Losing weight and losing fat is challenging enough without all the myths and misinformation to complicate the process. The fitness industry has always been a hotbed of myths and fads, as people who want to lose weight and transform their bodies chase quick fixes and misguided approaches. But the consequences of incorrect or uninformed advice can be devastating to your health, motivation and weight loss success.
To help you navigate the information minefield, we demystify some of the most common myths you're likely to hear during your transformation journey.
Myth 1: Successful weight loss requires extreme measures
Women in particular often resort to extreme measures when pressured to be thin. These include some often life-threatening approaches such as starvation diets or excessive exercise. Starvation diets severely restrict calorie intake and often lead to nutrient deficiencies and malnutrition.
This can be very harmful to your body and your health and can cause cognitive and/or emotional problems. If it goes on for a long time, you can even damage vital organs. Excessive exercise can have similar results. While starvation diets restrict caloric intake, excessive exercise does burning energy at a rate well above normal. Both approaches are extreme in nature and unlikely to result in long-term weight loss. In fact, it can sometimes lead to longer-term weight gain, when the body goes into survival mode and tries to regain weight by slowing down the metabolism. This happens if you are in a caloric deficit for too long, possibly with excessive activity. When you start eating normally again, the body will consider this as excess calories and you will gain weight, even though according to common sense you shouldn't.
Myth 2: A calorie is a calorie
While this is true from a pure energy standpoint - all calories provide the same amount of energy, in practice it's a little different. The body in different ways digest and metabolize calories from fats, proteins and carbohydrates. Additionally, these macronutrients have different effects on your hormones, which affect hunger, fat storage and energy production.
Calories obtained from natural foods, in general contain more micronutrients - important vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients that our body needs to function optimally - while calories from overly processed, refined or useful foods are generally "hollow" and with little nutritional value. If you're going to choose between a protein bar that has 300 calories and a medium cup of yogurt with three tablespoons of oatmeal and fresh fruit, you're better off choosing the latter. Larger amount of food, higher content of macro and micro nutrients and more natural. The choice is yours.
Myth 3: Only exercise will get me there
Overall, this theory says that weight loss is a simple equation – you burn more calories than you take in. But this is not entirely true, because exercise can be ineffective in reducing weight for various reasons, especially if you burn 500 calories through exercise, your body uses 1,800, and you eat 3,000.
Regular exercise has many health benefits, and weight training will help you build more muscle, which can boost your metabolism. Weight training can help you lose weight, but without a proper diet, it won't work like that.
Myth 4: Cardio is best for burning fat
A lot of people think that hours of high heart rate cardio is the best way to lose weight, but unfortunately that's not the case. While this method of training certainly helps you shed some fat, it's only really effective if you are dedicated endurance athlete, who trains several hours every week in this zone. You can use to achieve results principles of HIIT (high intensity training) either in weight training or cardio training. Weights build more metabolically active muscles, while sustained intense cardio efforts require energy, much of which will come from fat. In the end, the combination is just the best choice.
Myth 5: Sit-ups give you a flat stomach
The myth of fat loss is that by doing exercises that target or isolate a specific part of the body, you can lose fat from that area. The truth is, yes we metabolize fats through a process that depends on many factors such as genetics, hormones, age, body composition, intensity levels and the type of exercise or activity we do. Natural processes of body fat distribution (driven by hormones) thus store energy in parts of the body and vary between individuals. And doing hundreds of sit-ups every day will not speed up this process. Instead, use your exercise time for intense full-body exercises to burn as many calories as possible each day, or set a goal to walk more than usual.
Myth 6: Weight training will make me very muscular
Many women fear weight training because they don't want to get too muscular, but women don't naturally produce as much testosterone as men, making it impossible to gain huge amounts of muscle mass just by lifting weights. Gaining muscle mass also requires a lot of calories and a lot of protein, so don't avoid the weight room. Building more muscle and strength is key to helping you get the body you've always wanted. Remember the fact that muscle mass is gained slowly and the hard way.
