Lose a few pounds fast
If you want lasting results, you have to lose weight slowly. With a crash diet, the lost weight often comes back as soon as you stop it. Moreover, with a diet that is too strict, you mainly lose water and muscle mass instead of fat. That is why it is best not to lose more than 2 kilos per week. However, it may be that you want to lose 4 to 5 kilos quickly, for example to fit into your summer outfit. Is that possible? Yes. Is it dangerous? Not if you observe the following rules.
A strict diet does not harm your health if you follow it for a maximum of two weeks. Because weight-loss regimens always ensure that you consume fewer calories than you need on a daily basis, starvation is difficult to avoid. If you ignore those hunger pangs, the body will respond by slowing down the metabolism and breaking down muscle tissue. Also, many diets are one-sided, so you risk nutritional deficiencies over time. But for a while ‘crash’ is possible.
Crazy about bananas?
The choice of crash diets is large. However, not every diet is right for everyone. Instead, choose a diet that suits your lifestyle, habits and taste. With the banana diet, breakfast consists of one or two bananas and a glass of water. The kilos may fly off, but with such a scant start you won’t get very far if you have to do heavy physical work. With the yogurt diet you are less hungry because of the high protein content, but many people suffer from stomach and intestinal problems.
For vegetable lovers who would like to lose a few pounds quickly, the vegetable soup diet is a good choice. Breakfast consists of fruit, and during the day you take as much vegetable soup as you want. The cabbage soup diet, where the soup always contains white cabbage, would be even slightly more efficient (2.5 kg in three days), but the yo-yo effect is never far away. An extreme crash diet is the lemon juice diet: minus 5 kilos in a week. Do not start without mental preparation, because you only consume about 600 kilocalories per day instead of the usual 2000. Count on dizziness, headaches and concentration problems. And… the acidic juice can damage tooth enamel.
For the strong stomach
One diet that appeals to the imagination is the ‘old-fashioned’ sherry diet. It is based on the myth that alcohol breaks down proteins. You drink three to six glasses of dry sherry a day and eat half of every normal serving (the real secret of the diet). The only advantage of the alcohol is that the diet week becomes a bit more pleasant. But you lose at most 2 kilos per week, and for those who have to drive a car, this sherrygelag’ is strongly discouraged.
With the pineapple diet, as unbalanced as it is one-sided, you lose more: 5 kilos in four days. But you must have a strong stomach and ditto willpower. And just like with the other diets, the yo-yo effect is also included for free in this slimming regimen. To prevent you from gaining weight again very quickly, there is no escaping it: you will have to eat less than you did before the crash diet, and you will have to exercise a lot more.
Sources):
- Plus Magazine