Can Fast Weight Loss Ever Be Healthy? Or Permanent? - Battling Misconceptions and Prejudice


When people answer questions about weight loss on the internet, they suddenly become all-knowing. This effect is especially noticeable when the question involves rapid weight loss or 'crash dieting'. Some examples from yahoo answers are:

"There is no such thing as losing fat fast."

"Any weight you lose that quickly is just water weight, not fat and you will not look noticeably different"

"You should only be losing about 2 lbs a week. Anything more is unhealthy,"

"You will gain all the weight back (and maybe more) when you reach your target weight and start eating normally"

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But what make these people so confident in their answers? Why can't you lose fat faster than 2lb a week? Why do you have to gain all that weight back? Why is it so unhealthy?

The problem we have here is prejudice. The issue is that because most crash diets for rapid weight loss do all the things above and more, people assume that any diet that causes fast weight loss must be unhealthy or that you must regain the weight afterwards. This is simply not true. Let's look at some fundamental factors in weight loss that make up the reasons for this prejudice.

1. The Law of Calorie Balance

If you are taking in more calories than you burn you gain weight, if you spend more calories than you take in you lose weight. Simple.

2. Metabolic Slowdown

Any time you have a calorie deficit (are losing weight) then you body shifts in such a way as to try and stop you losing the weight - your metabolism slows down. This is why people reach plateaus in their weight loss.

3. Essential Nutrients for Health

These are not 'necessary' for weight loss but you would be foolish not to take them into account. Your body needs various things to function properly. 'Essential nutrients' are things your body cannot make for itself and as such you must get from eating.

For a diet that causes the fastest possible weight loss yet is still healthy, all three of these factors must be addressed. The problem is most crash diets only address the first (and if they address the next two they only pretend to - like calling a 'water-fast' healthy despite it missing all essential nutrients). As a result these diets have gained the bad reputation they deserve.

The Solution

Taking the three weight loss factors into account it becomes obvious that for the fastest weight loss possible, which is still healthy and won't mean you regain the weight, you need to keep calories as low as possible but keep nutrition as high as possible.

You can achieve this by cutting out all the non-essentials from your diet for the short length of time you would be following such an extreme diet (typically 2-4 weeks giving about 1-2 stone weight loss). The more of the non-essentials you cut out the lower your calories will be and the greater your weight loss. The non-essentials are:

1. All starchy or sugary carbohydrates - none of these non-fibrous carbohydrates are essential

2. Most Fats - you need omega 3 (from fish oil supplements or the vegetarian ones)

This leaves lots of lean protein and lots of green vegetables. Things like chicken salads, tuna steak with broccoli and green beans, lean pork stir fries, egg white omelettes with vegetables.

That is really all. Just cutting out the non- essentials for a couple of weeks will cause on average a stone of weight loss yet if you do it right then it you are getting more nutrients than most people's normal diets... After you have got to your target weight you can then move a healthy maintenance diet but that is another article all together.

For an easy step-by-step guide to setting up and following through a diet like this that is personalised to your body visit my site: http://www.thequickestwaytoloseweight.co.uk and if you have any questions please email me - I would love to hear from you - my email is address is contact page of the site.

PaleoBurn

Eat Stop Eat

Eat Stop Eat

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