Trying to take control of one’s weight and work towards better overall health is an admirable thing. It is, after all, far easier to simply ignore the need to change out what you’re eating for something healthier and instead go on eating what you enjoy. There are plenty of diets and diet guides out there that can help you figure out the best way to approach the change too. You’ll generally end up seeing the same consistent kind of advice such as favoring fruits and vegetables and only having a little bit of meat if you want to have a healthy diet. The exact mix tends to vary from diet to diet, but the theme remains the same. There are some that are different though. They promise rapid weight loss of a short amount of time. Some of them do work, but there are things you should know before engaging in a quicky diet like that that might change how you look at the very idea of such diets.

Rapid Diets Are Unreliable
A consistent theme in medical literature is that rapid weight loss, when it works, tends to be temporary at best. The extreme changes necessary for such diets allow circumstances to support the weight loss, but most of us return to our old habits after the weight loss goal is achieved. All that weight starts to come back just as rapidly at that point. Most of us want to lose weight and keep it off. The only reliable way that anyone knows how to achieve this is through slower paced weight loss that creates sustainable changes in diet and lifestyle. Taking a shortcut is a surefire way to simply damage your health through rapid fluctuations in weight. Your risks for countless diseases go up when your body’s weight fluctuates like that and the statistics don’t show any promising outcomes. Work with your doctor to find changes you can make in your lifestyle to achieve your weight loss goals instead of using rapid, fad diets if you genuinely want the changes to stick.

Rapid Diets Are Dangerous
As we highlighted above, rapid fluctuations in your body’s weight open up the possibility for various issues. One of the most worrying is that they up your risk for heart disease and other stress-related illnesses skyrockets. Just rapidly losing weight has its own risks too. Your body can end up eating its own muscles to keep itself going due to malnutrition from rapid diets. This sort of malnutrition ends up negatively impacting the rest of your body. Hair loss and skin issues aren’t uncommon as your body will have difficulty keeping everything health. Frequent dizziness and headaches can become a part of day to day life as well. The symptoms don’t end up getting any friendlier either as menstrual irregularities can also show up. You can end up throwing off your body’s entire electrolyte balance with rapid weight loss too and that comes with its own host of problems. The human body is not meant to shed weight rapidly. All of these issues can become long term problems if you lose weight too rapidly. Losing it at a reasonable pace is the only way to avoid the problem.

Rapid Diets Are Often Fads
If we take a step back and look at the patterns of rapid diet options, it becomes very clear that they tend to be stressed as a way to lose weight in spring and summer to look one’s best. A new one comes around every year and promises the exact same “miracle” weight loss to people while looking just a little bit different. Most of them are built around false ideas on nutrition and how the body works. Even worse, some of them are forms of starvation diet that deliberately invite malnutrition as a way to force the body to shed weight rapidly. All of this makes them extremely suspect and not worth any serious consideration. Those of us who genuinely value working towards our health goals are always better served by talking with our doctors and making a plan. Rapid weight loss diets are too vague and often too demanding on the body to be recommended by anyone with a reputation at stake.

There is a certain allure to finding a quicky diet that looks like it may be the solution to any weight issues we’ve been having. The idea that we can solve our problem and move forward quickly helps us all feel like there won’t be an indeterminable amount of time in which we’re struggling to stick with the diet. Unfortunately, rapid weight loss options are often unreliable and potentially threatening to our health. It may not be the news any of us want to hear, but weight loss is best achieved at a slow, regular pace if we want it to both stick and be good for us.