Resist Starving and Crash Dieting. Get Your Plate in Shape.
We’ve had enough of the word “obesity,” thus one of the most talked-about issues would be losing weight. There is a plethora of advice out there to help you shed those extra pounds. Particularly after giving birth, some people may want to lose weight fast. However, it’s important to think about whether or not any of these approaches to losing weight are healthy.
The “calories in versus calories out” strategy is commonly cited as the only proven method for weight loss by online fitness gurus. However, when it comes to the safest and most effective strategies for long-term weight loss, the adage falls short. As a result, many people have turned to calorie restriction, which can have devastating repercussions on health.
In this article experts from the Sirwiss network of health care providers and nutritionists discuss the dangers of carbohydrate restriction diets and other severe diets, as well as the best way to approach weight maintenance. If you’re someone who has trouble dropping pounds, and weary of trying extreme diets, then this article is for you.
Difference Between Prolonged Fasting and Starvation
You might confuse intermittent fasting with starvation if you’ve never heard of it before. Intermittent fasting, when practiced correctly, can be beneficial for some. Those who practice intermittent fasting alternate between times of eating and fasting. The most common type, called “16:8,” entails a window of eating time of 8 hours followed by fasting for 16 hours.
Intermittent fasting can help you lose weight by lowering the number of calories you eat, but that is not the point. A better way to lose weight is to eat the same amount of calories as usual or even have a small loss in a shorter amount of time.
A person would be starving when they haven’t eaten in days or weeks. Dietitians say that eating 450 to 800 fewer calories per day or less is an extreme way to cut calories. This kind of calorie reduction isn’t recommended because it could hurt your health. This leaves you with a huge calorie shortage that won’t help your body keep losing weight.
Starving Affects Your Body
Losing weight requires a calorie deficit, which can be achieved by increasing energy expenditure (e.g., through exercise) or decreasing food intake (e.g., through dieting). However, a bigger calorie deficit is not always associated with more rapid and sustained weight loss. Even if you lose a lot of weight at first, keeping it off for good may prove to be a real challenge.
Even worse, the body’s survival mechanisms may adjust to the significant calorie deficits if you starve yourself for long enough. This could sabotage your weight loss efforts before they even begin.
Metabolism Slows Down
Calorie restriction causes the body to shift its energy priorities, with fat stores becoming the primary target before muscle and skeletal tissue. Your resting metabolic rate (RMR) decreases as a result of adaptive thermogenesis (metabolic adaptation) in response to calorie restriction. In an effort to conserve as much energy as possible, your body will become less efficient at burning calories as a result. In addition, your energy levels may decrease when your metabolism slows. Your body employs this tactic to ensure you don’t use up too much of its limited resources. In order to get you to eat, your body also secretes more hunger hormones.
Less Effective Body Function
In response to severe starvation, the body may begin to slow down non-essential bodily processes in favor of those that are absolutely necessary, such as breathing and heart rate.
1. Hair and Nail Growth. Your hair and nails may become brittle.
2. Immunity. Your immune system may have a harder time fighting infection and illness.
3. Digestion and Hunger Regulation. You may experience irregular or intensified hunger, recurring bloating, or stomach discomfort.
4. Reproductive Health. Your menstrual cycle may change or stop.
5. Skin Health. You may experience improper or delayed wound healing or premature aging.
6. Bone Health. Your bones may become weakened.
The body’s natural response to starvation is to initiate a process of healing and restoration. Although rapid weight loss is achievable in the outset, your body will fight tirelessly to regain its previous size and health if it is provided with sufficient calories.
Harm Your Mental Health
The mental health of an individual can be negatively impacted by starvation and other unhealthy dietary practices. Dieting to the point of starvation increases the risk of developing eating disorders like bulimia, which is characterized by an intense preoccupation with one’s weight and shape. Prolonged hunger can lead to serious health complications, including anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating disorders. The first step in getting help for an eating disorder is talking to a healthcare provider, who can then refer you to a specialist if necessary. For further resources, you may want to call the National Eating Disorders Association’s toll-free hotline.
Overrated Health Trends You Should Avoid
Maintaining health should naturally include keeping up with current health practices. Many of the most popular trends around the world, however, are not as beneficial as they claim to be. Blindly following them could be dangerous to your health and produce no results at all. In light of this, let’s examine some of the most widespread health fads that, according to the professionals, you should avoid.
1. The Ketogenic Diet
The ketogenic (keto) diet promotes fat loss by restricting carbohydrate intake while increasing fat intake. The goal is to get your body into a metabolic state called ketosis, where it burns fat instead of carbohydrates for fuel. It’s possible that everything is just too good to be true. Avoiding a whole food group could be dangerous. According to registered dietitians, restricting a major food group such as carbohydrates is a dietitian’s worst nightmare. Loss of muscle mass despite an adequate or increased protein intake, as well as vitamin deficits and gastrointestinal health, is a major worry of the keto diet.
2. Juice Detoxes
This time it’s another health fad that claims to work fast. It’s tempting to think that a juice cleanse is the best approach to replenish your body’s vitamin stores, but is this truly the case? It’s not, to put it briefly.
With juice cleansing you can deprive yourself of some very important fiber. Some people find that they need to begin a cleanse after returning from a vacation or long weekend of celebrations in order to reset their bodies. The trouble is, though, that your organs already do this for you. Since detoxification occurs naturally in the body on a daily basis, there’s no need to damage your body in order to achieve it. Because cleansing is the point of juice detoxification, going through with a second cleansing eliminates the fruit and vegetable fiber that controls blood sugar levels and aids in nutrient digestion.
Only the sugars will remain thereafter, and these will be absorbed rapidly, leading to a dangerous rise in blood sugar. The healthiest thing you can do is keep on eating the same way you always have.
3. Apple Cider Vinegar for Weight Loss
This joke could be old hat by now. Apple cider vinegar as a magic bullet for weight loss is a widely held health belief. The claims made for apple cider vinegar, however, are not supported by any [substantial] research. Several tiny research, largely conducted on animals, support apple cider vinegar’s weight-loss claims. While these studies do suggest that apple cider vinegar may have some useful effects, additional work is obviously needed in this area.
4. Bulletproof Coffee
This drink came from the Tibetan sherpas who are in charge of leading trips up Mount Everest. They found that putting yak fat in their morning tea gave them more energy and let them climb for longer without stopping to eat. People now add butter, ghee, or coconut oil to their morning coffee and call it breakfast. The main thing to watch out for is that the drink can have a lot of fatty fat and no fiber or protein, which can be bad for people who are at risk for heart disease or inflammatory diseases. Some drinks can have between 20 and 35 grams of saturated fat, which is close to the daily limit.
5. Adopting a Popular Diet Plan
There is no universally correct way to eat healthily. People have a tendency to assume that one set of dietary recommendations can be used for everyone. While studies show that different foods have different effects on different people’s blood sugar levels, Individual differences and the make-up of one’s gut flora play a major role, setting the groundwork for widespread adoption of tailored diet. It’s wrong to associate blood glucose levels with things like dietary routines and nutritional value. It was discovered that people’s glycemic responses to the identical foods can vary widely.
6. Intermittent Fasting
Intermittent fasting has been called the “holy grail” of weight loss due to its rapid claims of success. One expert says the key is in when and how you fast. Skipping breakfast is a common way that people practice intermittent fasting, but this can lead to binge eating later in the day. Fasting according to common sense, which entails eating only breakfast, lunch, and dinner and not eating anything else (including dessert), is thought to be the key to realizing many of the purported health benefits.
7. Weight-loss Tea
The secret behind this hyped-up health fad has to be revealed. There are risks associated with drinking weight-loss tea. In most cases, you can expect a laxative effect. This is not only uncomfortable, but it can also cause long-term issues like dehydration and poor absorption. A compensatory behavior and a risk factor for eating disorders is the excessive use of laxative items like weight-loss tea. This tactic is short-sighted at best.
8. The Paleo Diet
According to proponents of the paleo diet, our forebears had a life expectancy of about 33 years and should therefore only consume foods that were available to them during that time period (about 2.5 million years ago). It’s just a fancy name for a low-carb diet, because it leaves out many healthy components including dairy, whole grains, beans, and lentils.
9. Eating Only Egg Whites
Having an omelet made of egg whites for breakfast? You should give that some more thought. Protein makes up nearly all egg whites. But the yolks are where all the good stuff is. Vitamins A, D, E, K, B1, B2, B5, B6, B9, and B12 are just some of the critical micronutrients contained in egg yolks, which also include almost half of the protein in an egg. You should include some egg yolks in your diet if you consume primarily egg whites.
10. Gluten-free Diets
A gluten-free diet, or any diet for that matter, may be overstated. Only people who have been diagnosed with celiac disease or gluten intolerance should follow this diet. Some nutritional inadequacies may result from following this diet. Pulses (beans, peas, lentils, chickpeas, and legumes) are a great source of fiber and protein, and eating more of them can aid with weight loss. Protein and fiber-rich pulses can help you feel full and satisfied all day long, so you won’t go for unhealthy snacks in the afternoon.
11. Pegan Diet
The Pegan diet is one of the most recent nutritional fads, drawing inspiration from both veganism and the paleo eating plan. This is essentially a more stringent form of the paleo diet, as it eliminates not just dairy, whole grains, beans, and other carbohydrate foods, but also the previous emphasis on meat and other animal proteins. Protein deficiency, along with deficiencies in other nutrients like vitamin B12, can be harmful. There is an excessive amount of pressure on consumers to label the diet they are following, rather than examine their nutrition as a whole and work on developing healthier routines. A weight loss or health plan is effective regardless of what you call it.
12. Water Fasting
In a “Water Fast”, you abstain from all liquids except water for a period, usually between 24 and 72 hours. It can lead to dehydration, lower blood pressure, and exacerbate preexisting diseases like gout, diabetes, and eating disorders. The quick shift in fluid and electrolyte levels after a fast poses a danger of refeeding syndrome, which can be catastrophic.
13. The Mono Diet
The latest craze is going without variety in your diet for a set amount of time. Eating only one food group, such eggs or chocolate, is supposed to help you lose weight quickly and easily, as advocated by the monotrophic diet (also known as the mono diet). If you don’t consume enough different meals, your body won’t get the nutrients it needs, which can have serious effects on your health.
14. The Blood-type Diet
According to this new diet trend, dieters can achieve their weight loss, energy, and health objectives by consuming certain foods and avoiding others based on their blood type. The diet also suggests specific physical activities based on one’s blood type. This may sound appealing at first, but it is an unfounded diet. According to a 2013 analysis of 1,415 studies on the blood-type diet, there are no significant advantages to consuming according to one’s blood type. Those who claim benefits such as an increase in energy or weight loss are primarily the result of healthy dietary modifications and an increase in physical activity based on the recommendations of the blood-type diet. Most likely, these advantages would have occurred regardless of blood type.
15. Plant-based Junk Food
Caution: not all plant-based diets are equal. The new plant-based products, such as the Impossible Burger, may not provide the full benefits of a plant-based diet. In the processing of an Impossible Burger, for instance, numerous modifications are made to make the flesh appear, feel, and taste as intended. During this procedure, numerous preservatives and dyes, including sodium, are added. Therefore, those who are interested in plant-based diet are encouraged to consume genuine, fresh, whole foods.
Starvation for the purpose of weight loss is neither healthful nor sustainable. While it may be enticing to get accustomed to some diet you found online, your body will suffer as a result. After prolonged starvation and reckless dieting, the metabolism may slow, the body may not function normally, and mental health may deteriorate. Though you may initially lose weight, you will likely acquire it back. Work with a health professional who can help you live at your healthiest if you’re having difficulty establishing healthy eating habits or if you’re exhibiting concerning eating behaviors