The downside of crash dieting

Dr. Akshay Jain MD, FRCPC, FACE, CCD, ECNU, DABIM, DABOM, Clinical and Research Endocrinologist, talks about the downside of crash dieting.

Duration: 2:26

People with overweight or obesity may often resort to crash dieting to lose weight very quickly. For instance, if there is a wedding in the family or if there's a planned vacation, people may start cutting down their food quite significantly for a few days in order to lose weight as quickly as possible. However, such crash diets are medically not recommended. Ideally, we want the weight to be progressively maintained at a low level for a long time or to chronically lose weight in a healthy manner.

Crash diets maybe disadvantages because these diets are not sustainable in the long run. And for a lot of people as soon as they resort back to their previous dieting habit, they will start gaining weight right back again. Whenever someone starts crash dieting, there's a lot of hormonal changes that occur right away in the body. For instance, there is a hormone called ghrelin that shoots up in the body, and this significantly increases the cravings for certain foods at the same time, when people start losing a lot of weight, there's two hormones in the body called Leptin and GLP one which can get imbalanced and as a result of this, the portion sizes as well as hunger may go up significantly, which is why crash diets may not be effective.

The other problem is that whenever one embarks on crash dieting and starts losing a bunch of weight, it's not just fat loss that they experience. People may also lose muscle mass. And this is the reason why people lose a lot of weight. They may experience muscle weakness at that same time. Hence, it is important that whenever one is dieting, we supplemented with regular physical activity so that we can continue to maintain muscle mass and improve endurance and strength.

Medically the most appropriate diet is one which has balanced quantities of all macronutrients, such as fat, carbohydrate and protein as well as micronutrients and in a limited caloric intake so that one can lose weight in a healthy manner and prevent it from rebounding.

Presenter: Dr. Akshay Jain, Endocrinologist, Surrey, BC

Local Practitioners: Endocrinologist