WEIGHT LOSS AND FITNESS MYTH #1:
Dieting eliminates fat.
Your body can’t discriminate between intentional calorie deprivation (as in a diet) and starvation. When you dramatically reduce your caloric intake, your body shifts into a protective mode by slowing your metabolism down and holding onto fat (an important energy source) and burning muscle instead.
In the beginning of a diet you WILL lose weight by dramatically cutting calories. But it won’t be fat loss. It will be water 
weight and lean muscle tissue – the exact OPPOSITE of what you want to get rid of. Not only will harsh diets slow your metabolism down to a crawl, causing your initial weight loss to come to a gradual halt, they will also inevitably bring about a ‘rebound’ effect. This rebound will make you even fatter than you were before starting the diet.
When you rebound, not only do you generally put on more weight than you actually lost with the diet, your percentage of body fat generally increases because your body cannibalised muscle tissue as an energy source during the dieting process. Thus the yo-yo effect that almost all dieters experience.
To permanently lose the fat stores in your body, you’ve got to burn more calories and increase your metabolic rate (the rate at which your body burns fuel throughout the day – even when you’re NOT exercising) with a precise exercise routine and proper nutrient ratio adaptations (that means eating the right stuff at regular intervals). Even if you don’t exercise (but I recommend you do), just eating 5–6 small, high quality meals each day (and by a meal, I mean anything from a nutritious snack to a sit-down dinner) will substantially increase your metabolism – and you’ll burn more calories!
WEIGHT LOSS AND FITNESS MYTH #2:
Pills, powders and shakes can make you skinny.
Fat burners, diet pills, nutritional supplements – you know who gets the most out of these products? The manufacturers and sellers. Some of this stuff is extracted from foods and has a role in nutrition but it’s not a substitute for eating right. And much of the ‘miracle’ drugs you see advertised are exceedingly dangerous to you. Don’t believe me? The next time you see an advertisement in a weight loss magazine for one of these ‘miracle’ products – or if you see a advertisment on TV for one – read or listen to the DISCLAIMERS AND WARNINGS that accompany these ads.
A lot of this stuff is dangerous and it has no place in a healthy, permanent weight loss and fitness lifestyle. Sure, if you’re willing to risk exposing your body to these drugs, you might be able to lose some weight – at first. But you will experience no long-term benefits – none! In fact, it’s really much worse than that. ‘Dieting’ in any form that denies your body the essential nutrients and calories it needs to function efficiently can cause you to lose weight…until you stop the diet. And anyone who has ‘dieted’ knows you cannot sustain the diet indefinitely. Your body screams out for nourishment and eventually you give in. That’s when the rebound effect begins. You will inevitably regain all the weight you lost – PLUS SOME.
And the regained weight is predominantly fat. During your diet your body cannibalised some of your lean muscle to use as fuel. After the diet, your regained weight does not come back in the form of lean muscle plus some fat – it comes back almost exclusively as fat.
WEIGHT LOSS AND FITNESS MYTH #3:
A regimen of aerobic exercise burns the most fat.
I see women who spend four days a week, 40 minutes at a time, on the stair-stepper, treadmill or bicycle who don’t lose weight! I know girls who run ten kilometres a day who have no muscle tone and plenty of rolls of fat around their waists. You’ve been led to believe that if you want to lose fat, all you have to do is regular aerobic exercise.
There’s more to it than that. You must be able to monitor and control your cardiovascular intensity to maximise the number of calories you burn. And, if aerobic exercise is not supplemented with resistance training (lifting weights) to at least maintain muscle mass, you cannot effectively accelerate the fat loss process.
Each pound of lean muscle tissue burns 35–50 calories a day while your body is at rest; whereas body fat is not metabolically active, so little to no fat is burned for each kilo of body fat. Therefore, a combination of properly monitored aerobic exercise and resistance training enables you to rapidly burn the maximum amount of fat.
SPECIAL NOTE: This may sound like it’s involved and time consuming. It’s not! With the proper fitness and nutrition system in place, you can quickly burn fat, lose weight and get fit in as little as 40 minutes per session And in 12 weeks you can dramatically transform your body.
Jessica X
