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Crash dieting
Crash dieting is dangerous!
Diets can make you feel depressed, worthless and unable to concentrate. They can also make you sick. Crash dieting can stress your body and in most cases will eventually make you put on the pounds! Crash dieting in growing young people also impairs growth and development. The fact is, it is natural for your body to gain and lose weight at different times in your life and diets just mess up that system.
One of the most common things people do when they are concerned about their weight is to diet. This can mean avoiding particular foods, or not eating at all. Sometimes this can become so much a part of people's lives that they develop an eating disorder like anorexia or bulimia nervosa. If you remember one message, remember this: dieting is dangerous for young people! The energy in food is essential for growth. Nutrient needs are very important in your teenage years. Food restraint can have serious effects on growth and development. These years need heaps of energy from food for bone, muscle and fat growth.
Here is some interesting information about crash diets:
- Crash diets make you put on weight in the long run. This is because they slow your metabolism down, which leads to MORE weight gain over time.
- When you go on a diet, your metabolism slows down so that you burn up less energy. When you go on a diet you lose some weight - not fat - but water and muscle, perhaps making you seem a little bit thinner. Your body goes into survival mode, so when you do actually eat something it stores fat readily, just in case you starve it again. Effectively, this means that each time you go on a diet, you are really teaching your body to more efficiently store fat. For this reason dieting can actually cause obesity!
- Crash diets stress your body out and might make you sick. Starving and then suddenly eating can hurt your immune system and the general well-being of your vital organs. How can you possibly continue to party without those?!
- Crash diets can affect your emotional well-being. You have a 95% chance that the crash diet won't work and you will regain the weight. Because crash diets don't work, we often blame ourselves - "I am hopeless". The diet industry is happy for us to blame ourselves.
- Crash dieting makes you slow and less able to concentrate. Studies have shown that dieters perform worse when tested for reaction times, rapid information processing and memory. How on earth can you concentrate on anything when there are chocolate biscuits and bars to think about? A lack of food can shock the body's system and block the functions of important chemicals in the brain.
No-one should go on any diet without talking to a doctor who will advise you on making small changes to your lifestyle, which will then lead to a healthy life for you in the future.
Content thanks to YouthHealthNE authors.
