Obtaining a Healthy Weight: Why Crash Dieting Doesn’t Work

Crash dieting involves making drastic changes to the way we eat, in the hope of losing a large amount of weight in a relatively short time. Crash dieters diet for different lengths of time and may diet for a period that is as short as 2 weeks or as long as a year.

Most of the time, after the diet is over, some of the weight comes back on. In a few cases, the person who was on the diet gains more weight than they had on originally. This leads to feelings of frustration and depression. Persons who crash diet regain the weight because after they reach their weight loss goal, they tend to resume their old eating habits.

Crash dieting encourages this in a way, because many crash diets allow dieters only one type of food-for example the cottage cheese crash diet, and other crash diets and diet aids that work fast. Since they are using diets for quick weight loss, persons will use a plan consisting of fruits only, or vegetable juice only. The dieter gets bored of eating the same kind of food and can’t wait to get back to their regular eating habits.

One of the other negatives of crash dieting is the fact that the body doesn’t get all the nutrients it needs to function effectively. The dieter is placed on a restricted diet, for example all potatoes or all-meat, so that the other food groups are left out. Eating in this way is unhealthy.

Losing weight effectively involves hard work and discipline. Usually, changes to the dieter’s eating habits are made gradually. When you make gradual changes to your eating habits, it’s easier to adjust to those habits and easier to sustain those habits in the long term.

Sustaining healthy eating habits and exercising regularly over a lifetime will help you to keep weight off in the long term. If losing weight is your goal, start today. If you take action today, you will start seeing results sooner.