The danger of rapid weight loss

Wrong! It's so easy to forget the dangers of dieting.

Here's the problem, in our total paranoia about fat -- that it's unhealthy and socially unacceptable, we often overlook that the danger of rapid weight loss is not just physical, it's also psychological.

So let's step back and take a look at the danger of rapid weight loss. So here you are on that latest and greatest diet product and life's going swimmingly. The scale is telling you a miracle is happening, your clothes are agreeing - you feel fabulous.

The psychological danger

It's so easy to become addicted to rapid weight loss. Even your scale, instead of being voice of criticism, smiles back at you! Just jumping on your scale can give you a rush.

But even that is nothing like the addictive rush you feel when everyone starts complimenting you one how much weight you've lost and how fast you've lost it.

Aha - and herein lies the inherent, and little recognized, danger of rapid weight loss.

Why did we go on diet? Because we were living in a deser-like place, full of self-criticism and we wanted to feel better about ourselves. Now we're losing the weight and fast which deserves an apparent - yay! By comparison to the desert we were in, those compliments feel like sweet rain and we blossom. Those compliments are addictive.

But, after a while the compliments start to die down. After all - everyone has become used to the new-looking you. Because your self-esteem was based on an exterior change without an accompanying interior one, without those compliments - you find yourself sliding back to the desert.

So how do we get those compliments again? Well we make sure we lose more weight right? And before we know it thousands of young women (and probably older women too), hungry to know they are attractive, are dieting themselves towards an eating disorder. This is a danger of rapid weight loss that we seldom stop to consider.

But rapid weight loss is precisely how I got anorexia when I was 15! I ate only gelatine and diet cold-drink for months on end - I thought losing weight fast and furious was good. It wasn't.

The Physical Danger
Because here was the physical danger of rapid weight loss I didn't know about back then. Whenever you go on a fad diet, your put your body into a state of deprivation and being the incredible biological masterpiece that it is, it immediately conserves energy and holds onto it's fat supplies for when it might need them.

And here's the order of any rapid weight loss. The very first thing you lose is water. Well pick up a bucket of water - it's heavy, isn't it? So water loss on a scale looks fantastic. So what's the problem? Well here's another danger of rapid weight loss.

Your body needs water to function properly. When that rapid loss is water, you've just slowed down your bodies ability to burn calories, and your body is still holding onto it's fat supplies.

The next thing you lose with rapid weight loss - isn't fat, but muscle. Well, muscle on a scale weighs 3 times what fat does, so guess what? That loss on the scale may look like a blessing - but in reality it's yet another curse.

Here's where another danger of rapid weight loss creeps in. Muscle is the tissue in our bodies that utilizes the most energy to stay alive, it’s also what we need to keep our bodies strong. Once again, you're retarded your metabolism and once again your body is still holding onto its fat.

So physically, you've lost water and muscle which you need to burn calories and all you've succeeded in doing is ensuring that you now have a higher percentage body fat now than you did before you started.

And as if that isn’t enough – when the fad diet fails you, another danger of rapid weight loss is that your body composition has changed. The higher our percentage body fat – the better our body becomes at storing food as fat. In this way, that rapid weight loss is contributing to the vicious cycle of fat regain.

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