Crash Diet Plans

The crash diet plans are characterized by eating fewer calories than the human body needs in order to preserve its weight. Unlike Caloric Restriction (CR) diets that ensure you still have the necessary intake of vitamins, minerals, proteins and water: crash diets are so restrictive that they cut the complete nutritional intake with more than 50% of what your body would normally need. The purpose of a restrictive diet is to offer you the maximum quantity of nutrients and the lowest calorie intake, the purpose of a crash diet is losing weight by literary starving you to death (one student died after following a crash diet where she only ate one apple a day and nothing more).

If you manage to avoid going into extremes, then a crash diet might be the perfect solution to your weight problem. The real challenge is to be able to distinguish those certain particular foods that you need to replace with healthy foods, and maintain your daily calorie intake stable.

Good weight loss tips on how to crash diet

Here are some tips that will help you lose weight on a reasonable crash diet:

• Do not cut your calorie intake with more than 20-30% than what your body needs. Women generally need 1500 calories to maintain their weight, while men need 2000. These general estimates depend on the age, weight, gender and daily habits of the individual. A good start would be to count your necessary calorie intake with a calculator you can find online, and then eat 20-30% less calories.
• A crash diet that includes only one apple a day or a 300-calorie daily menu can work for three-four days and it is helpful to jumpstart your weight loss. However, don’t follow such diets in the long run, as they will cause severe nutritional deficiencies.
• Regardless of what various ‘make-your-life-easy’-tips recommend: never buy food for a whole week or month. If you want to follow a healthy, restrictive diet plan, which offers you a minimum intake of calories and a maximum intake of nutrients, then buy fresh food every day. Fresh fruit and vegetables lose nutrients when they are refrigerated or kept in a storage drawer and this defies your purpose in dieting: obtaining the optimum benefits from the foods you eat.
• Set realistic goals. Don’t dream of losing 30 pounds in one week, as this is simply not possible. The human body can only lose about 3 pounds of pure fat a week. Of course, you can lose much more than that, but the rest of the lost weight consists of water.

Crash diets are not meant to be followed in the long run. They will help you to lose some weight (5-15 pounds) in a very short amount of time, and this weight loss will in the first place extremely motivational. However, in the long run you will have to change your dieting plan with a healthy, balanced one, which includes a very small, but steady reduction of the number of calories.