With Memorial Day just around the corner, we’re all starting to think a little more about our weight and what we will look like in a bathing suit this summer. No wonder this time of the year is the prime time to start a new diet or weight loss program. And of course we want to drop those pounds as quickly as possible, but that may not always be in our best interest. I came across an interesting blog post here about quick and healthy weight loss. It talks about various ways you may be risking you health and may even cause damage to your heart by losing weight to quickly and restricting your calories too much.

One of the problems of those crash diets that so many of us tend to go on is that it forces our bodies to go into starvation survival mode. Basically if we don’t eat enough, our bodies turn on an old survival mechanism back from the days when food wasn’t always as plentiful as it is today. Our metabolisms slow down and the body tries to store every gram of food it does get as fat. Unfortunately it stays in that “survival mode” for a while after we’ve given up on the crash diet (after all, who can stick to eating just cabbage soup or drinking a bright orange drink all day for long). That’s why we often gain even more weight after a diet… this is also referred to as the “yo yo effect”

So, how should you lose weight? By making changes to your lifestyle that you can stick with. Drink plenty of water, eat 3 to 5 balanced meals a day including plenty of lean protein, whole grains and fresh fruits and vegetables. A great way to get into this new healthy eating lifestyle is to use the Healthy Meal Plan that’s part of the Menu Planning Central Menu Pack.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 12:01 pm and is filed under Your Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.