Crash dieting makes you even fatter/ how to effectively lose weight!

Ever tried trimming off a few pounds for a holiday?


The key is to plan and lose weight long term, not short term.

It's well known that people, (mainly you girls) try to diet every now and then to feel a bit thinner. Well, this may work short term, but in the long-run you'll feel some pretty grim effects.

Yes, it's true that carbohydrates are the main contributor to calories, but they are one of the most vital parts to your diet. Carbohydrates are your main source of energy, and also the source of fat. Now carbs only turn to fat after eating 80g. So anything under 80g will be used in the next hour as your energy source; this supplies your body with its basic needs. However if you starve yourself of energy, well, its pretty self explanatory, you won't feel very good.

Eat vegatables! You may hate them, but they slow down carbohydrate intake, which helps you manage your weight more. Also it helps your digestive system move (feeling a bit grim writing this), letting your bowel operations run smoothly.

But don't get me wrong! Every week or two, allow yourself a day to completely pig out. It's not going to do much in the long term, also as time goes on, you'll learn to appreciate the food and eat it slower, which makes you get full faster and eat less.

What does carbohydrate do?


As you may know, the digestion system is reliant on enzymes, after a few stages of breaking down,
Carbohydrates turn into mainly glucose, a tiny bit of lactose and a tiny bit of fructose. Glucose is used by your cells for respiration and converted to energy.

So what makes you fat?


When you eat more than the maximum carbohydrate limit your body can take for the hour, any leftover gets turned into fat for storage and later use.

Why crash dieting is bad


When you diet/crash diet, the average person tries to eliminate as much carbohydrates as possible. This makes your body go into panic mode and store everything you eat in case things get worse. Yeah, you guessed it, that means you aren't really losing much fat.

Furthermore, with a deficiency of energy, your body won't be up to scratch either, and you're going to be feeling grim a lot of the time.

What to do


Diet in moderation. Just go slightly over the 80g so your body is satisfied. The leftover will indeed be converted to fat, but do you really eat every hour? No I didn't think so either! Over the next hour or two your body will burn the stored fat because it knows you won't be starving it to death by crash dieting.

Eating several smaller meals instead of 3 big ones will give your body a sense of monitoring a steady income of food and so will keep burning fat instead of being tempted to store it.

Probably heard it before, but eat fruit! It contains fructose which is a lot sweeter than glucose but in smaller amounts so it fills your glucose needs while the roughage is good for you. (And no carbohydrate!)

You probably guessed it, exercise! Except not as much as you think you'll need to. Exercise keeps your body fit, and when your heart rate goes between 108-126 bpm you start burning calories a lot faster. However, your diet is more important than exercise so think of exercise as bonus points!

To serve as a motivator for exercise, you lose 1g of fat for every 9 calories you burn!

So if you take anything from this article, don't crash diet. It's more stupid than taking a solar powered torch into a cave.


On a side note, my travel insurance is now sorted so work experience in africa is a guarantee!