Diets For Quick Weight Loss – The 500 Calorie Diet Is Very Popular
June 24, 2009 by Dan Beckwith
Filed under Diet
Engaging in diets for quick weight loss can be very dangerous. But, if you don’t mind taking risks with your health, the 500 calorie diet might be right for you. Keep in mind, that even when considering diets for quick weight loss, the 500 calorie diet is a very extreme form of dieting. Even so, it tends to be extremely popular.
Clearly, the reason for this popularity is that you will quickly lose weight. Almost everyone who has a need for diets for quick weight loss, goes to a low-calorie diet. But even among low-calorie diets, the 500 calories per day diet is at the low end of the spectrum.
First, for a definition…For a diet to be considered low calorie, the arbitrary cutoff point is 1200 calories per day. Anything below that is considered to be a low-calorie diet. Clearly the whole idea of a low-calorie diet is to lose weight quickly, but again – it can be quite dangerous so it should always be thoroughly planned with a nutritionist or your family doctor.
It’s well known that the best way to lose weight is to burn more calories than you eat. You can do this by burning more, or by eating less. Your body needs a certain number of calories just to exist. If you’re not eating enough, the theory is that your energy needs will be taken from the fat calories in your body.
But, keep in mind that your body is very smart. It won’t simply keep burning away calories. Your body will think you are starving, and it will cut way back on the number of calories it uses to survive. This affects your metabolic rate, which means that your body will start eating away at your muscle mass.
For the long-term, this is very dangerous. It’s your muscles that burn calories (far more than fat) and if you lose muscle mass, it can have a highly detrimental effect on your body and on your ability to keep weight off in the future. As one of the diets for quick weight loss, it works…but only for a little while.
Your gender, activity level, height, body type, genetics, and overall health will determine how quickly and how badly your body is affected by a 500 calorie per day diet. For short while, 500 calories per day may be enough for some of us.
For most of us though, particularly if we are overweight, eating only 500 calories per day is literally starving yourself. Your body is most likely used to taking in 2000-5000 calories per day – or more – and suddenly dropping to 500 calories will move your body into starvation mode. To conserve energy, your metabolism slows way down.
You don’t want to do this for very long because your body will learn to live on 500 calories per day, right up until you run out of calories to burn, then you will slip into a coma and die.
The good news is, we usually stop our dieting before that happens. The bad news is, now that you’ve lost so much muscle mass and your metabolism is so slow, as soon as you go back to your old eating habits (and we all do) you will have a sudden spike in weight gain. In fact you’ll gain more weight than you would have if you had never gone on a diet to start with. Diets for quick weight loss may seem to be very effective, but they just don’t work over the long haul.
The best way to determine a safe, workable daily calorie level is by using a BMR/AMR calculator. This will tell you how many calories you need in order to maintain good health and support your lifestyle. Now, you know how many calories you need and if you subtract up to 500 calories per day you will have one of the ideal diets for quick weight loss.
Since the body size and mass of men and women is so obviously different, this means that they need a different number of calories to survive. While the average woman may eat 1200 to 1300 calories per day their male counterpart needs from 1500 to 1600 calories per day. That’s why it’s so important for you to consult your physician before starting any diet. Safety must come first.
In conclusion, cutting back to 500 calories per day is very popular in the realm of diets for quick weight loss, but it can be very dangerous. It will work to help you lose weight, but the total loss is short-lived at best. You should never restrict your calories that dramatically without the constant supervision and monitoring of a doctor.
To get your FREE copy of my “Fast Weight Loss Tips!” mini-course, and to learn more about the best ways to lose weight, check out my website right now.
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