Extreme Diets – Do They Work?

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Most of us don’t have to worry right now about showing off our beach bodies, and Christmas is just around the corner, which means we’ll all be gorging ourselves silly and not watching that waistline. That said some people I know have recently started crash diets in the lead up to December. This had me wondering – do crash diets really work?

Some of the most reliable diets involve an easy low carb diet plan or calorie cutting. There are all manner of other wild diets that involve just eating soup or even just eating grapefruit! When religious sticking to these diets, they do work. We’ve seen it in the case of actors before, practically starving themselves just to get in shape for a role (method acting taking to it’s extreme). In fact, there are stories of people being able to shift multiple stone in a matter of months without a single touch of liposuction. Rob Cooper, known as The Former Fat Guy, went so far as to lose a staggering 300 pounds in two years, all through natural methods.

However, one theory that often crops up is that drastic weight loss can also lead to drastic weight gain once the diet has stopped. This is known as yo-yo dieting and it seems to be similarly all too common amongst celebrities who have lost extreme amounts of weight. Yo-yo dieting has been proving to have bad effects on one’s health, even being a major cause of heart disease. Is it possible to ever lose extreme weight, without gaining it rapidly after?

A study from Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts has recently dispelled this myth. It blames the main reason for people rocketing back up to their previous weight being a dependency on rich food and unhealthy snacks. These people, having lost all that weight, don’t just return to their old diet, but overcompensate. The mental satisfaction of reaching a size and weight that one is comfortable with makes them believe they then eat more and not feel guilty about it.

Indeed some people are thin and are able to seemingly devour as much as they can possibly pile on their plate. This is more down to genetics and metabolism. These people have always been thin and have a hard time bulking. When a previously larger person finally reaches the size of a thinner person, they may partially believe that they too can keep up. But their metabolism has not changed and is still at its previous slow rate, meaning the pounds begin piling on quickly.

Perhaps then the moral of this story is to never get too complacent. You can challenge yourself to an extreme diet, lose the weight and keep that size, but you have to still be sensible afterwards. There’s no need to be on a cabbage diet forever (the thought of having to do that for eternity is enough to make anyone give up) – just don’t celebrate your newly achieved killer figure with a royal banquet!