However, obesity resists treatment and presents a complex and frustrating problem for overweight individuals and the health professionals treating them. Nevertheless, in order to lose weight you must consume fewer dietary calories than your body expends. Despite their overwhelming lack of success, Americans have made dieting to lose weight a popular American pastime. Frequently, dieters attempt a crash regimen that promises to melt off unwanted pounds. Radical diets, however, although sometimes successful in the short run, have serious disadvantages.
Crash diets are difficult to maintain.
And as soon as you go off the diet, you gain your weight back. Crash diets are nutritionally imbalanced and can even be dangerous. Diets that emphasize one category of foods to the exclusion of others can cause serious metabolic imbalances. Extreme diets do not change bad eating habits but instead temporarily substitute one unsound dietary pattern for another. As a result, many dieters find that periods of severe caloric restriction make it harder to keep weight off.