It's completely normal to want to lose weight as fast as you possibly can. Unfortunately many people think that starving themselves with some crazy fad diet is the best way to reach their goal of losing weight quickly, it's not. Starvation diets never work in the long run and they actually don't even work that well in the short run either.



When you use some insane starvation diet like "The Grapefruit Diet," "The 1200 Calorie Diet," or "The Cabbage Soup Diet" you actually do your body far more harm than good. You will not lose weight nearly as fast you might think you would and even worse, the weight that you do lose will mostly be water and muscle. When you go off the diet (which you will eventually, of course) you will gain back all of the weight you lost except as fat instead of muscle!

Why is that? Because when you go on an extremely low calorie starvation diet your body's metabolism actually slows down so much that your body goes into "survival mode" and holds onto your body's fat as long as it possibly can. Instead your body will actually start to burn your precious muscle for energy. This is the worst thing that can happen for your long term fitness. Each pound of muscle on your body burns 50 calories a day at rest compared to just 2 calories a day for a pound of fat. That's why very muscular people can eat so much food without getting fat.

It's totally essential for real long lasting weight loss and also for short term fast weight loss that you keep your metabolism up and running as fast as possible. If you want to speed up your weight loss you should try adding exercise (in particular strength training) to your dieting regimen instead of trying to starve the fat off. Exercise can actually speed up your metabolism along with burning calories.

While it's understandable to think that if you just starve yourself that's the fastest way to lose weight, it's not really true. Worst of all it will make it all the more harder for you to lose weight in the future!

It's also an awful thing to do nutritionally. When you starve yourself you make it harder for your body to get the vitamins and nutrients that it needs to work at it's very best.

Instead of a starvation diet, choose a sensible diet that focuses on the good foods you should be eating instead of just eating very little. If you eat the right foods you will not be so tempted to over eat in the first place. It is sweet dessert foods and starchy snack foods that make most people overeat. Avoid them as much as you can. Save them for occasional treats instead of as a daily part of your life.