I've not been around much for a while but came here a lot in 2005-6 and found it a great support in losing the weight.

Just been looking around, and a bit surprised at some of the extreme 'diets' people are on, at the moment. I heard on the news last month about a woman on a strict diet who died, recently - drank too much water or something.

So my q.... When you see people knocking out entire food groups, or forcing their bodies to survive on a few hundred calories a day, making themselves so ill they pass out/throw up, does it scare you? How far would you go to lose weight? And are you just 'dying; to get thin or trying to get healthy? At what point does an extreme regime turn into learning to just be healthy and how can you get from one to the other..? This is a genuine question. Can you find the energy to even exercise at all on a few hundred cals a day and how will that make you fit and healthy, longterm?

If you follow an extreme regime - why? And if you're against them - why?

Well from septermber untill mid december I had a strict routine based around my work I would eat a vege stir fry before work at 7:30pm then wouldnt eat my whole 12 hour shift come home have a hot chocolate and some toast then sleep until 6 where i would then bath and repeat. I was working 5 days a week sometimes more and cycling to and from work.
When I was off work I made sure that any calories I took in I would bike as much as possible off , I would pick random destinations and just bike or just go round the town a few times.
This with the fact i was working 12hr shifts in a nursing home led to me losing a considerable amount of weight.
Yes I was concious of my weight loss I measured myself everyday and weighed myself I knew my weight fluctuations inside out and would punish myself when I increased in weight or if I ate to much.

It i only now that certain things in the past month has happened has made me realise my regime was dangoreous and an obsession with becoming thinner overtook me , I rember saying to a freind once I have not eaten in 24hours i feel proud. It was the control over the food situation that i enjoyed but now realise was so dangerous.
Before i moved and took up my job I was doing weightwatchers and also took that to extremes but now quite so.
When u have the mindset that you want to be thinner and that u feel fat even when u are far from it u cant stop ureself u just want to get that kick from getting smaller and smaller i rember asking myself when am I actually going to stop dieting and be hape with the size I am or am I going to kill myself doing so ?

Sorry for the long post and i think the meaning of my post may have been lost however i shall say that , I belive that we as a society push ourselves to hard to be thin yes be healthy but trying to be too thin can be dangorous!

I am agiasnt eextreme dieting! I've tried the low carbs diets and cutting out bread, grains, pastas, rice, etc jsut didnt work fro me it made me dizzy and tired all the time.. diets liek atkins might work fro some people- but ot me long term it's not a healthy lifestyle..

I've been calorie counting eating anywhere from 1400-1700 cals a day eating all my food groups and I feel just great! I don't get cravings, because I can fit them in, and I still get to eat whole wheat and whole grain items. and I'm still losing anywhere from 2-4 lbs a week! I know this is a way I can eat forever because I can still eat anything I want just in more modest healthy versioned portions! I'm a total advocate for calorie counting! a healthy amount of calories! anything below 1200 is way too low! and you should typically be anywhere from 1400- 2000- to me this is healthy!

That's a huge and good question.

I have had the energy, as an anorexic, to work out copiously. Getting up EARLY on a Saturday to do 1 hr on the rowing machine..in the garden shed? Whilst being sufficiently malnourished to have yellow skin? That's the kind of mental energy you get when you are terribly unhealthy, frankly, in the head. No sane person would treat themselves like that.

Extreme regimes don't work. Even if they do "work", its a bad, ED- triggering way. There may be some exceptions but I havn't seen many..any actually.

Exteme dieting does not work long term. Those that do vlcd or diets which cut out entire food groups cannot maintain their loss. They mess up their metabolism and as soon as they go back to eating 'normal' food the weight goes straight back on. I've done the yo-yo thing - more times than I want to admit to. However I'm now convinced that finding a plan that you can stick with for the rest of your life is the only sane way to do lose weight. True, it might take many months or years to get there but what's the rush when you got the rest of your life (which will probably be a longer life having lost weight in a healthy way).

Kitty

*This is a bit of a long rambly post. I realised that after typing it that I wanted to say these things but it kind of veers off topic in the middle. So feel free to skip if you like...

I can honestly say that extreme crash dieting has made me the woman I am today. i.e. more than 200lbs over my healthy weight.
Every time I tried one of these "miracle" diets I not only gained back everything I lost, but I added some. By contrast when I've lost weight in a healthy way, it has by and large stayed off.

Some of these diets have made me sick to my stomach (Lighterlife - the one that lady who died of over consumption of water was doing), some have made me light-headed, some have depressed my immune system so I was constantly getting sick. But in the main the biggest problem they all had was that they screwed up my metabolism and sent the "engine" of my body into shutdown. It's no wonder I regained weight afterwards when you look at the science of some of these things. You are practically guaranteed it!

So I've come to the conclusion that I need to change my lifestyle not really my diet. I'm eating healthy food now and it's portion / calorie controlled but not in a rigid way - at a healthy level to help me lose but so that I'm not hungry and I'm getting a wide variety of foods. I've also started to exercise and I want to build that up.

When I think back to the first diet I was put on, and I say "put on" because I was 11 years old, I think all I learned about diets before was how to gain weight. The dieting advice I had back then was so bad and so designed to mess with my head that it's no wonder I ended up here. The starvation diet was seriously suggested to me as a growing child / teenager. "Just don't eat", "your aunt lost all her weight by eating just one slice of ham and half a tomato a day for 3 months. When she went back to school no-one recognised her!" - what like that's a good thing?, and my personal favourite "you'd be so pretty if you just lost weight". I think I was 12 or 13 when that little gem came my way. I used to eat just to spite these people. Then later I'd cry alone about how I wasn't normal. The truth is I was completely normal. I had skinny arms and legs and just a bit of puppy fat round my face and tummy. If I'd been left alone it would have probably gone on it's own when I went on to grow another 5 inches by 18. But by then I'd been down the extreme dieting / regaining / secret bingeing cycle about 6 times at least and was well over 200 lbs.

I think extreme diets are a blight on modern life. Nothing worth having comes easily. If something looks too good to be true then it is! The problem is that we would all like to be able to eat our cake and still look good in skinny jeans.
The reality is not like that for most of us and it's taken me years to get to the point where I pay more than lip service to accepting that.

There is a book I've found by Susan Powter called "Stop the Insanity". She is pushing her own plan in the book, although it's a healthy one I think, but her analysis of the failures of the diet industry is spot on to my mind.

Stop the Insanity of extreme dieting. If only we could then maybe we wouldn't all be so fat in the first place.

Lol Susan Powter, read that book when I was 13 and it prompted me to cut out all fat and wind up anorexic.

Which was a shame, because as a 20 yr old I might see the sense it in, and not take an OTT view like I did when I was very young.

Agree with everything you said.

This is the news story had in mind:

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-sto...5875-20963727/

The lady on this blog http://obesitytimebomb.blogspot.com/...ghterlife.html makes some interesting points, too.

Strikes me that people on these plans think *When I'm thin I'll magically be able to resist all the things that got me fat* - but their brains aren't laying down the engrams to do that, if they're not eating realistically and healthily...You can't diet down to x weight and then suddenly re-educate yourself. It's behavioural, as well as physical, surely?

Given the prominence of this news story - and not just this plan, I should say there are plenty of others equally strange in terms of calorie intake - why would anyone embark on such a diet, in the wake of the publicity? Do people watch that news story and think *Hey that diet WORKS!*