Three Diets that Slow Down Your Metabolism

When you're planning out your diet it's fundamental to understand that your body needs a specific amount of calories to help you feel energized and speed up your metabolism.

Most likely, a large part of the world’s population has searched online for strict diets in order to lose weight quickly.

These “magical solutions” or “mi racle diets”  are very dangerous, because they don’t offer the balanced nutrition that our body needs. Keep reading to learn more about the diets that affect your metabolism and over time, can even harm your health.

Why some diets can affect your metabolism

There are many reasons why you should not follow a diet that promises you’ll lose weight fast. Particularly if you don’t understand what a healthy diet really involves. Let’s break down the famous fad diets, so that you know why to avoid them.

When a diet has less than between 1200 to 1400 daily calories, it doesn’t provide your body with the energy it needs. Consequently, your metabolism will slow down and you’ll experience tiredness, dizziness, headaches, poor concentration, etc.

Furthermore, a slow metabolism will make it harder for you to lose weight. In order to shed pounds, you need your body to burn fat. Hence, if you feel tired, you won’t feel like exercising; physical activity is fundamental in maintaining a healthy weight.

Many of these ‘magical diets’ tend to be restrictive, meaning that you’ll only eat a small variety of foods, that  are very low in calories .

This results in unbalanced nutrition; you should be getting all of the essential nutrients, vitamins and minerals from what you eat. Plus, eating the same foods over and over again, will tire you and make it more difficult to stick to the diet.

Three diets that slow down your metabolism

Dukan Diet

This is a famous protein-based diet; it became popular in recent years. This diet plan has four phases (or stages) and the duration of each, depends on how many pounds you want to lose.

During the first stage, only animal protein is allowed, such as: red meats, chicken, fish, lean cheeses and eggs. This stage should last no more than ten days. During the second stage, you must alternate the days in which you eat protein, and those in which you eat veggetables, and keep going until you reach your goal weight.

The third phase is about consolidating your weight and here, you can gradually start eating carbohydrates again. One or two weeks later, you may go back to eating normally, which is the forth and last phase.

And what are the risks? The British Dietetic Association states that the Dukan diet is dangerous for those who have kidney or liver problems. The high amounts of protein may intoxicate your body and slow down your metabolism.

Atkins Diet

Atkins diet is basically a stricter version of the Dukan diet. Its menu is mainly based on animal protein and fats, such as: olive oil, coconut oil, nuts and butter. The alleged success of this diet is due to the lack of carbohydrates. 

Specialists point out that a high fat intake poses a risk to our health. People with coronary heart disease and high cholesterol must avoid Atkins diet.

Furthermore, the lack of vegetables and fruits causes a decrease in vitamins and minerals.

Starvation diets

Controlled fasting is a common practice in many ancient cultures, where it’s done in a balanced and conscious way. However, some diets propose long periods of fasting to ‘detox‘ the body, which disregard the facts of basic science. 

To clarify, detoxing might actually be beneficial for your health. But diets that insist you spend days of eating nothing but green juices, detox smoothies,  broth, soups or even just water, do not work. 

The pounds you lose on diets like these are very easy to gain back, once you start eating normally again.

Plus, prolonged fasting can cause burns and inflammation in your stomach. In some cases, it can lead to ulcers in the digestive tract.

For all of these reasons, following starvation diets means that you will inevitably slow down your metabolism.