For whatever reason, many people want to lose weight, and most want to lose weight fast. This is why fad diets continue to thrive even though health experts have been advising against them for years. In your weight loss efforts, one of the first questions to address is whether quick weight loss methods are really worth it.

It is true that crash diets and other quick weight loss plans help you lose weight considerably in a very short time. However, they often don’t give you long-term weight loss results. What’s worse is that it can undermine your health and lead to further weight gain in the long run. Why is this so? Let’s take a closer look at crash diets to understand how our body reacts.

Crash dieting usually involves drastically reducing your daily food intake. As a result, their body doesn’t get enough food, causing their natural survival instincts to kick in. Your body then enters what is known as “starvation mode,” in which your metabolic rate slows down deliberately to conserve energy. Therefore, your crash diet will cause you to burn less fat in the long run.

You can argue that this is perfectly fine since you’ve already lost a significant amount of weight in the first few weeks anyway. What you need to understand is that his body only burns a maximum of two pounds of stored fat each week. Any weight loss you experience more than two pounds in a week is therefore a loss of your body’s water content, or worse, a loss of muscle mass.

Muscle helps your body burn more calories, and the more muscle you have, the more calories your body tends to burn. So, you see, crash diets not only slow down your metabolic rate, but also cause you to lose muscle tissue which is very important for burning more calories. This is why you tend to gain weight back quickly when you rely solely on crash diets. A much better option would be to stick to a sustainable diet plan that helps you lose weight and stay healthy at the same time.