Crash diets often live up to their name. Although you might lose weight in the beginning stages, you most likely will be unable to either sustain your weight loss or even reach your desired weight. When dieting to lose weight, understanding the reasons that a healthy, balanced diet is preferable to a crash diet might help you avoid beginning an unhealthy diet.
Identification
A crash diet is a drastic diet that relies not on healthy eating patterns but on either cutting calories drastically, eating no fats, taking unhealthy supplements or focusing on eating mainly one food, such as grapefruit. A website or infomercial might promise large amounts of weight loss with little effort or lifestyle changes on your part. Comparing dieting claims against the advice of medical professionals can help you quickly distinguish a crash diet from a healthy diet.
They are Unsustainable
One test of a healthy diet is whether it is effective at helping you achieve your goals in a sustainable manner. Crash diets are not sustainable: You cannot eat only one food for the rest of your life, eat at a very-low-calorie level for long periods or avoid certain food groups forever. Once you quit the crash diet, you might find yourself reverting to your old eating habits and regaining your lost weight.
They Temporarily Slow Metabolism
If the crash diet requires an unhealthy caloric level, your body might go into "starvation mode," according to an article in "Arthritis Today" magazine. Your metabolism is how many calories your body needs to function throughout the day, including sedentary activities like sleeping, involuntary functions such as food digestion and physical activity. When your metabolism slows through not eating enough food on a crash diet, your body looks to your muscles for energy. This muscle loss causes your metabolism to slow even more, stalling your weight loss.
They Encourage Unhealthy Behaviors
A crash diet does not work long term because it often encourages unhealthy behaviors. Unlike well-rounded diets that encourage exercise, changing your thoughts about food, balancing a variety of foods and meals and modifying behavior, a crash diet encourages none of these. Instead, the diet might require skipping meals, which is ill-advised. The low-calorie nature of the diet might leave you with little energy to exercise. Conversely, some crash diets encourage you to eat very little and perform extreme amounts of exercise in the hopes of losing large amounts of weight in a short period. Neither behavior is healthy.
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