extreme dieting question
 

I'm not planning on doing this myself (hah, like i could kick my eating habits cold turkey anyways), but was reading a thread where someone brought this up, and was wondering..

Say if you did an "extreme" diet (say 800, or something) and then very, very gradually pulled yourself up to something reasonable, like, 1200-1300, would you be able to keep the weight off, or would you balloon back up?

What if you kicked up your cardio and other work-out regimes?

Like I said, I don't plan on doing this, I'm just wondering if someone who was really committed could pull something like this off.

Thanks guys.

Here's a thread where we discussed this last week:

http://www.3fatchicks.com/forum/showthread.php?t=137830

It is just my opinion, but a lot of extreme diets don't teach the kind of healthy habits needed to sustain weight loss. I learned how to find healthy recipes, grocery shop, make healthier versions of foods I loved, I learned how to balance my life to make time to pack lunches/snacks for the week, make healthy choices in restaurants, I learned how to find healthier options than fast food even when I was in a hurry, how to handle food temptations at work, how to tweak my plan if it wasn't working - literally a thousand things I needed to learn to live as a thin person.

It has never worked for me in the long term, though I've done it many, many times in my 36 years of dieting (put on my first diet at 5, and have had only three or four years in which a diet of some sort wasn't attempted). It was obvious early on that each successive attempt at a very low calorie diet was
less successful than the attempt before.

My personal belief is that repeated extreme diets impair metabolism, particularly carbohydrate metabolism over time. Whether a single attempt does so, I have no idea. I also think that it is the rare person who can successfully transition from a very low calorie diet to a healthy, balanced one. I believe extreme thoughts and behaviors do not not transition well to well-balanced thinking, but rather encourages an even MORE extreme path.

In a lot of ways, I think it's like "cramming" for exams in high school and college. A person who procrastinates and crams instead of spreading out study time sensibly often says "next time I won't wait until the last minute", but each "cramming" incident increases the chances that cramming will occur in the future, especially if any success is seen from the cramming (at least a passing grade).

Just my perspective.