Fast weight loss occurs when a person burns significantly more calories than he or she eats, often by drastically cutting calorie intake. Some people achieve rapid weight loss with crash diets, or severely restrictive eating plans. These diets can cause nutritional deficiencies and other adverse side effects, so it's best to lose weight slowly and steadily.
Methods
To lose significant amounts of weight in a short amount of time, many people resort to drastic measures. Some follow restrictive diets, such as the Master Cleanse or cabbage soup diet, to lose weight rapidly. Others may turn to exercising intensely for hours each day.
To determine if a diet is considered a crash diet, pay close attention to advocates' claims. Some diets may claim to help you lose 10 lbs. or even more in 10 days. If claims seem too good to be true, they probably are. You should also be wary of diets that advocate eating from only certain food groups, divide foods into "good" and "bad" groups and rely on liquid calories.
Warning
Crash diets can lead to several possible adverse health effects. In addition to creating nutritional deficiencies, they can slow your metabolism, leading to weight gain when you discontinue the diet. Crash diets can also harm your immune system and cause muscle loss, dehydration, heart palpitations and even heart attacks. Chronic crash dieting can also lead to low bone density, setting you up for fractures. It can also cause mood swings and blood sugar crashes and spikes.
Mechanism
If you experience rapid weight loss, you're not necessarily losing fat. Since crash diets are dehydrating and lack essential nutrients, you may instead be losing muscle mass and water weight. Losing muscle is detrimental to fat loss because it slows your metabolism, so the weight will often quickly return once you quit the diet. Slow, steady weight loss is more likely to be fat loss.
Tips
To maintain your health while dieting, don't dip beneath 1,200 calories each day. Eat more if you feel cranky or fatigued. Eat a balanced, varied diet with foods from each food group. Aim for a reasonable weight loss of 1 to 2 lbs. per week.
If you qualify as obese and experience health problems as a result of your weight, you can ask your doctor about following a very-low-calorie diet to lose weight quicker. Very-low-calorie diets must be medically supervised to ensure adequate nutrient intake.
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