As unpleasant as the idea may seem, it’s easy to be enticed by the potential weight loss benefit of using laxatives. A laxative is anything that increases your bowel activity. Many laxatives that are marketed to dieters also claim to be able to “cleanse” the colon, which will improve health in addition to causing weight loss. If you’re turned off to the idea, then rightly so – it’s not as good as it sounds.
Part of the problem with laxatives is that they make your body process food so quickly that none of the nutrients are absorbed. For some people, this may be the desired effect, as it also means that no calories are consumed. However, this is very unhealthy. It goes without saying that our bodies require nutrition to survive – they also need calories, which are an energy source. Artificially removing these things leaves our bodies starved and unhealthy.
One technique that many have looked into to lose some extra weight is to take laxatives. Many want to use a pill that will help them lose weight since doing so through disciplined methods is relatively tricky. The concept is that if one takes laxatives, they will end up having a larger bowel movements getting rid of food they eat faster before it’s absorbed into the body. The logic behind this sounds pretty solid, but in reality it is not.
When you take laxatives with the hopes of losing weight, you will lose weight, but it will not be a healthy drop in weight. In reality, since you will develop symptoms like diarrhea, you will dehydrate yourself. The weight that you will lose is only water weight. In the long run, use of laxatives can result in permanent and severe damage to the gastrointestinal tract. Simply put, our bodies aren’t meant to work that way.
Laxatives have also been shown sometimes to cause the bones to grow weaker and softer. In the short term, laxative use can also lead to nausea and vomiting, stomach cramps, dehydration, and rectal bleeding. Doing this over a long period is unsafe and extremely unhealthy as you will lose all your electrolytes. So will laxatives help you lose weight? The answer is yes, but it is just not worth the cost to your health.
Despite what might be said, laxatives have never been tested for weight loss and are not a weight loss product by any means. It is not a good strategy for losing weight since you aren’t going to be losing fat. You can develop quite a few symptoms that are negative from long-term laxative use that you want to avoid.
What you should focus on is getting a healthier diet. It does not only have health benefits but is part of the process of losing weight over the long run. It’s also good to have an exercise program. It will burn the extra calories and fat that you want to lose that a laxative can’t.
Yes, laxatives can help you lose weight, but laxatives will not help you lose the amount of weight you were hoping. The minimal amount of weight laxatives help you lose is not worth many problems that it can cause to your body. Using laxatives to lose weight is not an ideal dieting strategy to consider.
Last Updated on July 27, 2021
