My top 10 dieting myths...

My Top 10 Weight Loss Myths:-

1. Eating late will make you fat, as you will be inactive in the night and the food will not be burnt up and will turn straight to fat.
No it won’t. A calorie is a calorie what ever time you eat it. The digestive system takes about 4 hrs to turn food into fat, depending of what food is eaten of course. But, the body will still be using energy all the time, and the digestive process uses energy too. The main factor is how many total calories you’ve eaten throughout the whole day. If on average you are eating less energy in calories than the body burns up in a day, you’ll lose weight, whenever you eat. This fallacy comes from the general belief that when people eat late at night it is an extra meal or is snacking, since people pre-disposed to do that are likely to be overweight the theory is they are fat because they’ve eaten late…

2. Through diet and exercise you can target areas of fat loss, like the hips and thighs.
How many times do you hear this one?
Sadly it’s wrong. Fat is evenly distributed around the body. It is also burnt off at the same rate from around the body, no one area quicker than another- even if you “target” that area with exercise. Some people think they have a fat arse and thin body, they don’t they probably have a genetically big arse. If they lose fat they’ll still have a proportionally big arse as the rest of the body would have shrunk at the same time. The only way around that is cosmetic surgery or using clothing to balance things out.

3. You are what you eat, eating Fat will make you fat!
Wrong and the kind of gross simplification some diet food companies love to push. Well, what you eat is important but it’s not necessarily what you eat that makes you fat, its how much of it. 500 calories from fat rich foods or vegetables or rice is still 500 calories. Fat is high in calories so eating less will help reduce overall calories consumed and will aid weight loss, but only if these calories are not replaced by something else. Many low fat foods are high in sugars so are really no better for you in terms of weight loss unless you are controlling overall calorie intake. The body converts excess calories to fat, just because the food was fat already doesn’t make it more likely to be turned into fat.

4. Skipping meals will make you put on weight.
How can not eating make you put on weight? This should be followed by “but only if you begin to eat more at other times”. This misconception has come about based on the idea that people that skip meals will still be hungry and are more likely to snack, and when they do this will often be snack foods which tend to be higher in calories. So the net result is that they end up eating more than they would have done. Put it this way though, instead of having a cheese sandwich which is worth 425 cals for lunch at 1.00pm you have a cup of coffee which is 25 cals and you have an apple worth 100 cals as a snack at 3pm as you’re hungry. Assuming for the rest of the day you eat what you would have done your total calories taken in have reduced by 300 cals. In this scenario you’ll lose weight not put it on. Skipping meals is not a good idea because it encourages snacking, if you don’t snack all it will do is make you feel more hungry.

5. Eating a big breakfast will kick start your metabolism and help you lose weight in the long run.
Eating more than normal or than you need, will mean you put on weight unless you do additional exercise to burn of the extra calories. Having a fried breakfast when otherwise you’d have eaten nothing, then having your normal diet for the rest of the day will make you into a porker in no time! Your metabolic rate does not increase when you eat something; well it can as a result of digesting the food but this is certainly not enough to cover what extra calories are coming in. Doing exercise or gaining weight either through muscle or fat increases the metabolic rate. The idea is that a big breakfast fills you up and makes it unlikely you’ll snack later on, since the breakfast will contain less calories than the snacks, you’ll end up losing weight. Again though it all depends on what else you do and what the breakfast is… simply eating breakfast will not cause weight loss.

6. “Carbohydrate rich foods like potatoes, rice, pasta, and bread are not fattening unless you put fat (in the form of sauces or butter) on top of them.“
What a load of complete and utter crap! And to make things worse this comes quote comes word for word from a UKTV website where they are trying to de-bunk dieting myths! The link to the article is here:-http://uktv.co.uk/style/item/aid/586544/multipageid/586545
So that means I can eat tons of spuds then does it, and I am guaranteed not to put any weight on? The idiot that wrote the article fails to note that foods high in carbohydrate, like potatoes, contain calories. Unused calories are converted to body fat so over-eating them and any other food for that matter will still make you fat. Bread is notorious for having hidden ingredients and many loaves on sale have relatively high fat contents in any case, as well as a host of chemicals. A classic example of poor advice and poor science!

7. If you lose more than 2 pounds a week it will not be fat but will be lean muscle tissue.
This one was also in the UKTV article above, which has also been copied word for word to other sites offering advice.
This is not true. The amount of weight lost on a diet will be related to what calories you eat versus your BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) plus any other calories you burn. If you are an overweight adult you can easily lose 2+ pounds by just reducing your calorie intake from whatever to 1,500 calories a day without doing any form of additional exercise, just the calorie difference will do this. If you then do extra exercise on top you will burn extra calories and lose more weight. Doctors, dieticians and nutritionists tend to advise on 2 pounds of weight loss per week as being an optimum level as this can be achieved without crash dieting, which they are obviously not in favour of. Dieting can cause muscle as well as fat loss, but at what level this kicks in depends on the person’s physiology. Generally starving one’s self would be guaranteed to do it but you’d be losing a hell of a lot more than 3 pounds a week if you did that. A good example of taking good science and extracting the wrong answer!

8. Just sticking to a diet is not enough, you need to exercise too.
Another one from the terrible UKTV article and this has been copied to other sites word for word. Some people are so lazy; the original UKTV article has lifted a lot of info from yet another site by the way.
Not true of course, otherwise morbidly obese people who are bed ridden and therefore cannot do any extra exercise would never be able to lose weight by dieting, which of course they can and do. Again, its all about your calorie intake versus your BMR, if you eat less than you need you’ll lose weight without any additional exercise. Of course exercise brings other health benefits, as well as burning calories and assisting weight loss and since overweight people are less likely to do exercise losing weight can sometimes help them to begin. But, exercise being NEEDED for weight loss? Nope, not true. Of course I mean exercise in the sense it is a special effort like jogging or going to the gym. Any activity can be regarded as exercise though, even running the vacuum cleaner round burns calories…

9. In low carbohydrate – high protein diets the weight loss is mostly water.
Guess where this one came from? Yep it’s UKTV again. I’m going to send them an angry email, how can one article be so wrong?
Low carb diets get a bad press; you’re either for them or against them. Most dieticians think they are bad for your health due to often high levels of saturated fats (particularly the Atkins version) and there are also concerns over the lack of vitamin C, calcium and fibre. All true probably, but the diet certainly does result in fat loss. Millions of people have lost a serious amount of weight on low carb diets and this is not all water otherwise they’d be dead from dehydration. Whether or not the weight stays off for good after doing a low carb diet is another argument entirely, but since the myth is about water loss I’m sticking with criticism of that. The same article this statement came from also describes Ketones as compounds produced when the body begins to use up protein for energy. Which is just totally wrong, Ketones are a by product of the burning of stored body fat. They appear when the stored glucose in the Liver is depleted and no additional energy is coming in to the body. In healthy people who are not pregnant this is normally as a result of the body not receiving enough energy… from food or after exercise where energy reserves have been used up. Ketones are present in people on low carb diets because they are consuming less energy than their body needs, hence the body fat being burned. Why can’t people do “proper” research before publishing articles on the internet as fact!?

10. Some special foods, like grapefruit or apples will burn fat just by eating them.
Sorry, I can just lose weight by eating something? Great, I’ll just eat 50 apples a day and I’ll be down to my ideal weight in weeks! This one is mentioned at:-
http://www.momswhothink.com/diet-and-nutrition/fat-burning-foods.html
I love the name of this site: “moms who think”, well they may think but they don’t read, or at least they don’t do proper research before publishing bunkum as advice. The reality is that all food will generate some metabolic activity when it is digested and this will burn up energy in the body in its self, this is on top of the normal metabolic processes of the body. But, there is no specific food you can eat which will cause more stored body fat to be burned in preference to any other source. The only way to do that, as said before, is to reduce calorie intake, do increased levels or exercise or both.