Dangers of Extreme Diets
You can’t turn on the television, open a magazine or listen to the radio without hearing about some fad diet that is “guaranteed” to help you lose weight. Not only that, but these diets are now also infiltrating social media streams too so you may be wondering how bad for you they can really be. The answer is very bad. Extremely Low Calorie Diets Your body requires a certain number of calories every day just to function. Every process that your body does, from keeping your heart beating to allowing your digestive system to work effectively, is fueled by the foods you eat. Therefore, when you don’t feed it enough you are risking some basic internal processes. This is why you feel so tired when you start to lower your calorie intake to unhealthy levels. Your body conserves as much energy as it can to make sure it survives, leaving minimal amounts of energy left over for anything else – such as walking around the house or running errands. Also, diets that fall into this category also don’t provide the nutrients your body needs to run efficiently. You risk becoming deficient in various vitamins and minerals which brings about a whole new set of health issues that are often worse than the ones being overweight create. Unsafe Pills and Powders A lot of diets on the market today offer weight loss via supplements such as pills and powders. As we all learned in the case of ephedrine, not all weight loss supplements are good for you. A lot of the pills that are designed to stoke your metabolism do so by increasing your heart rate. While exercise does the same thing, it does it only temporarily and in a healthy way. When you take a pill that keeps your heart running at super-fast speeds day in and day out, you’re just asking for trouble because your heart can’t take it for very long. Essentially you are giving yourself high blood pressure which is extremely dangerous when you don’t treat it, right? Not only that, but some contain other substances that aren’t good for you. If it has a diuretic, you risk becoming dehydrated and throwing off your electrolytes. As a result, you feel lethargic and risk circulation issues, muscle cramps, low blood pressure and increased illness. Detoxes or Cleanses Some extreme diets offer weight loss by detoxifying or cleansing your body. Although this may sound good in theory, it actually does more harm than good. When you ingest substances that are meant to speed up your digestive system, it creates two separate issues. First, you risk dehydration (which sometimes happens when you get sick with chronic and persistent diarrhea). This in and of itself can be enough to get you hospitalized for treatment. Second, you teach your bowels to quit functioning on their own. Essentially, it’s like you’re turning their switch to the “off” position and telling them not to follow their normal processing. The result is that they quit functioning effectively and how you have a whole new set of issues. Extreme Exercising Some diets promote weight loss via extreme exercising. While you certainly want to get in some physical activity, overdo it and you could cause more harm than good. When you engage in physical activity that is too demanding, you risk causing damage to your muscles, tendons and ligaments. This causes you to not only hurt yourself in the short term, but may produce some long lasting effects that plague you for years to come. The Best Path to Weight Loss If you’re looking to lose weight, you’re much better off taking a solid, healthy approach that supports activities and behaviors that you can sustain for a lifetime. After all, if your goal is to get healthy, doesn’t it stand to reason that your ways of achieving it should be healthy as well? That’s what the SlimPlate System is designed to do. You learn which foods will promote your weight loss goals (and your health) as well as how much of them to eat so you give your body exactly what it needs to thrive without overfeeding it. It also teaches you nutrition and balance – two things that you can use for the rest of your life so that your results are permanent!