A liquid diet for weight loss consists in substituting all solid food with smoothies, soups, juice, frozen bars or any combination of all these products. If you decide to follow a liquid diet, then you should know that you will obtain immediate results. You will lose weight at a fast pace. This happens because you cut out calories when you decide to give up consuming whole foods. Generally, weight loss occurs when consuming fewer calories than you burn on a daily basis.
The liquid diet for weight loss might harm your state of health
Specialists indicate that the average person needs approximately 2,000 calories to preserve body weight. This means that a liquid diet provides somewhere between 600 to 1,000 calories every day. Therefore, it creates a large deficit in your body and you will inevitably lose weight. Unfortunately, this usually turns into starvation, being extremely dangerous for your state of health.
A significant variation of very-low-calorie diets can help you implement a lot of smoothies, clinically prepared nutritional drinks. Moreover, you can also use concoctions of lemon juice and cayenne pepper while substituting whole foods. Experts tend to use this type of diet to help overweight people lose weight very fast. Nevertheless, many Hollywood stars chose liquid diets over other nutrition habits.
People follow some varieties of liquid diets, hoping to obtain incredible weight loss in a short period of time. However, people should know that all this comes with a risk. Starvation may cause a lot of health issues. It is recommended that before starting such a diet, you need to get informed about its benefits and risks.
A juice fast provides an increased amount of carbohydrates
Before starting this diet, you should ask you physician’s opinion because you might need medical care and a medical practitioner will know exactly what you need based on your medical history. This type of dietary habit should not be confused with an all-liquid diet which is usually prescribed before and sometimes after a medical procedure. All-liquid diets were designed by medical professionals to be gentler on patients’ gut, not to be low in calories.
By consuming only juices or smoothies, you are actually starving your body which needs 2,000 calories when you are only providing around 1,000 calories per day. Denying your body the amount of necessary whole foods may severely damage your digestive system and your metabolism. We all need whole foods to survive. A juice fast or a liquid diet for weight loss risks overcharging your body with sugar and carbohydrates while struggling to burn the muscle mass to obtain energy.
Losing weight in such a short period of time may cause nutritional deficiencies, nausea, quick muscle loss and loss of energy. Sometimes even medically supervised liquid diets can have severe effects. People who decide to follow such a diet may experience kidney stones, gallstones, severe fatigue, dehydration, headaches, bad breath, nutrient deficiencies, muscle loss, diminished immunity, abdominal discomfort and liver inflammation.
A liquid diet may have disadvantages that could damage your health
A liquid diet provides a generous amount of phytonutrients, vitamins, and carbohydrates, but it lacks essential fat acids and proteins, which fuel a healthy brain and support muscles.
To sum up, liquid diets do not teach people how to support a weight loss in the long term. Eventually, they will go back to whole foods, and they might even regain all the lost weight. If some people give up healthy dietary habits, they may even gain more weight when they return to their old way of eating.