4 ways to quick weight loss diet is harming your body

The whole world seems to be on a diet. A dietician is now like a family physician; every urban family has one. At most social gatherings, you will find people commenting on who has lost and who has gained a few kilos, and discussions on what their dietician has said belongs to the ‘avoid list’, while tucking into a portion of everything that is on offer.

Wanting to lose a few kilos to reach your ideal weight according to your height and body frame is a great idea. Being overweight can be an indicator of various changes going on in your body, apart from it indicating that your lifestyle and food choices are not very healthy. However, what most people don’t think about is that there is a right way and a wrong way to lose weight. Speed dieting and crashing your way towards your goal might look like the easy thing to do but if you want to lose and keep that weight off for good… read on.

To lose weight quickly you…

…need to go on a fad diet
That’s what those weird diets that you get off the internet are called. Some dieter will claim to have lost weight by eating only proteins, another might say they ate nothing after 6pm every day, while yet another will have eaten all high fat foods and avoided carbs (everyone’s favourite enemy) and will have lost tons of weight. Most people will never be able to sustain these fad diets beyond a period of time and eventually get back to eating all the foods they may have “sacrificed” to lose the weight.

Fad diets are usually boring and repetitive, and have strange side effects like bad breath, constipation, gas and even dizziness and fatigue. The reason? They are imbalanced as far as nutrients go, so eventually you will eat what you normally do, and you will reward yourself often for being good, and soon you will have gained back double the weight you had lost.

…need to starve
Dieting became a bad word ever since people started to assume that when you say ‘dieting’, you actually mean you are not eating. When a person who eats a certain amount of food a day suddenly cuts it to one-fourth the original quantity, the results begin to show very quickly, no doubt, but then so do the deficiencies; the hair loss and the pale skin. Starving to lose weight makes you feel deprived, puts you in a bad mood and makes you low on energy at all times. It may make you lose a few kilos, but that is only short-lived.

…tend to give up bad habits, only for a short time
In an attempt to lose kilos before a set ‘deadline’, many people give up some bad habits till the date they have in mind, only to get back to those bad habits with a vengeance. You have to find a better alternative for a bad food habit rather than just swearing off that food for a short interval. If you decide to give up on that midnight chocolate bar for some time, replace it with something else that you will enjoy and something that benefits you. This will make sure you’re not tempted to go back to that habit. Try one-two pieces of dates or a cup of milk, or even a cup of chamomile tea that will relax you.

…may be consulting with someone unqualified
There are a lot of quacks who pose as weight loss experts or dieticians/nutritionists. These are people who have just done a certificate course from unknown institutions for a few weeks and have decided to start their practice. They might not even have the basic knowledge of the physiology of the human body or the biochemistry of nutrients and what they do. They will ask you to measure and calculate each grain that goes into your mouth and make you not just fear food but also hate your own body. In order to succeed at what they are doing, since they have no qualification backing them, they will promise to give you fast results without you realising what it costs you health-wise.

If you’re going to a nutritionist you haven’t heard of, ask them where they received the degree that qualifies them in their field. It takes three years of undergraduate studies to become an authentic nutritionist, after which some choose to do their Master’s for another two years. Ask them if they are members of the IDA (Indian Dietetics Association), as IDA only issues life memberships to qualified dieticians with degrees from recognised institutions.

To sum it up:

1. When you lose weigh in a healthy way, you should lose about one kilo a week, when your diet is accompanied by exercise and lifestyle modifications.
2. Healthy weight loss should mean creating a better lifestyle for yourself and slowly ridding yourself of bad habits that harm your health.
3. Your diet should not entail desperate measures to get to a certain weight.
4. Your weight loss should make you feel good, not just look good.
5. Healthy weight loss should be under the watch of a qualified IDA-recognised nutritionist/dietician