Why Starvation Diets Don’t Work

Posted on June 14, 2007 in Nutrition by byronb

Gullible people have a simplistic view of starvation diets. Since eating made them fat in the first place, they believe that starvation would result in shedding that fat. Since they cannot go into complete starvation, they choose a starvation diet comprising perhaps a cup of coffee (preferably, without milk or sugar) for breakfast, a carrot and celery for lunch and a piece of brown bread for dinner. Maybe in the first week they may lose some weight but by the end of the second week, the loss tapers off.

Most starvation diets fail after the initial period. Moreover, they are not safe at all. They harm the systems of the body in untold ways. Besides, they do not serve their basic purpose, which is losing weight. Just by skipping meals and eating junk food, you cannot lose weight. While you are on a starvation diet, instead of burning all the excess fat and calories stored in your body, your metabolism actually slows down to conserve the calories in the body. Some studies state that during the time of a starvation diet as much as 30% of the stored fat is burnt less than that burnt during times of normal diet. This translates into the fact that starvation diets do not work for long-term weight loss plans.

Minimum caloric intake

The American College of Sports Medicine stipulates that the minimum calorie-intake for women should be 1200 and for men 1800. A starvation diet obviously won’t work because many try to eat less than these recommended calories per day. Eating less is unsafe. Starvation diets are successful only in undoing your efforts to lose weight.

A starvation diet makes you tired and stressed. Add exercise to a starvation diet and see what happens. Since your body is deprived of the essential nutrients, and if you then try to make your body spend more energy for your exercise, your stress levels increase, your muscle, instead of fat, is burned off, or broken down or reduced. Naturally, you feel weak and exhausted. Muscle reduction unfortunately further slows down the metabolism.

Starvation diet backlash

Any crash diet has a backlash, as you might well know if you have ever attempted one. As soon as the brief duration of the diet is over, your appetite returns full force and makes you eat everything and anything you can lay your hands on, especially those very things that should be avoided for weight loss. The bingeing sessions only work to fatten you up like never before. Then you think you must go through one more starvation diet in order to shed the extra fat lately added. Again, after one more failed starvation diet, you return to satisfying your wolfish appetite.

The overall result is something extremely harmful to your metabolism. When you abruptly disrupt your eating patterns by adopting a starvation diet, your metabolism becomes abnormally inefficient. You may not lose fat or weight, but you will certainly succeed in losing a healthy appetite. Your body loses its ability to deal with the food that you eat in order to convert it into the energy you need to lead a healthy life.

Starvation diets not only do not work for weight loss. They are also certainly detrimental to your metabolism and general health.