Mastering the Whole Food Plant-Based Lifestyle: Practical Tips and Ideas
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Spot Reduction Myth:
Definition: Attempting to burn fat from specific areas through targeted exercises.
When it comes to losing weight, there are a lot of misconceptions and myths out there, not only can believing them derail your diet efforts, it can also mess with your health. This is why, to begin my course, I want to debunk the most common ones. This is to make sure you don’t ever fall for false advice or false gurus again and can shed pounds safely and smartly. Keep in mind that there are many variations of the myths I’m about to debunk, but once you know the most common ones, these variations will be easy to spot.
Myth number one is called the Fetlar Spot Reduction Myth, spot reduction refers to the attempt to remove subcutaneous body fat stores from specific areas of the body by performing exercises that target those areas. For example, a person who has a lot of fat stored in their sights above the hips, so-called love handles may use a sideband or an abdominal side to side twisting exercise in the attempt to burn those fat cells.
Detox Myth:
Definition: Belief that detox diets flush out toxins and aid weight loss.
Reality: Long-term dietary and lifestyle changes are required for overall health improvements.
Dangers: Drastic diet changes can deprive the body of necessary nutrients and calories.
Unfortunately, fetlocks reality is a little different, performing those exercises may strengthen the muscles responsible for those movements, but they have little to no impact on reducing the amount of fat stored there. Fat loss will always happen over the entire body and cannot be localized. Now, of course, genetics and hormones will also have an impact on this. Men tend to have more fat in the upper body, especially in the abdominal region, whereas women tend to store their fat in their hips but thighs and lower abdomen. So next time someone tries to sell you their AB workout to lose belly fat, keep in mind that when the body burns fat stores, it doesn’t use the stores nearest to the muscles being flexed. Instead, fat from the entire body is burned.
Carbs Will Make You Fat Myth:
Claim: Carbs increase insulin levels, leading to fat storage.
Reality: Quality carbs are necessary for energy and can be part of a balanced diet.
Recommendation: Avoid simple high-sugar carbs and focus on quality carbs with fiber.
Training a certain muscle group may be a valuable exercise. Just don’t expect it to reduce fat. Myth number two is the myth that detoxing will help you lose weight, detoxes are short term diets that usually focus on juices or other fruit and vegetable based products while restricting generally less healthy foods and drinks like coffee and soda. This is usually done to flush out any harmful toxins in your system. Now, the idea behind detoxing and cleanses is good. Our bodies are regularly exposed to a wide variety of toxic substances and some of them can accumulate in body fat. However, there’s no evidence that trendy cleanses or detox diets help reduce the damage or rid the body of toxins.
Why, you ask? Because changes to your overall body require long term changes to your diet and exercise regimen and not just a week of drinking some trendy detox lemonade. In fact, drastically changing your diet can deprive your body of adequate calories and nutrition and make things even worse in the long run.
This then applies not only to your health, but also to your weight loss efforts, if you severely restrict your daily calories and thus create a starvation diet, what you will be losing over the first few days is mostly water and glycogen. This weight will return once you start eating normal again. Also, severe calorie restrictions cause you to lose muscle, which is not what you want.
Fat Is Bad for You Myth:
Belief: Consuming dietary fat leads to weight gain.
Truth: Dietary fat is essential for hormone production and overall health.
Advice: Avoid trans fats and stick to healthy fats like omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids.
The goal is to lose fat, not muscle, and you simply can’t do this when restricting your calorie intake too much. Lastly, the longer you starve your body, the worse and worse you will feel your energy levels will crash. You struggle with hunger, cravings and depression and more. So instead of doing regular detoxes, make long term changes to your overall diet and lifestyle. We will talk about what these should look like later in the course. So stay tuned for that. Myth number three is another very common myth that says carbs will make you fat, telling people carbs are bad is one of the most common advices false fitness gurus will give you while at the same time trying to sell you their special diet.
Diet Foods Myth:
Theory: Diet foods make weight loss easy.
Reality: Low-fat or low-carb labels don’t always mean low calories.
Tip: Always check nutrition labels and avoid the misconception that diet foods are inherently better.
Generalising about carbs seems to get more popular by the year. Usually they will tell you that consuming carbs can lead to an increase in insulin, which will lead to more fat storage. So is there any scientific evidence to support this claim?
While there is some evidence that carp can cause insulin insensitivity, this is pretty much only the case for people with diabetes that are at the same time over eating simple high sugar carbs. So, yes, if you don’t exercise and your diet consists mostly of candy bars and chocolate and such carbs will negatively affect your health and weight. However, if you follow a well-balanced diet and exercise regularly, then quality carbs will actually be necessary to fuel your workouts.
This is also why I usually don’t recommend a low carb diet. Unless you’re completely sanitary or your stomach doesn’t digest them well. Most people will be better off sticking to quality carbs, which have a lot of fiber, which leaves you feeling full for longer periods of time.
Cutting carbs from your diet also means restricting your energy source and limiting your potential for muscle growth. Another common dieting myth is that fat is bad for you.
Many people believe that if you eat dietary fat, you gain fat. That’s why for many, many decades, the traditional way to lose weight was to follow a low fat diet. Today, we know, however, that eating fat doesn’t make you gain fat unless it also leads to a long term calorie surplus. In fact, cutting all your fat from your diet can be dangerous, since your body needs to consume fatty acids for hormone production, low fat diets can decrease your testosterone production.
Clean Eating Myth:
Claim: You must eat clean to lose weight.
Truth: Weight loss depends on calories in vs. calories out, regardless of food type.
Optimal Approach: Focus on healthy foods while maintaining a calorie deficit.
So make sure to always get some omega three and omega six fatty acids. Also, many low fat products actually contain more calories than their normal counterparts, which really defeats the purpose of cutting fat from your diet to lose weight. And there’s also the idea that saturated fats cause health problems. Now, there is some truth to this, because based on what we know today, large amounts of saturated fats might be problematic to the heart.
However, there is no evidence that they are the direct cause of heart problems. For now, it makes sense to limit them to a certain amount while sticking to quality saturated fats like coconut oil or high quality grass fed meat. But at the end of the day, the only type of dietary fats you should really avoid are trans fats, which can be found in highly processed and fried foods.
Myth number five is that diet foods will directly to weight loss. The theory is simple. Certain diet foods make losing weight painless and a lot easier. These foods are generally labeled as low fat, low carb and artificially sweetened. Now, obviously, the reality is a little more complicated, low fat and low carb doesn’t always mean low calories. And if you’re trying to lose weight, buying these treats could really undermine your efforts.
Studies have shown that participants ate up to 50 percent more of foods that the researchers had falsely labeled low fat than they did of the same exact foods with real labels. Why? Because most people assume that diet foods contain up to 20 percent fewer calories than their regular counterparts.
And most don’t bother to actually check the nutrition label to see if that’s correct. As a result, many people will eat more because they believe it’s justified. So what’s my advice on this? When you’re tempted to buy a snack that’s labeled light or low fat, check the nutrition label.
Look at how many calories are serving and then compare that number with the calories in the regular version of that product. Oftentimes they’re either the same or even less. Also, never tell yourself that it’s OK to eat more pizza because you chose Diet Coke over regular Coke. I know cutting out certain foods from your diet can be difficult, but if you start small, big changes will happen over time. OK, onto the last month on my list, which states that you have to clean to lose weight. Now, one important disclaimer up front, I do advise you to eat mostly unprocessed quality foods.
Most people get not enough vegetables and fruits and overeat on fast foods and candy. That being said, you can lose weight even if you consume a lot of junk food. I will talk about this more in a later lesson. But what weight loss ultimately comes down to as calories in versus calories out? If all you eat is pizza but you consume calories are less than your body needs to maintain its current weight, you will lose weight, vice versa, if you only eat healthy foods. But they add up to more total calories than your body expense, you will gain weight.
Now, of course, the sweet spot is to focus on healthy foods while also being at a calorie deficit. But it’s more important to understand the mechanism behind weight loss. It’s not so much what you eat, but how much you eat.
