For decades, those people slightly or heavily overweighed were told by nutritionists and health experts that the best way of getting rid of those unwanted extra pounds was to stick to a long term and steady diet plan. Apparently, losing weight gradually was much better than following any of the more popular and much advertised crash diet plans that offered almost instant weight loss.
Diet plans such as the 3 day military diet, the astronaut diet, the cabbage soup diet, the grapefruit diet or the Scarsdale Diet are examples of these nutrition plans that have been traditionally considered not only dangerous but ineffective as well.
Medical papers written by nutrition experts have long emphasized the fact that crash diets were the easy but harmful way to shed pounds. From the well known yo-yo effect in which crash dieters quickly gained back their intial weight and even more pounds, to adverse health effects and a reduction in metabolic rate , lots has been said about the disadvantages of these diets when compared to other diets. This is especially true of those diet plans in which, through a controlled calorie ingestion, overweight people could gradually lose weight.
However, according to a research paper published in October 2014 in the medical journal The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology, losing weight fast can be as good as doing it slowly.
Crash Diets Under the Microscope
According to this study, 200 obese adults followed under medical control either a 36-week gradual diet program or a 12-week rapid weight loss plan. The former reduced their calorie intake by 500 calories a day from the recommended calorie intake for men and women while the latter only ate between 450 to 800 calories per day.
Of these obese adults, those who lost more than 12.5% of their body weight were then put on a weight maintenance diet for three years.
On the crash diet four out of five dieters reached their target weight in comparison to just half of those that followed a slower weight loss program. And, quite surprisingly, crash dieters were no more likely than the others to regain the lost weight. In fact, in both groups some participants regained weight.
Thus, even though medical recommendations favor the adoption of gradual diet plans for obese people, those who lost weight fast didn’t bounce back to their initial weight any more significantly than the other ones.
Needless to say, this research paper is quite controversial and has already raised an interesting discussion amongst nutrition and health experts.
Positive Aspects of Crash Diets
That said, everything seems to indicate that crash diets should be looked at under a different light now. Even though the fact that losing weight in a gradual manner is healthier is not under discussion it is important to point out some positive aspects of crash diets.
Experts believe that those people following low-calorie plans for shorter periods of time are less likely to give up in their weight loss efforts than those who follow those plans for longer. People on a diet prefer to restrict themselves from eating those high caloric foods they like for a few days and weeks and then be able to indulge responsively in them again rather than having to count how many calories they eat every single day over the long-term.
It is also true that people who are overweight are more motivated to stick to their diet program if the see results fast. In other words, they are more likely to accept a daily intake of only 800 calories per day for just a few days or weeks when the image they see themselves in the mirror and see how much weight they’ve lost.
What is more, crash diets can be more effective in those cases in which people want to look slimmer for a looming event in their lives such as a wedding or party.
