Safety while dieting is crucial. What good will a lean body do if it is at the cost of your health? Excessive exercise can lead to muscle weakness and injury. A diet high in certain food groups but missing others can lead to vitamin and mineral deficiency. As long as you are taking necessary precautions, you should find that dieting and exercise can lead to good health and a boost in self-confidence.
How do you know if your dieting plan is safe? Does the plan include all groups of foods? If a weight-loss plan excludes a whole group of foods (grains, fruits, vegetables, dairy), you are in real danger of deficiency in certain vitamins and minerals. Also, a lack of variety will make it hard to continue the plan in the long term. Remember that the changes you make to lose weight are the same changes that will maintain your hard-won weight loss. And yes, you will have to continue good eating habits to maintain weight loss.
Secondly, does the plan allow reasonable calorie levels? Most experts agree that women need at least 1,400 to 1,600 each day to maintain a healthy body; men require at least 1,800 to 2,000 calories. And even at those levels, it's almost impossible to obtain all nutrients from the diet. Eating at least 2,000 calories a day is a safe bet for everyone.
Clearly, people with health problems should contact their doctor to find out what types of diet and exercise will be appropriate for them. People with heart disease will often have head pain instead of chest pain. Like chest pains, cardiac headaches begin during exercise and subside when exercise stops. See a doctor for an exercise stress test if the pain of your "exercise headache" is severe, you normally don't get headaches unless you smoke, you're over age 50, or you have any risk factors for heart disease such as high blood pressure or a family history of heart disease.
