People looking to lose weight often resort to desperate measures. However, it has been proven time after time that going on an extreme diet may cause you to lose weight rapidly but the odds are that you will gain that weight right back and add even more pounds the second you end your diet.
Losing weight is not about putting yourself through some ridiculous diet that only allows you to eat three stalks of lettuce a day or requires you to pop pills – it’s about changing your lifestyle and the way you think about food. To help you steer clear of bad diets, here are the top three worst ways to lose weight:
1 – Starvation diets – Like the name indicates, a starvation diet is when you simply starve yourself. In more technical terms, a starvation diet can also be described as severe food restriction with very low calorie levels. Although it’s definitely the “simplest” kind of diet – there’s no need to count calories or control your portion sizes – it’s one of the worst ways to lose weight.
It sounds counter intuitive, but starving yourself can actually make it harder to lose weight. The reason for this is because your body realizes that you have stopped eating, and thus makes changes accordingly to deal with this. Although consciously you know that there is food available if you choose to eat, your body does not realize this and instead reacts as if there is no food available and it needs to preserve the fat reserves remaining. Therefore, the body tries to store fat and burns calories even more slowly than before. If you keep the starvation up long term, it can lead to permanent damage to both your body and metabolism.
2 – Weight cutting – Weight cutting is term that refers to the practice of rapid weight loss. One way to accomplish weight cutting is to rapidly reduce your weight by losing water within a few days. Weight cutting is generally practiced by athletes right before a sports event in order to qualify in certain weight classes, but some people have adopted this practice in dieting as well.
Two major problems with weight cutting are that the weight loss is of little use and dehydrating yourself this badly can be quite dangerous. 65% of the human body is made out of water. If you reduce the amount of water in your body, sure you’ll lose weight when you get on the scale, but you won’t lose the right type of weight. Having water in your body is a good thing – you want to get rid of the fat. You may not necessarily be able to drop a dress size just because you’ve done weight cutting.
3 – Hormone diets – Hormone diets are diets that restrict your food intake as well as requiring you to inject yourself with or orally take hormones. The most recent example of this diet is the hCG diet, where you eat only 500 calories a day and inject yourself with the pregnancy hormone human chorionic gonadotropin. Sure, anyone will lose weight on a 500 calories a day diet, but there are health risks involved with shooting up with hormones. The FDA reports that hCG users are at risk for blood clots, depression, headaches and breast enlargement and tenderness.
About the author: Tom Markos is from the life insurance website LifeCover. He loves writing about healthy living and personal finance topics.