Extreme Diets—Good For You?

If you're overweight, then the odds are that you are interested in shedding a few pounds. You want to become slim, slender, healthier and more energetic. You're interested in improving your health so as to avoid the pitfalls that being overweight can lead you to. But how are you going to go about losing that weight that you put on over these past few years through just a little over eating? Should you set a caloric deficit that is extreme, and try to lose all that weight all at once, or should you adopt a more moderate approach, seeking to lose weight more gradually? Or should you set a slight deficit, approaching your change gradually and carefully? Which is guaranteed to deliver the best long term results? In today's article we are going to take a careful look at this question, and help you figure out what would work best for you to help you achieve the best long term results possible in your quest to lose weight.

First lets establish what the terms mean so that there can be a minimum of confusion. While any short article will suffer from having to generalize and simplify, the principles should hold true and remain so for anybody seeking to implement them. Caloric deficit means simply by how much you are reducing your caloric intake from your maintenance levels. This can be done through either exercise or by eating less, but the final result is the same, even if there are indeed greater complexities we are ignoring. Further, when we discuss setting your caloric deficit to small, medium or large, what we mean is reducing how much you are consuming by either 10%, 25%, or anything greater than 25%.

So let's take a look. If you set a small deficit, you will lose weight gradually but will also run the risk of accidentally eating more than you expected and in doing so remove the deficit you intended to set. However, this is the healthiest approach as your metabolism will not react to it. However, it takes forever, which is why a moderate approach is better, where your metabolism will begin to slow down but you can overcome this by eating plenty of protein. An extreme deficit is probably the worst option, as you will lose a ton of muscle mass as your body goes haywire and tries to retain its fat reserves believing that you are starving.

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