Is the Fast Diet Bad For You?

The shortest answer to this question is yes. Starving yourself no matter the conditions is never a good idea.

In a world where your image carries a lot of weight in people’s perception of you, some have gone out of their way to come up with different ways of achieving the ‘perfect’ body or face or wardrobe and so on. There are many different diets that people have adopted in pursuit of this perfection. One of these is the fast diet. The word ‘fast’ here is used to mean starving yourself and is not referring in any way to speed. Is the fast diet bad for you?

How the fast diet works

There are many variations to how this diet is carried out. The most common is the five to two eat-fast ratio. This means that for five continuous days, you are free to eat just about whatever you want to; healthy or junk. After this, the dieters starve themselves for two days surviving only on limited calorie foods and water.

The self-starvation part of the fast diet is what makes it bad for you. Its fans argue that the two days of starving force your body to burn fat for energy and the result is loss of weight. However, studies have shown that this works against the dieter as what happens is that the body actually lowers metabolism rate to preserve what it has. This means that you actually end up gaining weight during the five days of unmonitored feeding as you body’s ability to burn fat is slowed down greatly.

• Fatigue and weakness after the fast.
• Weight gain instead of loss due to the unmonitored calorie intake during the first five days.
• Skipping meals causes hyper acidity in your stomach that manifests in stomachaches and heartburns.

• Gastric ulcers due to hyper acidic environment in the stomach.
• Weight gain due to low metabolism.

• Unlike other diet plans. You still get to enjoy tasty treats without worrying about calorie intake.
• In some cases, it does help the dieter lose weight faster than other diets.

As earlier stated, starving yourself is never a good idea. Below are some safer diet plans. None is without its effects but they are all considerably safer and more effective than the fast diet.

• The Paleo diet
• The Dukan diet
• The raw fruit diet
• Vegan diet
• Flexitarian
• Last but not least, good old fashioned balanced diet and exercise.