5 Popular Weight Loss Myths Debunked in 2020

Are you trying to get a lean body, but it seems like none of your efforts to achieve the ‘body goals’ is bearing any positive results? Do you still follow the ancient hard rules that you’ve been made to believe in when you want to lose weight?

Have you actually stopped carb intake, stuck to drinking just the right amount of water, starved yourself for hours, and taken the ‘best’ diet supplements but still no change? What is it that’s frustrating your progress?

Do you ever wonder why all the famous myths fail to work? Well, that could be frustrating.

What if someone told you that you’ve been told lies all along? Most probably, the only hindrance to your success is that nobody has been so close or sincere enough to tell you the truth about these weight loss myths.

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We’ve also always followed these ‘crazy’ myths so blindly even when science has since proven them to be wrong. You don’t have to worry anymore because we got your back!

In this post, we shatter the most popular weight loss limits in 2020.

Before you read on, however, we’d like to warn you that this post may not be helpful if you’re not prepared to part ways with the ‘traditional’ fail-proof ways of losing weight that flat out won’t work. You’ll, however, find it interesting if you’re ready for a change.

 

1. Engaging in weight loss intense Workout is the Most Reliable Way of losing weight

It’s exciting to see how many people openly talk about this myth all over the media. From internet ads to influencer campaigns and others, almost everybody seems to endorse intense exercises and workouts as the ideal way of losing weight quickly.

It is even strange to see how many people insist that hitting the gym is the first step in the race to slimming down. Without this, we’d never lose weight.

Here’s what you need to know about weight loss exercises and workouts:

Intense exercises and workouts are only good for your health. While it would be a good idea to have it as part of your daily activities, it basically has very little to do with slimming down.

Ideally, it may not be necessary when it comes to losing weight. Here’s why:

The calorie burn proportion that physical exercise has on your body is very small. A healthy human body burns calories through three main processes;

1. The food breakdown thermic process
2. Resting metabolism and
3. Physical activity

From these ways, the food breakdown process burns out 10 percent of the total body calories. Resting metabolism burns up to 70 percent of the human body calories while physical exercises only help burn 20 percent of the total body calories.

 

 

This means that even though physical exercises contribute to the weight loss process; it isn’t the primary contributor here. A good number of the body calories are burnt through the help of basal metabolic or resting metabolic rate, and we have very little control over it.

If you insist on the exercises; therefore, your muscles will ultimately give up, and sadly enough, you’ll stop seeing the desired results.

 

Here’s the logic behind this muscle behavior:

If you have to get any results with calorie burn, you’ll have to increase the rate of repeating an activity over and over then increases the intensity or the load. If for whatever reason you stop increasing these factors and see no change in muscle size, you should know that you’ve hit the Exercise plateau phase.

As you probably know, the term plateau is majorly used in describing things or features that are rather flat. Therefore if you reach this phase, it means that your muscles’ growth rate has flattened out.

The muscles have, therefore, stopped growing, and they no longer provide you with the resting calorie burn. This kind of adaptation is a common phenomenon for both strength training exercises and cardio exercises.

The second reason why exercises may not be a reliable way of losing some pounds is that they’ll make you feel hungrier. If you’ve been to the gym for some time, it is highly probable that you have had some intense craving for food or snacks during the sessions or when you’ve just completed exercises for that day.

While this feeling is pretty normal, it is not healthy and can be dangerous to your weight loss goals in the long run. Snacking too much won’t allow you to achieve your weight loss goals.

Instead, it may only lead to the buildup of even more dangerous fats in the body. If you feel the cravings more consistently during your gym sessions or after completing them, it would be better if you allowed your body some rest.

This is because, when you’re on a regular exercise routine, the blood volume and mitochondria in the muscles will keep on increasing in response to the increased muscle mass. Because of this, your body may start demanding even more sugary foods.

In extreme cases, you’ll even find yourself doubling the size of the meals you eat. Your body system would then get even more restless, thus increase the need for more food. Your appetite would also threaten to go through the roof, and hunger pangs will be a common thing—daily!

The result is that you may ultimately be pushed into making bad food choices. You must be probably wondering whether exercise can help suppress the hunger hormone.

 

 

Well, that’s what ‘they’ tell us, but when looking back to facts, you’ll realize that the hunger suppression phenomenon in lean and obese people is strikingly different. In fact, there are a lot more ways that exercise will possibly make your system demand more food.

These include;

• The duration of exercises. If you can maintain exercises for more extended periods, chances are there you’ll ultimately take longer to feel hungry again. In reality, though, very few people can manage at least a 2-hour interval for daily exercises.

A significant percentage of busy working Americans take just 30 minutes of workout engagement, something that most commonly ends in hunger breaks even before getting back home from the gym.

• The intensity of the workouts. You may not be fully aware, but the intensity of your workouts is also directly proportional to the way your body loses weight. This is because, when you increase your activities’ intensity, most of the blood in your body rushes to the heart, muscles, and brain.

The result due to this is that there will be very little blood supply left for the gut. This explains best why when you just start working out intensely, you’ll feel a drop in your appetite. Right after that, when your body gets back to its normal mechanism with nothing left in the gut, you start starving for extra calories than it is normal for you.

• The diet. It is a common phenomenon with endurance training to heighten hunger levels. The primary disadvantage with this kind of training is that it makes your cravings even more intense, something that can only be helped with carbohydrates and not the healthy recommendable proteins. You also must remember that having a relaxed balance of exercises and weight may not help with your weight loss goals but only make them even more challenging to achieve.

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2. Reduce Your Calorie Intake

Reducing calories is a common recommendation for weight loss enthusiasts. The significant realistic way of achieving this is cutting down on the amount of food that you eat.

Here’s the booby trap; when you cut down on so many calories so you can at least lose some weight during the workouts, you won’t see some good results in the long run. This is because; with the time you’ll find yourself eating even more food but still feel that you’re hungry.

The next thing that would happen is that your resting metabolism will continue to slow down. When you exercise for extended periods, you overexert your body, thus causing its mechanisms to slow down significantly.

When you finally begin to lose weight due to the exercises, your resting metabolic rate will slow down, leading to a drop in your resting calorie burn. On the same note, you may also realize that even if you maintain the same high intensity in workouts, your body weight doesn’t drop that much or don’t drop at all.

The basic explanation behind such effects is that you’ve made your body metabolism adapt metabolism to adapt to the same calories amount over a long time.

 

Aerobic Exercises are overhyped, but they are not the Game-changers

If you’re a weight lose enthusiast, it is highly possible that you’ve come across the term; aerobic exercises. The plain truth is that these exercises are overhyped.

According to a recent study on obese individuals who engaged in aerobic exercises, isolated aerobic exercises only proved to be beneficial to the survey subjects health-wise. It didn’t bring in the desired weight loss effects as was expected of it.

From this research, it was concluded that separate aerobic exercises are only ideal when used in improving low LDL levels and blood circulation but not in losing weight.

 

 

3. Fast Foods are Destructive for your Weight Loss Goals

Basically, fast foods refer to pre-prepared foods—and you’ll find fast-food joints almost everywhere in America. The myth of fast foods, making you fat dates back to many years ago from when you were still a baby.

Even when you’re a full-grown adult, you’ll always hear something at the back of your mind telling you to back off fast foods when you desire to feast on fast foods, for example, a cheeseburger.

Here’s the fact, most fast food joints have food selections that span across broths, sushi, salads, and sashimi which are undeniably healthy. Besides, it is not the lightest foods in fast food joints that are healthy.

In fact, it is interesting to note that McDonald’s hamburger that you probably thought was unhealthy for you isn’t really calorific as you are probably imagining. With just 250kcals and the Grille Chicken Salad having only 133kcals and 20g proteins, it’s something that you’ll undoubtedly enjoy and not affect your weight loss programs.

 

4. You Must Stick to Just the Low Carb Diets to Lose Weight

First things first, a low carb diet would help you lose weight, but this doesn’t mean that you’ll just have to stick to it alone. If you decide to stick to it, chances are high you will find it a backbreaking struggle to progress.

The basic definition of a low carb diet is that it is a diet that has minimal carbohydrates. You’re basically restricted from eating food items that are packed with complex and simple carbohydrates.

Your meals instead comprise mainly food options like fats and lean proteins. In a low carb diet, therefore, you’ll mostly be eating:

• Proteins that majorly include; eggs, meat chicken, and fish.
• Fats and natural sugars mainly comprise; vegetables, cheese, butter, and dairy fat.

You’ll also need to avoid starchy and sugary foods like whole grains, pasta, chocolates, rice, bread, barley, and sauces, among others. While following these trends would ensure that your body retains the least amount of bad calories, there are specific low carb diets that have since lost the edge but people continue to blindly follow them.

 

 

Here’s a breakdown of some of those diets.

1.    Keto Diet

You must have probably heard about Keto diets too. This diet is majorly popular because of its shallow carb content and concentrated fat content approach.

The logic behind this approach is to induce ‘ketosis’ process in the body so that your body can focus on just using fats as the primary energy fuel. This diet is further broken down into two fundamental categories which are; targeted keto diets and the cyclical keto diets.

• Targeted keto diets: Here, the menu requires that you combine a few carbs with your workouts.
• Cyclical keto diet: In this diet, you’ll be required to stick to a stringent carb diet for most of the days. After completing the predetermined number of days, you’ll then switch over to a high carb diet and stick to it for around two to three days.

2.    Low carb Paleo Diet

The low carb Paleo diet draws its inspiration from the Palaeolithic era. With this type of diet, you’ll majorly focus on eating more dairy products, fish, grains, meat, legumes, and seafood.

3.    Zero carb diet

For the zero carb diet, your focus will be to strip off all carbs from your diet. With this diet, you’ll majorly rely on protein with a little fat that’s added with salt and few spices. It is however highly criticized with critics pointing out that it lacks the essential nutrients thus not safe for human health.

4.    Basic low carb diet

The basic low-carb diet doesn’t have any proper definition. Instead, it focuses on restricting your carbohydrates intake. It involves focusing on the western diet that’s based on food groups like fats and primarily proteins which would heavily comprise poultry, fish, meat, and dairy products.

5.    Low carb high-fat diet

Just as the name suggests, this diet consists of highly fatty foods and low carbohydrates. The recommendable carb intakes in a low carb high-fat diet are around 100grams to 200grams and mainly involve unprocessed foods like meat, fish, and chicken.

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6.    Low carb Mediterranean diet

Just as the name suggests here too, this diet is hugely made up of Mediterranean foods. It also places a considerable focus on the traditional fatty fish with extra virgin oil and butter.

7.    The Atkins diet

In the Atkins diet, you’ll focus on eating the least amount of carbohydrates as possible and as many proteins as possible. To achieve the perceived benefits, the Atkins diet is divided into four phases which are:

• Phase 1: In phase 1, you’ll be required to stick on eating just 20g carbohydrates each day. Stick to this trend for two weeks.
• Phase 2: In phase 2, you’ll be required to add low carb veggies, and fruits and nuts in your diet.
• Phase 3: Here, you’ll now be required to add even more carbs to the diet and continue until your weight loss rate slows down.
• Phase 4: Eat carbs in healthy amounts without gaining the weight you lost.

 

8.    Eco-Atkins diet

The approach that the Eco-Atkins diet adopts is more of a vegan diet. Your protein sources here will mainly come from plants like soy, gluten, and nuts.

The diet here, however, comes with a fixed calorie percentage which includes;

• 25 percent from carbohydrates.
• 30 percent from proteins and
• 45 percent from fats

 

Reasons Why Low-carb Diets May Not Help Your Weight Loss Goals

If you’ve tried to shed some pounds in the past, it is highly probable that you’ve at least made it a priority to read and stick to low-diet plans. If you didn’t achieve your weight loss goals, the problem probably has nothing to do with you.

The problems may instead have to do with the cons of these diets and factors that they didn’t address something which you are also not to blame at all. Here are some of the reasons why a  low carb diet may only wreck your weight loss dreams.

 

Low-carb Diets are not Consumer-Friendly

Do you ever wonder why so many people just can’t get off to smooth starts with low carb diets? Well, most of people have underlying health conditions.

By following or abruptly, switching to the strict low carb diets, risks are high that you’ll develop even more severe health issues. Here is a rundown of some of the conditions that won’t allow you to start a low carb diet.

• When you’re breastfeedings.
• If you’re diabetic and are on insulin.
• If you’re pregnant.

 

Sticking to a Low-carb Intake may lead to Sodium Deficiency in your body

The carbohydrates that we consume directly affect insulin hormones. Therefore if you cut down on the carbs, the immediate effect is that you’ll affect insulin function in your body.

Since insulin is required for sodium and fat storage, when its level goes down in the body, the body will begin to excrete excess sodium. When the sodium gets reduced in the body, you risk suffering a lot of discomfort in the body.

Some of the common side effects of reduced sodium in the body include;

• Drowsiness
• Palpitations
• Constipation
• Fatigue
• Lightheadedness and others.

 

 

Low-carb Diets Drain Your Energy

When you regularly consume lesser carbohydrates—less than the 100g level, you’ll get into a period when all the glycogen (energy) stores in your body get finished up. From here, your body fueling system would then switch to fats, but this is inefficient and won’t produce sufficient energy for optimal body activities.

Besides, when your body breaks down fat molecules to sugars, it will release massive by-product amounts. These by-products are known as ‘ketones’, and they come with their own set of complications as well.

These may include;

• Constipation
• Lightheadedness
• Foul breath
• Nausea
• Fatigue
• Headaches
• Drowsiness

 

Low-carb Diets May also Cause Unnecessary Stress for Your Health

The most significant risk about low carb diets is that they are arguably lethal for persons who suffer from prediabetes type 2. This is because, by sticking to these diets, you’re making your body to ‘fend for itself’.

In a bid to fulfill the body’s energy demands; therefore, it will be forced to ‘sacrifice’ the muscles. The body will now switch to taking up the muscle glycogen storage, something that will lead to muscle mass loss or muscle atrophy.

If you eat high fatty foods still, you also risk developing cardiovascular diseases. This is because when you’re on these diets, you will in most cases, switch to oils, fatty fish, and butter to compensate for the carbohydrates you’ve stripped off your menu.

This would only lead to heightened cholesterol levels in the body, something that may also cause hypercholesterolemia and hypertension. You also risk developing kidney stones if you live on a diet that is low on proteins and heavy on carbohydrates.

 

Here’s why:

While a low-carb, high protein diet will help you shed some pounds, it will only happen for a short duration but not bring any long-term success, thus make your body absorb lesser calcium amounts.

 

 

 

They Deprive You of Essential Nutrients

Reducing or stopping carbohydrate intake will not only deprive your body of fruits, and high-carb foods but also make it miss out on vital nutrient sources like;

• Vegetables
• Low-fat dairy products
• Beans
• Minerals
• Fibers
• Vitamins

When you miss out on nutrient sources like whole grains, your body will have weakened immunity against metabolic syndrome. Besides, you also risk developing other life-threatening conditions like cancers and stroke.

Finally, when these foods are lacking in your diet, it will be hard for your body to get sufficient essential minerals and vitamins that are necessary for it to get antioxidants to help in fighting diseases and infections.

Keto Flu

Keto flu refers to a group of symptoms that’s common in people who follow a keto diet which involves eating minimal carbohydrates. Since your body needs sufficient time to adapt to the ketosis process, you’ll likely experience the following symptoms as it still struggles to adapt.

• Nausea
• Headaches
• Constipation
• Vomiting
• Irritability
• Diarrhea
• Weakness
• Sugar cravings
• Muscle cramps
• Reduced concentration levels
• Muscle soreness
• Insomnia
• Stomach pains

 

You Risk Developing Reversed Obesity

Since a low carb diet presents you with plenty of unhealthy food options like cheese, fatty burgers, and butter, there’s a risk that you may surfer different cardiac diseases or even reversed obesity. High fat intake is harmful to your overall health.

There’s no Strict Low-carb definition

To some extent, it is strange that there is no one strict definition of a low carb diet. Usually, foods that have less than 100g to 150g are referred to as low carbs, but then; we don’t have any explanation on wrong or right carbs.

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5. It is Safer to Use Weight Loss Supplements to Lose Weight Quickly

Most people confuse the difference between weight loss pills and weight loss supplements. According to the FDA, weight loss pills are approved drugs that are prescribed by certified physicians before use.

On the other hand, supplements are illegal substances that are marketed as drugs that you can use to increase the rate of weight loss. Most of them are FDA disapproved and pose even more dangerous risks to your health.

They’re available in different forms which include syrups, tablets, capsules, powders, and oral pills, among others. You’ll easily identify them in commercials since they use vibrant colors and promises to provide your body with the vital natural ingredients that will help you lose weight fast.

Depending on the marketers, these supplements may also ‘falsely’ promise to;

• Suppress your appetite or cravings
• Satisfy your hunger
• Not drain your energy
• Excrete insoluble fats, among others.

 

Weight Loss Supplements Health Risks

Kidney Damage

According to doctors, weight loss supplements are the primary culprits when it comes to kidney damage in males and females alike. It is believed that rapidly decreasing BMI is directly related to GFR insufficiency.

When you take weight loss supplements, your BMI will drop rapidly, and the body’s ability for excreting nitrogenous waste from its system also goes down. These supplements are also known to catalyze the rate of ammonia production in the body, something that also increases your risk of suffering from kidney stones.

 

 

Insomnia

Most diet supplements have vast numbers of chemical components in them that cause sleepiness and these chemical components are often unlisted. Most of them are also made with caffeine which is an active ingredient, and when you consume it, you may feel some unpleasant side effects like insomnia and sleeplessness.

Ischemic Colitis-colon and Bleeding

A good number of these diet supplements are also made with ‘phentermine’. A while back; ‘phentermine’ was widely used in short-term weight loss programs. Health experts warn that when you’re not aware and misuse it, you may experience unpleasant symptoms like bloody stool, colon bleeding, and bowel disorder, among other effects.

Liver Complications

Apart from insomnia, the colon complications that can be caused by these supplements, they’re also believed to cause hepatotoxicity. Herbal supplements like arsenic acid and Kombucha, which are very common in most herbal dietary supplements are known to cause acute liver toxicity.

Diarrhea

Exothermic fat burners which are also commonly known as fat-burner supplements are some of the most sought after supplements in the weight loss industry. They’re also pretty common with athletes and people battling obesity.

The primary downside with most fat burner supplements is that they cause diarrhea. When used, they induce acute anorectic effects that would make you feel unpleasant effects like diarrhea and nausea, among others.

They’re also known to delay emptying of gastric, stimulate the Central Nervous System (CNS), and induce satiety. It doesn’t end there, though. Some of them won’t even help with weight loss at all.

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Increased Heart Rate

Most weight loss supplements are made with stimulants which in most cases are active components. This best explains why most people would experience a sudden increase in heart rates, cardiac insufficiency, and palpitations after using these drugs.

One primary concern with a faster heart rate is that it may also lead to a reduction in your blood pressure level, something that can also make

Note: Apart from these myths, there are some medicines emerging in weight loss industry. Among those medicines, Prozac for weight loss is the most prominent one. However, some people prefer Naltrexone for weight loss. It all comes down to one’s preference. But keep in mind to consult your doctor before going for any medication!

Wrapping Up

There are a lot of myths that cloud the entire weight loss topic. While some are fueled by malicious marketers whose focus is to make you purchase their products—some of which can be hazardous to your health, we also tend to believe these myths because of not knowing.

The best way forward is to not trust anything that comes your way or commercials that grace your TV screens. Before getting started with a weight loss program, be sure to do your research about it before diving in. It would, however, be much better if you seek the guidance of a certified physician or dietician.

Book an appointment with Mango Clinic to find the right treatment for weight loss.