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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.

Clearly, the reason for this popularity is that you will quickly lose weight. Almost everyone who has a need for diets for quick weight loss, goes to a low-calorie diet. But even among low-calorie diets, the 500 calories per day diet is at the low end of the spectrum.

1200 calories per day is generally used as the cutoff point to determine a low-calorie diet. In other words, anything below 1200 calories is considered to be a low-calorie diet. Obviously, the whole point to a low-calorie diet is to quickly lose weight. But again, this can’t be over stressed, severely limiting your caloric intake is very dangerous. Any low-calorie diet should be thoroughly planned with your nutritionist and/or your family doctor.

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.

The difficulty comes in the fact that our body does not know that we are on a diet. Instead, your body thinks you are starving and it will cut way back on its metabolic rate…in order to help keep you alive. It lowers the number of calories needed for survival and starts eating your muscle mass.

This is disastrous over a long-term. Most of our calories are burned by our muscles, so if we lose them, it’s not only bad for our bodies – but it also affects our ability to keep weight off in the future. As one of the diets for quick weight loss, the 500 calorie diet works… but only for a short while.

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.

Your body will adapt and learn to live on 500 calories per day…until the day that you run out of calories to burn, then you will 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.

Using a BMR/AMR calculator is a very efficient way of determining what your healthy, daily caloric level should be. In other words, it will tell you how many calories are necessary to support your weight, your health and your lifestyle. Once you know how many calories are necessary to maintain the status quo, you can subtract 500 calories per day and you will have constructed one of the ideal diets for quick weight loss success.

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.

So, to wrap it up… in the realm of diets for quick weight loss, the 500 calorie per day diet is very popular. It will work to help you lose weight, but it can be very dangerous – And your weight loss is only temporary at best. You should never cut back that dramatically on your calories without the constant monitoring and supervision of a doctor.

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