How Stimulant Abuse Relates to Crash Dieting and Eating Disorders

According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, stimulants speed up your metabolism. When you speed up your metabolism, you lose weight. This is why many diet pill manufacturers use stimulants in their pills. Using a diet pill that causes you to lose weight rapidly is one of the most common forms of crash dieting and crash dieting often causes or is a symptom of an eating disorder.

Stimulants as Diet Drugs

The majority of the diet drugs on the market contain some form of stimulant. Although some of them contain substances as simple as caffeine, many of them contain dangerous toxins including amphetamines. Although all stimulants speed up your metabolism and suppress your appetite, they also are addictive and most often dangerous.

What is Crash Dieting?

Crash dieting involves trying to lose weight using:

• stimulants
• other drugs
• partial, complete, or liquid fasting
• combining these methods

Most crash diets only work if you want to lose a small amount of weight in a specific amount of time. It is an unhealthy way to lose large amounts of weight. The problem with crash diets is that they give a fast reward.

How do Eating Disorders and Crash Dieting Relate to Each Other?

Crash dieting using stimulants is a way to further the eating disorder. People with these disorders chronically over or under eat. They use the crash diet to try to correct their body weight. A few of these disorders are:

• Anorexia – If you have this disorder you think that you are overweight and restrict your calorie intake to a dangerous level. People with anorexia often engage in crash diets in order to lose weight quickly. Unfortunately, a crash diet is only meant to last a few weeks, anorexics sometimes continually use crash diets which ultimately causes organ failure.
• Bulimia – If you have this disorder you are on a continuous cycle of binging and purging. Crash dieting is often used after a binge to lose weight. This rarely works because most often the rapid weight loss is often only temporary and binge eating habits put the weight back on.
• Binge eating disorder – If you have this disorder, you cannot control how much or how often you eat. Unlike bulimia, you do not purge the food. You do however crash diet after a binge. The binge makes you feel guilty and the guilt makes you want to counteract the eating. This leads to the crash dieting.
• Orthorexia – this disorder is characterized by eating an extremely restrictive diet. This is almost the definition of crash dieting. Instead of eating a restricted diet just while you are dieting, you continue to be obsessive about the foods that you eat and often use stimulants to lose weight when you deviate from your diet.

5 Medical Reasons you Might be Abusing Stimulants

Where to Find Help

Eating a healthy diet is a good idea, overly restricting your diet and crash dieting constantly is a bad one and indicative of an eating disorder. Most people who have an eating disorder begin to crash diet using stimulants to lose the weight they gain or that they feel that they gain. Both the eating disorder and the stimulant addiction need treatment. You can find treatment simply by calling 800-605-6597 Who Answers?.