With so many conflicting ideas on social media and other media it’s getting harder and harder to separate fact from fiction (especially when you see stories like this). Here’s the scoop on 5 weight loss myths that might be wasting your precious time.
1. Save your strength: waiting until after you’ve lost the weight to start strength training is a bad plan. Without consistent strength training only half of the weight you lose will be fat – the rest will be your lean body mass (a.k.a. your metabolism). Strength training while you lose weight will help you maintain or increase your metabolism, and this will make your weight loss easier to maintain.
2. Eating 5-6 small meals will help you lose weight: the research is clear, eating more often leads to eating more total calories in a day. There is zero metabolic benefit to spreading your food out. More calories = more body weight. Eating fewer, larger meals is more satisfying, takes less time, and far more effective for weight loss now and in the future.
3. More sweat during exercise = more weight loss: If you do easy exercise in a hot and humid room you will get very sweaty. The heat and humidity make the otherwise easy exercise feel hard, but you’re not burning extra calories nor are you getting stronger. You actually burn fewer calories in a hot and humid room because you can’t work very hard in those conditions.
4. Adding healthy food helps you lose weight: example – most could benefit from adding more protein to their diet, and eggs are a great source of protein. However, if you simply add eggs to your normal breakfast blueberry muffin you’ve added many extra calories to your breakfast. A better strategy is to swap the muffin for a few eggs and some blue berries. This gives you more protein, more fiber and fewer calories in a way that won’t make you hungry.
5. Eating too little causes weight gain/prevents weight loss: eating fewer calories than you consume causes weight loss. The less you eat the faster you lose weight. Telling someone they’re not losing weight because they’re eating too little is like telling someone in poverty they’re broke because they don’t spend enough. The unethical pray on the poor with exactly this idea as they sell “prosperity secrets,” the same as unethical people pray on this frustrated with their weight selling “metabolism secrets.”
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