Are you planning to go on a diet?  For what reason? –Probably to lose some pounds. But we hope that another reason is also to maintain a healthy body.  Skinny is not equivalent to healthy and we would like to emphasize that important fact before you even think about crash dieting.

Crash diets are any diets that are designed to make you lose weight in a very short period of time. Mostly, crash diets do not advertise themselves under that name, but are more likely to give themselves a more original name. They usually promise that you can lose “20 pounds in 2 weeks” or something similar.

The problem with crash diets is that they do not provide your body its needed nutrition as you lose weight.  Your body has certain nutritional requirements. If you have a weight problem, that means you are probably overeating. That is, you are taking in more calories than your body needs for optimum functioning. A crash diet takes you to the other extreme, forcing you to take in fewer calories than your body needs. This may sound like a balance –“under-eating” to make up for overeating, but your body is not meant to go to such extremes.

Another bad effect of crash diet is your tendency to overeat after you “under-eat.”  After you lose 20 pounds in two weeks, what’s next? Nothing is stated about this in your crash diet plan.  So you end up going back to your usual food intake and you eat even more since your body feels like it has been deprived of food for a long time.

A good diet involves ways to cut back on calories, but also includes enough nutrition to keep your body working at its best.