Diets For Quick Weight Loss – The 500 Calorie Diet Is Very Popular

Diets for quick weight loss can be very risky. But, do you like to take risks with your health? If so, the 500 calorie diet may be right for you. Even when considering diets for quick weight loss, the 500 calorie diet is an extreme form of dieting. However, it is very popular.

The reason for the popularity is that it will help you lose weight very quickly. Among people who are looking for quick weight loss, low calorie diets are quite common. But even among low calorie diets, 500 calories is at the low end of the scale.

For a diet to be considered a low calorie diet, 1200 calories per day is the cutoff point. Anything below that is thought of as a low-calorie diet. The whole idea of a low-calorie diet, of course, is to lose weight quickly. However it can be very dangerous. Any low-calorie diet should be thoroughly planned with a professional dietitian or nutritionist.

To lose weight, it’s clear that you have to burn more calories than you eat. You can eat less, or burn more. Either way works. Just to keep functioning, your body needs a certain number of calories every day. The idea is, that if you eat fewer calories than needed, the excess will come from your stored fat.

But, keep in mind that your body is very smart. It won’t simply keep burning away calories. Your body will think you are starving, and it will cut way back on the number of calories it uses to survive. This affects your metabolic rate, which means that your body will start eating away at your muscle mass.

Over a long-term, this is disastrous. Your muscles burn far more calories than your fat, so if you lose them, it not only has a bad effect on your body but it also affects your ability to keep weight off in the future. The 500 calorie diet, as one of the diets for quick weight loss – works… but only for a short term.

Your gender, activity level, height, body type, genetics, and overall health will determine how quickly and how badly your body is affected by a 500 calorie per day diet. For short while, 500 calories per day may be enough for some of us.

For most of us though, particularly if we are overweight, eating only 500 calories per day is literally starving yourself. Your body is most likely used to taking in 2000-5000 calories per day – or more – and suddenly dropping to 500 calories will move your body into starvation mode. To conserve energy, your metabolism slows way down.

You don’t want to do this for very long because your body will learn to live on 500 calories per day, right up until you run out of calories to burn, then you will slip into a coma and die.

The good news is, we usually stop our dieting before that happens. The bad news is, now that you’ve lost so much muscle mass and your metabolism is so slow, as soon as you go back to your old eating habits (and we all do) you will have a sudden spike in weight gain. In fact you’ll gain more weight than you would have if you had never gone on a diet to start with. Diets for quick weight loss may seem to be very effective, but they just don’t work over the long haul.

The best way to determine a safe, workable daily calorie level is by using a BMR/AMR calculator. This will tell you how many calories you need in order to maintain good health and support your lifestyle. Now, you know how many calories you need and if you subtract up to 500 calories per day you will have one of the ideal diets for quick weight loss.

Safety has to be the first consideration in starting any diet. You should always consult a physician. Clearly the mass and body size of men is dramatically different than that of women. The average woman may burn 1200 to 1300 calories per day where the average man will burn 1500 to 1600 calories per day. Primarily due to the differences in muscle mass.

Finally, when it comes to diets for quick weight loss…the 500 calorie per day diet is a popular one. But, keep in mind that it can be very dangerous. Clearly, it will help you to lose weight. But the weight loss is only temporary. It’s going to come right back as soon as you stop the diet. Unless you are under the constant supervision and monitoring of a doctor, you should never cut back your calories that dramatically.

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