Obesity is one of the primary risk factors for developing heart disease. At the same time, when you are overweight, your heart has to work harder when you exercise to lose weight, which could trigger heart pain. Avoiding heart failure and other cardiovascular complications is the main reason that you should undertake a diet and exercise plan to lose weight under a doctor's supervision.
Misconceptions
Not all chest pain is related to heart disease. According to The Noninvasive Heart Center, the pain you feel in your heart may actually emanate from your abdomen, spinal column or chest wall. Hypertension, or high blood pressure, is another risk factor that often accompanies obesity and can worsen as you diet. Instead of heart pain, you actually may be going through a heartburn attack due to a higher fiber and more natural diet that your stomach is not accustomed to. If you've been eating too few calories, you are susceptible to gall bladder disease, which can trigger chest pain.
Anxiety
The stress of maintaining a low-calorie diet or working out on a regular basis, while healthy in the long run, may trigger blood pressure spikes if you worry too much about the outcome. A common cause of chest pain among dieters who are emotional eaters is hyperventilation. When deprived of the food that you used to medicate your feelings, you may experience a panic attack, which can feel like a heart attack. You may feel faint and dizzy, with a crushing pain in your chest.
Anemia
When dieting, you may be prone to anemia if you don't maintain a healthy balanced diet. Symptoms from a lack of iron in your diet often start as chest pains and worsen to include palpitations and shortness of breath. As part of your diet, if you are restricting meat consumption to avoid the high fat content of the foods, you should talk to your doctor about iron supplements or take a multi-vitamin with added iron to supplement your new diet.
Heart Failure
Your chest pain may be due to heart failure, often caused by persistent high blood pressure, obesity and abnormal blood sugar levels. When dieting, you often undergo blood sugar swings if you skip meals or don't consume enough calories to support your basic body functions. Continuing with very low calorie menus can lead to heart failure. If you've developed diabetes, you risk heart failure at some point. You may become overly fatigued at first when you exercise and eventually may have a heart attack. Severe, sudden heart pain should be treated as an emergency. After a heart event, you'll have to be more careful than ever about the level and duration of your exercise and you'll have to closely monitor your diet.
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