Crash dieting is also known as yo-yo dieting and fad dieting. These types of diets are short-term approaches to weight loss, designed to help you lose weight quickly. While this may sound appealing, many risks and complications can accompany your weight loss --- if you even lose weight at all. Talk to your health care provider before you start a new diet.
Crash Dieting
Most crash diets will claim that you can shed 5, 10 or more pounds in just a few days, weeks or a couple of months, and do so with little to no effort. The diet may call for you to severely restrict your caloric intake or limit you to only eating a few different types of foods, such as grapefruit and toast. Depending upon the diet, it may claim that you do not need to exercise or maybe only exercise for as little as 10 minutes per day. If it were this simple, very few people would be overweight.
Types
There are many types of crash diets, and each may require you to eat a specific kind of food or require you to eat food in various combinations, or even eat foods in a certain order to lose weight. Some fad, or crash, diets may require you to eat only meat and eliminate starches and fruits. The Cabbage Soup diet is one example where followers will primarily eat cabbage boiled in water, along with a few other ingredients. The easiest way to spot a crash diet is by checking for a few commonalities: Take notice as to whether or not the diet asks you to eliminate a type of food or food group, see if it promises a specific result in a specified period of time, look to see if it recommends eating one specific food on a constant or regular basis, and pay close attention to how much work the diet actually calls for; if it's little to no effort, it's probably too good to be true.
Side Effects
Crash dieting can have a variety of side effects, and the side effects may affect you differently than it would a family member or friend. Repeatedly following crash diets can negatively impact your metabolic hormones, such as sex hormones and insulin levels, which can cause you to produce more estrogen and become diabetic, according to the Fitness Magazine website. While on a crash diet, you may feel fatigue from not getting enough calories, hungry from inadequate amounts of food and irritable because you're hungry and tired. You may also suffer from diarrhea, bad breath, headache, abdominal pain, gas, bloating and muscle cramps.
Expert Opinion
The Mayo Clinic's Donald Hensrud, M.D. recommends sticking to good old-fashioned diet and exercise for the safest weight loss. This method may not be as fast as you like, but it is healthy, safe and steady. If you reduce your caloric intake by 500 calories per day, you can lose a pound per week. When you couple this diet method along with exercise, you can lose more but that will be dependent upon the type of exercise and length of time spent on workouts.
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