*Taps yardstick on desk* Ok, students, today I would like to talk to you all about "Crash Dieting."
Miss Freelance Fatty is SICK of crash diets, and wants you, her class, to know why they are so bad for you! Ok? Good!
Sigh. I really am sick of Crash Diets. There is a new one going around my work right now, the HCG diet. This one is a doozy. Not only does it rely heavily on a "nutritional supplement" but the diet restricts one to a diet of 500 calories a day. Yeah, that's right. So obviously its not the supplement that makes you lose weight, its the fact that you've gone from 1800-2200 calories a day down to 500.
This diet is bad for you. Period. Let's say on this diet you lose 20 pounds in a month. At least half of that weight is muscle right? So check out this math...
1 lb muscle = 50 calories burned per day (just to exist)
1 lb fat = 2 calories burned per day (just to exist)
So lets say you lose 10 lbs of muscle, and 10 lbs of fat on a crash diet.
BTW, when you lose weight too fast, you always lose muscle. When your body thinks it's starving, it will dump whatever takes the most energy, and as you see above, muscle takes 25x energy to keep alive than fat.
10 lb muscle = 500 calories off your metabolism
10lb fat = 20 calories off your metabolism
Total = 520 calories a day you are no longer burning. That's like a meal! So now, you've lost your goal weight, you go back to your, let's say 1800 calorie a day diet. And before this diet, you maintained your weight well, so you were burning that 1800 calories every day. But now, after losing that muscle and fat, you are now only burning just under 1300 calories a day. So you start to gain back the weight at about a pound a week. After 20 weeks you're back where you were.
But get this, you're worse off now! Unless you're really doing muscle building, you don't get that muscle back that fast... so you've only upped your metabolism by maybe 50-100 calories, even though you weigh what you did before!
This is where yo-yo dieting comes from people. You lose 20, gain back 25, lose 25 gain back 30... you're screwing your body when you do it this way. Crash diets always do just that... CRASH!
Ok, so why my ginormous rant about this today? Like I said, I have several coworkers on this diet now HCG. Its so ridiculous. But you know what annoys me the most? The fact that all they can talk about... is their diet. My one coworker, ICD, she is the worst of them all. All she talks about all day is "I can't have that!" Over and over again. The biggest blow came today... the reason I'm finally blogging about it...
One of the guys I work for brought in some trout he caught and smoked himself. It was divine. We were all having little snacks on it. So ICD comes over, and get this (I'm so not making this up...) She asks if she can SMELL it. Seriously. She lifts up the plate and smells it. So the guy who brought it in, looks at her like she's lost her mind and says, "Just have some." I bout yelled at him. Because I knew exactly what was coming next. "I CAN'T" she says, "I am not allowed to have it, so I'm just smelling it." And she walks away.
After enduring going out to lunch with her last week... and hearing her tell the waitress over and over again what she can't have... I am just about ready to scream.
But don't take diet advice from the fat girl right? Jeez. Oh, btw... I am keeping off this now almost 15 pounds I mysteriously lost. I think its the less snacking I'm doing lately. Being poor has its benefits I guess.
Ok comment time. Um, I am still so blinded with rage over this incident, I can't really think of anything creative... so why don't you comment about the crazy dieters you've run into. Add to my story!
9 years ago
