Rapid Weight Loss - Good or Bad?
If you have weight to lose, you probably want to lose it right now. You don’t want to have to wait for weight loss programs to work, as many will only allow you to lose one to two pounds a week.
You’re impatient to look good for a special function and you just don’t have the time to follow this slow moving kind of plan. However rapid weight loss can be harmful to your weight loss efforts, even if the short-term results are what you’re look for.
The plans that you may have heard about
There are a number of rapid weight loss plans that you can follow. These include plans like the Cabbage Soup Diet, Atkins Diet, fruit juice fast, meal supplement shake plans, and more. Basically, these plans do a number of things:
- Reduce overall calorie consumption to less than adequate levels
- Reduce the food options that you have, thus limiting your calorie intake
- Help to increase water loss, which can look like weight loss on a scale
- Create difficult rules to follow on the short term, though not plausible for the long term
If you cut back on your calories, you will lose weight – that much is certain. But these rapid weight loss plans do so in a much more severe way so that you lose weight more quickly than is considered healthful. These plans are difficult to follow, even in the short term, and can even set you up for future weight loss problems.
What are the negative effects of Rapid Weight Loss?
When it comes to rapid weight loss, you might wonder just how bad it can be – you’re losing weight, you’re feeling good; how bad can that be? The truth of the matter is that losing weight this quickly is not necessarily the weight that you want to lose.
First of all, cutting your calories that dramatically causes your body to think that it’s starving. And when it doesn’t get the calories that it needs, it will turn to other parts of the body for those calories – the muscles, for example. In many of these diets, your body basically begins to eat itself (much like in cases of starvation and anorexia), which then whittles down your metabolism-charging muscles.
While this might not seem like a bad thing, when your body gets to this point, you will also lose energy and strength.
Dehydration can occur with rapid weight loss
The next thing that can happen on these diets is that you can become dehydrated, which causes problems in the functions of your body. When your cells don’t have enough water, they can have troubles performing their duties, relaying messages, transporting vitamins and minerals, etc.
This creates a shock to the system and can even go so far as to create issues for the electrolyte balance in your body (in the simplest explanation, the balance of water and salts). When your electrolytes aren’t balanced, this can upset message transmission, which can lead to cell death and disease.
Your body is made up of 70% water for a reason; and in rapid weight loss programs, you can upset this balance and create serious problems.
When you’ve lost water and muscle mass from rapid weight loss programs, you are also causing your metabolism to slow down, which will make future weight loss more difficult. In addition, any future weight loss efforts will cause your body to wonder if you’re going to starve it again, which will make it hold onto fat longer, rather than burning the fat stores first as slower weight loss methods have you do.
Other negative effects of rapid weight loss:
- No education about proper eating habits
- Problems with nutritional balance in the body
- Possible physical effects like digestive upset
Another concern with rapid weight loss methods is that idea that you’re establishing habits that you can not maintain, which means that you will be heading right back to your old eating habits when the diet is ‘done.’
What you need to realize is that permanent weight loss means that you need to change your eating habits permanently. While you might look good after finishing a weight loss program like this, you might not be holding onto the results that you want.
