Calorie Restriction Diet Effects on Your Overall Health

• Cutting calories too much can send your body into starvation mode which makes weight loss more of a challenge
• Eating too little can cause other health problems, including reduced immune system functioning, fatigue and inactivity, and even eating disorders
• Your metabolism won’t go back to normal as soon as you diet to give up the calorie restriction diet

One of the golden rules of losing weight is you have to consume fewer calories than you use in a given day. For example, if you are only using 2,000 calories each day, you could drop pounds just by dropping your calories intake to 1,900 calories. However, some people say if you could lose weight slowly by reducing your calorie intake a little why not lose weight quickly by choosing a more drastic calorie restriction diet. While that might sound like a good idea on paper, the starvation diet is almost always a recipe for weight loss and health disasters.

Calories Cutting & Weight Loss

Typically, a severe calorie restriction diet is going to help you drop weight very quickly for the first week or two. Most of the weight you lose is from the water your body has retained. You’d lose that even if you were on a healthier diet in most cases. However, this quick drop in weight is seen by some dieters as a green light for continuing on a dangerous and usually ineffective path.

You see, if you cut calories too much, your body isn’t going to respond “Oh, we must be dieting so let’s start using up all of this stored fat.” Instead, the body goes into what is known as starvation mode, a response that evolved in our earlier ancestors in response to changes in the food supply which sometimes meant we had very little to eat as hunter gatherers.

When this mode kicks in, your metabolism is going to slow down so your body can get by on fewer calories. Instead of releasing those stored areas of fat to replace the energy you’re not bringing into your body, your body starts consuming muscle tissue. It hoards the fat just in case times get worse. Once you get into this mode, eating a larger amount of food won’t break the cycle, at least not right away, instead all of the excess energy is going to be stored as fat which means you’ll end up gaining more weight. This is exactly why people who go on extreme diets then stop them end up gaining more weight than what they have lost.

Other Health Problems

The starvation diet can lead to other health problems, too. For one, your metabolism may stay lower and this can make weight lose much harder in the future. You could also end up putting yourself at risk of other health problems because eating too few calories is going to lead to fatigue and inactivity. When you don’t eat enough, chances are you’re also not getting enough nutrients which will affect how your body functions. Your immune system is one of the first to become less effective so you’ll stand a better chance of getting sick on a calorie restriction diet.

Plus, these types of diets can become addictive. Because you do quickly reach a weight loss plateau, calories must be cut more and more in order to see even modest weight declines. The end result can be a full-blown, life-threatening eating disorder.

The information supplied in this article is not to be considered as medical advice and is for educational purposes only.