When you think of crash diets, what comes to mind? Do you feel tired, restricted, hungry, or like you’ve lost an important part of your life? I know I do! But contrary to common beliefs, crash diets are bad. They mess with your metabolism and most of the time you gain the weight right back. So, let’s explore what is good or bad about some of these “lose weight quickly” diets.
Let’s start with the HCG diet. This can be good or bad depending on your reasons for doing it. There are many people who can’t stick to a diet and they end up trying HCG because they hear about all of the good results. But there is a problem with this; generally the HCG diet is a quick solution for people that “want it now”. People generally quit other diets because they don’t see results as quickly as they expected. The thing is though, weight loss isn’t something that’s supposed to happen quickly. If you lose weight too quickly, you will end up with saggy skin; you aren’t providing your body with enough time to tighten its skin.However, HCG does have some applications where it’s good. Let’s take, for example, people who eat healthy but still can’t manage to lose weight. They do everything right, but they’ve hit a plateau. Though they’ve tried everything, this is the smallest amount of weight they can reach naturally, and they are still overweight. This is a case where I think this diet is a good idea. This will give them a little push back into losing weight, and they’ll be able to maintain their weight afterwards. However, this rarely applies to people. Most of the time, people just need to cut the calories a bit and eat more nutritious food in order to lose their excess weight.
The next diet is the raw foods diet. Basically, you aren’t allowed to eat anything that’s been processed or cooked. This means a lot of juicing, peeling, and blending. Based off what I’ve learned in my nutrition class, this seems like a bad idea. In order to get vitamin B12, you either have to eat raw meat, or take a supplement (which is processed by the way). Not to mention, your protein is going to be a little tough to get. You’re going to be stuck eating nuts all the time! Granted, everyone could use more fruits and vegetables in their diet. I don’t agree with eating this type of diet permanently, but rather eating like this 2 or 3 times a week, and not doing it 2 days in a row. You want your body to get enough nutrients over the course of the week.
So, what’s the secret to losing weight then, if it’s not dieting? Well, I’m sure you guessed it: eating healthy and burning more calories than you consume through exercise. My good friend Jessica wrote a blog post about the REAL secret to losing weight, and she goes into more depth about the reasons healthy living, rather than crash diets, work.
Well, I guess that about wraps things up. Happy eating!