Common Diet Mistakes - Why Starving to Death is Bad for Your Health

Earli.US Have you ever felt so desperate about your weight (perhaps because of an important upcoming event) that the thought of a starvation diet crossed your mind? Have you ever thought along the lines of “Well, it's not good for my body, but I need to be in good shape, and if I barely eat for a week, then I have to lose weight – right?”


Common Diet Mistakes - Why Starving to Death is Bad for Your Health

Have you ever felt so desperate about your weight (perhaps because of an important upcoming event) that the thought of a starvation diet crossed your mind? Have you ever thought along the lines of “Well, it's not good for my body, but I need to be in good shape, and if I barely eat for a week, then I have to lose weight – right?”

Wrong! A starvation diet is one of the worst things that you can ever do, both in terms of health and in terms of your weight loss effort. Unfortunately, starvation diets are something a lot of people still believe in, mostly because they seem easy and, on the surface, make a lot of sense. The goal of this article is to share with you some of the most common mistakes that you can easily avoid when it comes to picking a diet.

This cannot be stressed strongly enough – starvation diets are not only bad for your health, but they also cause you to gain, rather than lose, weight in the long run! A starvation diet means that your body will not have enough energy to power itself. Initially, it will dig into its energy reserves and burn up some of the fat. However, it will also start destroying muscle tissue to get what energy it can for your body.

More importantly, your body will go into what is known as “starvation mode”. This happens when your body realizes that it's not getting food at the regular intervals it is accustomed to. As a result, since it doesn't know when its meal is coming next, your body will start saving up all the energy in can (think of it as an emergency stockpiling mode).

When your body is in starvation mode, it will try to use up as little energy as possible. Your metabolism rate will slow down dramatically, and all non-essential energy will be stored in the form of - you guessed it - fat. As a result, a starvation diet can actually make you gain weight in the long run.

Of course, this won't happen overnight. If you go on a starvation diet, then, over the first few days, you may noticed a dramatic drop in your weight. The bad news is, this weight loss is not sustainable. As soon as you start eating normally again, you will gain all the weight you have lost – and then some. The reason is that, since your body will need time to switch out of the starvation mode, eating normally will mean that the energy you normally spend will be stockpiled as fat instead. This is the main reason why you sometimes go on a starvation diet and then realize that all of the weight has come back a month later.

In short, a starvation diet is not only damaging to your health – it simply does not work. The best kind of diet is the one that combines regular meals, while cutting down (but not eliminating) on all the unnecessary calorie intake (for example, cakes or sweets). Unlike a starvation diet, a balanced nutrition plan won't give you immediate results. But you will lose weight nonetheless, and, more importantly, you won't gain it back when you've stopped dieting!