It’s nearly bikini season. Time to get rid of the excess weight you’ve been carrying in your abdomen and buttocks. The solution? A diet where you lose 1-2 pounds per week? No, the crash diet! Lose 5, 8 or more pounds right away. Look great in that tiny bikini. Crash diets do work! Providing, of course, that you have the will power to starve yourself and you don’t expect the results to last very long. So, what’s the harm? You’ve lost 6 pounds of fat in one week and you’re on the way to fitting into that bikini. Well, you haven’t really lost that much fat. You’ve mostly lost water. As you reduced your carbohydrate intake, you reduced your body’s supply of glycogen and eliminated some of its water. The fat is still there. Resume eating normally, and you’ll regain the water weight.

Nutritionists recommend a minimum daily intake of 1200 calories. When you drastically reduce this number or stop eating, you deprive your body of vitamins, carbohydrates, proteins and nutrients that it needs to sustain itself. While low-fat diets may be ok, a fat free diet is not. Your body requires 30% of your daily calories to be from fats. If it doesn’t get the nutrition it needs, your body reacts by becoming more efficient at storing fat. Your metabolism slows down to conserve what little nutrition it’s getting. When you start eating again, the body continues to conserve energy for quite some time. As you eat more food, you will gain weight at a faster rate.

Drastically reducing or stopping eating puts you at risk. Crash diets are extremely dangerous for your heart, kidneys, liver, and brain because you lose lean tissue around them. If you don’t eat enough, your body will actually burn the muscle tissue of the organs themselves to provide your brain with sufficient energy to function. This puts you at risk for liver and kidney failure, heart attack and stroke and even death. Crash diets cause extreme food cravings, causing you to gain weight. You may become dizzy or uncoordinated. You will probably sleep more as your body conserves energy. You may develop iron deficiency anemia, vitamin B12 or potassium and sodium deficiency. The latter two play an important role in regulating the way that your heart beats. If their levels become too low, you could have a heart attack.

Long-term crash dieters frequently suffer from osteoporosis. Crash diets severely limit calcium intake. As a result, calcium leaches out of the bones in your body, making them brittle. As a result, many crash dieters may later in life suffer broken hips, wrists and other bones. You may lose your hair, have brittle nails or your flesh may become grey. Your hair loss could continue as long as six months after you resume eating normally again.

What about the psychology involved in crash diets? Let’s stick with bikini season. It is our motivation to lose weight quickly. You buy the tiny bikini, tell yourself that you’ll fit into it by the beginning of summer, hang it up where you can see it as a reminder of what you’re working towards, and reduce or stop eating. Everything should work out as planned, but it usually doesn’t. Why?

We are creatures of habit. We like our routines, especially when it comes to food. Trying to suddenly adopt a new, stricter diet is hard because it is not part of our routine. It may be too different for us to adapt to it. If we can see instant results, then we’ll have more impetus to stick to the diet. If we don’t see the results we expected, most of us would simply put the bikini in the bottom of the drawer and go back to our normal routines. Like it or not, we can’t change our eating habits overnight. Crash diets, moreover, may make you feel irritable, depressed or lead to eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia.

Dr. Catti Moss, spokeswoman for the Royal College of General Practitioners, summed up the potential effects of crash dieting. She called it "a dangerous approach” and noted that people who crash diet are “more susceptible to many health problems, and they seem to have a reduced life expectancy because of this.” The key to weight loss is proper nutrition and exercise. You won’t get into that tiny bikini sooner, but when you do you’ll be a lot healthier.