Many people think starving
themselves or attempting to develop an eating disorder is the quickest and most
effective dieting tactic. Well, sorry I’m not sorry to break the news to those
of you who are under the impression that starvation is the answer, but it is
definitely NOT. Because this is obviously not your high school health class or
therapist’s office, I will spare you the lecture on positive body image and how
it is important to love yourself and all that, and I will simply explain the
straight up facts of why deciding to stop eating is not going to help you lose
weight.
First of all, most people who
decide they are “over” trying other diets and other healthy means of losing
weight such as exercising and decide they will just stop eating do not last
very long on their hunger strike. After a couple days of not eating or eating
very, very little, people give up. Some can maybe go for a few weeks, but
eventually they will give up, too. Why? Because one quickly realizes that the
physical and mental feelings starvation causes are not worth it. Unless you
have the psychological disorder that is called Anorexia, there is no way you
will have the will power or ability to stop eating for a long period time (and
if you do you should seek help immediately). That being said, you can’t just
decide one day that you are going to become Anorexic; it does not work like
that. It is a disease that requires treatment, and many people die from it each
year.
When you stop eating for a number
of days or a couple of weeks, you may step on the scale and find you have lost
a few pounds. But don’t jump for joy just yet. As soon as you start eating
again, which you will, you will gain all that weight back immediately and
sometimes more. When you go on a healthy diet to lose weight, your body is
still getting the amount of calories it needs to function on a daily basis,
allowing weight loss to occur as well as high daily functioning. On a “crash
diet” when you are getting no calories or very few calories, your body is
unable to function at its normal rate. When you are consuming less calories
than your body needs to function, it will store those calories as fat! This
happens because you’re body is going into starvation mode and after awhile your
muscle will begin to breakdown because you are not getting the proper vitamins
and nutrients to maintain them, and you will appear flabby rather than toned.
Also, it is extremely difficult (and dangerous) to exercise while on a “crash
diet” because the lack of calories causes lack of energy and motivation.
Fainting is quite possible, and who wants to be the girl at the gym passing out
on the treadmill? Many of us are aware that in order to lose weight you need to
essentially burn more calories than you consume, and this well-known fact is
what leads many people to assume starvation is the quickest tactic for weight
loss. Although this math may seem correct, after a number of days you will
realize why it is not. Eating too-few calories slows your metabolism way down,
so when you start eating again, you’re body is not burning off the calories as
it normally does. Many people who stop eating for a short period of time start
binge eating as soon as they decide they can’t take the miserable feeling of
starvation anymore and end up gaining more weight.
A few years ago I decided to give
the crash diet a shot. Like many people, I assumed it would be the most
effective way to drop pounds quickly as I was uneducated about the science and
reality behind it. For almost an entire month I ate mostly fruit and averaged
about six hundred calories a day. I was starving and constantly light-headed,
but the scale kept telling me I was succeeding, and I lost fifteen pounds in
about three weeks. But I also lost muscle tone, and I lost a number of social
opportunities because I did not have enough energy to go out with my friends
and socialize with people. After four weeks I snapped out of it. I was so
hungry and felt so weak, so I began to eat a normal diet again. Within one week
of ending my crash diet, I gained back all the weight I had lost and came to
the hard realization that I had just wasted a month of my life. Those were four
weeks I could have been out with friends having a great time and also
exercising to maintain muscle tone and eating a healthy weight loss diet that
did not cause me to feel the need to hibernate and be antisocial.
Overall,
the point is that starvation is not the way to lose weight. It’s not even just
that starving yourself is straight up bad for you but also that it is a stupid
dieting tactic that will probably not help you in your weight loss goals. The
difference between a person on a “crash diet” and a person on a healthy weight
loss diet is that one is miserable and unsuccessful and the other is using
strength and will power to exercise and stick to healthy food choices that will
lead to their success.
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