Wedding Crash Diet Ends in Death

By Kelly Turner on September 17th, 2009

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Samantha Clowe, desperate not to be a “fat bride” and to prove to her coworkers she could do it, started The LighterLife diet to lose weight before her wedding.

After 11 weeks on the diet, Clowe, having lost 42 pounds, was found dead of heart failure by her fiance in their home.

The LighterLife diet had Samanatha on 530 calories a day, less than 1/3 the amount recommended for most women to safely lose weight. An investigation was inconclusive about whether the controversial LighterLife diet played a part in her death. This, however, is the second reported case in three years of a woman who has died from similar heart failure after losing a significant amount of weight on the LighterLife plan.

Home Office pathologist Dr Alfredo Walker said a post-mortem examination failed to establish a cause of death, “but it may be related to her low calorie diet and weight loss.”

The diet’s fault? Perhaps, but I’m not convinced. Many women will do whatever it takes to lose weight, and those extremes are often dangerous, whether its a marketed diet, or just cutting back on meals and calories in general. It’s not good for your health, but women do it anyway because being thin is more important that being healthy. We know better, we are smarter than that, yet it doesn’t change anything because it doesn’t change the fact that thin equals beautiful and respect at work.

Usually those that die from restricting their calories are anorexic or bulimic, and painfully thin and emaciated, and so, mistakenly, people feel if there is fat on your body, you can survive off of it. But starving is starving. Those who are still over weight are not immune to the serious health effects of calorie restriction. Truth is, crash diets and detox diets are dangerous and deadly no matter what your weight is.