Dieting Risks
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18 AnswersA
Dr. Mehmet Oz, MD , Cardiology (Cardiovascular Disease), answeredSee All 18 AnswersFad diets come and go, and some can be downright unhealthy. Learn what you should eat to lose weight as Dr. Oz and dietitian Samantha Heller discuss fad diets in this video.
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Discovery Health answeredSee All 2 AnswersWhen we lose a moderate amount of weight, our skin shrinks to fit our body's new size. The collagen in our skin gives it elasticity.
Losing a massive amount of weight, however, can leave you with extra skin because it has lost its elasticity.
In some cases, when people lose massive amounts of weight, they have extra skin left over from their heavier days. Their skin loses its elasticity and hangs limply from their body.
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Keri Gans , Nutrition & Dietetics, answeredSee All 5 AnswersIt may sound counterintuitive but many people have difficulty losing weight because they skip meals throughout the day. If you skip meals, you will be hungrier the next time you eat, and you will overeat. Contrary to popular belief, overeating often stems from not eating enough of the right foods at the right time. Study after study shows that you will consume more calories at the end of the day when you skip meals and snacks. -
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Tim Ferriss , Fitness, answeredIf you get headaches or have other symptoms of low blood sugar, 90% of the time it will be because you are not eating enough. First-time slow-carbers are accustomed to eating small portions of calorically dense carbohydrates (think bagels or pasta), and they duplicate the portion sizes with the calorically lighter slow-carb foods, resulting in insufficient calories. Expect that you can eat two to three times as much volume, and assume that you should.
Likewise, if you have trouble sleeping due to hunger, you're not eating enough. In these cases, consume a bit of protein prior to bed, which can be as simple as 1-2 tablespoons of almond butter (ideal) or peanut butter with no additives (the only ingredients should be peanuts and perhaps salt). Note to the ladies, for whom peanut butter seems to be like crack: the tablespoon scoop should be no more than a small mound, not half the jar balanced on a spoon. -
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Discovery Health answered
Calorie-restricted diets generate a lot of buzz about their possible benefits, from lower blood pressure and improved heart health to longevity - but they aren't for everyone. Cutting up to 30 percent of your daily calorie intake also can cause you to look gaunt or emaciated and experience dizziness, memory loss, loss of muscle mass, a faulty menstrual cycle and a lowered libido. Eliminating more calories - up to 60 percent of daily intake - causes signs of starvation in lab mice. Even without the side effects, some people find these diets too much of a hassle. Finding foods that pack the nutrients without the caloric punch while keeping a balance of proteins, carbohydrates and fats is time-consuming, and can be expensive.
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Reston Hospital Center answeredSee All 3 AnswersSeveral popular diets emphasize eating low amounts of carbohydrates in order to lose weight. Individuals who follow these diets typically eat about half of the recommended servings of carbohydrates and instead consume proteins and fats.
While low carbohydrate diets can produce weight loss, studies show they usually result in regaining the weight lost since it was lost so quickly and in an unconventional manner. To avoid gaining back the weight, you should lose about one to two pounds a week on average simply by limiting calorie intake.
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Dr. David L. Katz, MD, MPH , Preventive Medicine, answered“K-E” stands for ketogenic enteral nutrition. A better, more descriptive term for the new diet is the nasogastric tube diet. The K-E diet involves inserting a feeding tube into the nose, down the esophagus, through the stomach, and into the duodenum, and then infusing a high-protein feeding solution continuously.
This is done in the hospital routinely for people who can’t eat. But that’s not what the K-E diet is about. It’s about brides-to-be who want to lose 10 pounds or so in a hurry to look good in a wedding dress.
This diet is little short of lunacy on the part of any such bride-to-be; colossally misplaced priorities on the part of any groom-to-be watching it happen; and as profound an abrogation of professional ethics on the part of doctors peddling it (for $1,500) as I have ever seen.
Everything about this is appalling. Not so much because of the risk of metabolic complications from a ketogenic diet over a period of just 10 days. These are real, and include stresses on the liver, kidneys, and skeleton -- but for people healthy at the start, such concerns are both minor and remote. Bone loss will occur, but will be inconsequential if limited to a 10-day span. Constipation is the one complication that will occur almost without fail. A ketogenic diet is used in medical practice to treat intractable seizures -- but that's a case where the inconvenience and adverse effects of the diet are the lesser of two evils, because the alternative is uncontrollable epilepsy.
What makes the K-E diet truly appalling is that it transforms a medical therapy into the indulgence of a short-term, short-sighted, vanity-driven whim.
If the K-E diet survives a while -- and I sure hope it doesn’t -- I bet it will come to be defined as an eating disorder in its own right. I fully appreciate the frustration many people feel when trying to lose weight, but if bulimia is not the right answer for that problem, neither is this!
A nasogastric tube is an unpleasant, undesirable medical procedure we impose on sick patients who can't eat. It carries with it a risk of aspiration pneumonia, which can be fatal.
In terms of quick weight loss, this dangerous nonsense is a guarantee of quick rebound with interest, since it involves no useful behavior change whatsoever. As for the doctors involved in peddling this travesty, I condemn their actions. The job of physicians is not to come up with any way to satisfy a patient's whim no matter how fundamentally at odds with health.