Are you desperately trying to lose a few pounds quickly for whatever reason and thinking of crash dieting as an option? You better think hard and long before committing yourself to this path, which may look appealing at first due to its possible short term gains, but which in the end has dire repercussions for your health in the long run.

Basically a crash diet entails drastically cutting back on the amount of calories and fat that an individual takes in on a daily basis. As a matter of fact, many of the diet plans that are touted in a number of magazines are in essence crash diets. Fad diet, starvation diet or crash diet, the difference between all these is very thin as they have a common string running through all of them – they have very bad effects on your health.

Let us look at some of the reasons why crash diet are bad and you should throw away the diet plan you are using or about to use.

1. Extreme mood swings
When you are on a crash diet, you are likely to be easily depressed and irritable, which can be attributed to deficiency of two minerals Serotonin and Dopamine, which aid in neurotransmission and are found in carbohydrates and proteins.

2. Possibility of damaging critical organs
Vital organs in our bodies like – kidney, heart, liver, and the brain, need carbohydrate energy to work perfectly. When this energy is inadequate as a consequence of consuming too little food, they turn to burning muscle tissues. If this condition persists, the organs may turn to muscle tissues surrounding the organ itself, leading to diseases like kidney failure and heart attack.

3. Dietary deficiency
As result of taking too little food, our bodies are deprived of essential minerals that make it tick and thus leave it wide open to afflictions like Anemia caused by B12 deficiency, or Osteoporosis (weak bones)  brought by a lack of Calcium.

4. Gain more weight
Crash  diets make the body adapt to low food intake, thus when you resume your normal eating after losing the desired pounds, chances are very high for you to gain weight as your body will not have  adjusted to more food.

All said and done, if we want to lose weight, we should stick to time tested methods – eating a balanced diet and taking a lot of exercise, as the short cuts don’t work!