They claim to lose weight in a few weeks but nevertheless the miracle diets are harmful to health. We discover what its main risks are.
Unfortunately they are everywhere: sites that publish diets that claim to lose between 3, 4 and 5 kilos a week. They are the so-called miracle diets, and far from helping to lose weight, they can seriously affect the health of the people who follow them.
Why? Mainly because they are diets elaborated in a nutritionally inadequate way, which promise to lose kilos quickly and with little effort, either by consuming a single food throughout the day, or by restricting the consumption of certain groups of macronutrients completely (generally carbohydrates) .
The result is more than evident: although it is true that at the beginning an apparent weight loss is achieved (that is, when we stand on the scale, our weight is actually lower than the previous time when we weighed ourselves), the truth is that, as We will see carefully in this note, in reality there has been a loss of weight not because we have lost fat, but because what our body has eliminated are basically liquids.
Consequently, when we finish the miracle diet, or leave it, we begin to gain the “lost weight” within a few days of abandoning it.
What is a miracle diet?
It tends to be called a miracle diet to that diet that, always supposedly, ensures the loss of between 3 to 4 kilos (or even more) a week. They basically consist of weight loss diets that promise to lose weight quickly in just a few weeks.
They are characterized because they always tend to be related to the name of a specific food (carrot diet, artichoke diet, ice cream diet …), and in most cases they are based on consisting of low-calorie diets that, far from take into account the health of people, have a very serious impact on them, especially if they are extended over time.
Health risks of miracle diets
In a sense, miracle diets can be dangerous or very dangerous for the health of people who follow them because they lead to significant imbalances in the body.
Not surprisingly, those are much more dangerous that, to the low caloric intake, adds both a certain imbalance in the distribution of macronutrients and a very low intake of vitamins and minerals.
Organic imbalances also tend to be produced by eating food in the wrong quality and quantities, and in most cases weight is lost not because fat is lost, but because it “loses weight” due to losing fluids, body proteins, electrolytes and glycocene stores.
This is because the reduction or reduction in the calorie intake cannot be done from one day to the next, drastically, and it must be taken into account that a diet that does not exceed 1,200 calories, must be accompanied by vitamin supplements and minerals.
In addition, they have the special peculiarity that, when they are finished, people who have followed these diets gain even more kilos than those who have lost (a phenomenon known as the “yo-yo effect “).
What are the risks of following these types of diets?
The risks, as we have seen, are more than evident: certain nutritional deficiencies can occur that, at the beginning, tend to go unnoticed. But that, nevertheless, can become a pathological condition by itself, increasing the risk of suffering some diseases such as infections (since our immune system has been altered, as collected in 1991 by a study on cortisol and immunity), colds and colds, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, anemia and even some types of cancer.
In addition, as a study showed, following an unbalanced diet (whether or not it is losing weight) has a direct impact on the health of our bones, and may increase the risk of osteoporosis.
We actually tend to lose weight at the expense of the proteins that our body loses, and to a lesser extent depending on the percentage of fat, which would be ideal. As a consequence of this (due to the loss of proteins and fluids on the one hand, and the low caloric intake on the other), alterations occur in the body, which can cause not only metabolic disorders, but also cardiovascular and dermatological alterations.
Why do we gain weight when we abandon the diet?
When we follow a miracle diet there is a sharp drop in our body’s energy reserves, since our metabolism is reduced, mainly because this type of weight loss diet is mainly limited in calories.
For this reason, it is usual that during the first weeks they cause a notable loss of weight. But, later, the decrease in metabolism translates into a drop in daily caloric expenditure, as demonstrated by a study, so that when we abandon the weight loss regimen we tend to regain the lost weight.
Therefore, the key is to put ourselves in the hands of a specialist who, according to our basal metabolism, age, weight and height, will prepare an adequate weight loss diet, providing the nutrients that our body needs, and following healthy eating habits.
