Beat Regain

In social media, I see a lot of people talk about getting their weight maintenance “back on track” by going on a crash diet. It’s especially interesting to look at the Weight Loss Surgery community to observe what happens when people are losing lots of weight.

In this series of posts, I’ll discuss crash diets and the various reasons people go on them to avoid weight regain.

First, let’s define what a crash diet is.

• Excluding entire food groups such as all carbs.
• Consuming only liquids or “smoothies.”
• Consuming some very limited number of specific food or liquids.
• A regimen defined by a specific time limit, usually because it’s so extreme it would be inadvisable to follow it indefinitely.
• A regimen with such extreme rules that it would be very difficult to sustain it beyond a particular time limit.

In no particular order, here’s the first reason people go on a crash diet…

“I’ve regained and want to get the weight right off.”
 A radical change in your usual diet will usually cause water weight loss. Go back on your usual diet and whatever you lost with a short-term crash will come back.

Water weight loss fools us into thinking a drastic measure worked. Water weight loss occurs when there is a reduction in glycogen stores. Glycogen is the body’s energy source, produced from carbohydrates we eat and stored in the liver. The body stores some several hundred grams. Each gram of glycogen holds three to four times its weight in water. Deplete the body of carbohydrates and you deplete glycogen. And there goes your water weight! Eat carbohydrates after the crash diet and your glycogen storage will fill right back up! Water weight and all.

Losing a pound of real weight means you burned up a calorie deficit of 3500 calories. Most people seriously overestimate how many calories they burn. The estimates we read in the media are never accurate. How many calories you burn in any given activity will be based on a variety of factors, specific to you. It’s impossible to generalize about that.

The big issue with all crash diets will always be sustainability. Any drastic measure you take to get weight off quickly will not be something you can continue to do.