The purpose of this page is to bring some clarity around certain “Old Wives Tales” about dieting and weight loss. There is no easy fix to loose weight and keep it off and we all have succumbed to various low fat food myths, fasting and the so called science around Eggs.
Read on to find the science behind many tales that simply are or are not true.
Eggs do not cause heart disease and are among the most nutritious foods on the planet. There’s one thing that nutrition professionals have had remarkable success with, and that is demonizing incredibly healthy foods. The worst example of that is eggs, which happen to contain a large amount of cholesterol and were therefore considered to increase the risk of heart disease.
But recently it was proven that cholesterol in the diet doesn’t really raise the cholesterol in blood. In fact, eggs primarily raise the “good” cholesterol and are not associated with increased risk of heart disease.
What we’re left with is one of the most nutritious foods on the planet. They’re high in all sorts of nutrients along with unique antioxidants that protect our eyes.
To top it all off, eating eggs for breakfast is proven to cause significant weight loss.
Bottom Line: Eggs do not cause heart disease and are among the most nutritious foods on the planet. Eggs for breakfast can help you lose weight.
Because I want to finally put the most common strength training misconception to rest…
Lifting heavier weights, will NOT not make you get “big” or look like one of those muscle-clad women on the cover of a bodybuilding magazine — not even close!
So it’s time you retire the little “pink” dumbbells and here’s why…Unlike men, your body doesn’t produce enough testosterone to stimulate large, bulky muscle growth. Those masculine looking gals you see on the cover of magazines are juicing up with testosterone and spending HOURS everyday in the gym. I mean, it’s a LOT of work for a woman to have muscles popping out all over the place — so hard that even though these ladies spend hours in the gym everyday, they still have to use illegal substances to get that big!
What you WILL get by lifting weights with my cardio-strength circuit workouts is a super lean, toned and fit body. And here’s why…
One pound of muscle can burn up to 20 calories a day. That means if you just replaced 5 pounds of fat with 5 pounds of lean muscle, you’re going to burn an extra 100 calories a day!
Low-Fat Foods Are Good For You Do you know what regular food tastes like when all the fat has been taken out of it? Well, it tastes like cardboard. No one would want to eat it.
The food manufacturers know this and, therefore, they add other things to compensate for the lack of fat. Usually, these are sweeteners — sugar, high-fructose corn syrup or artificial sweeteners like aspartame.
We’ll get to the sugar in a moment, but I’d like to point out that even though artificial sweeteners don’t have calories, the evidence does NOT suggest that they are better for you than sugar.
In fact, many observational studies show a consistent, highly significant association with various diseases like obesity, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, heart disease, premature delivery and depression.
In these low-fat products, healthy natural fats are being replaced with substances that are extremely harmful.
Bottom Line: Low-fat foods are usually highly processed products loaded with sugar, corn syrup or artificial sweeteners. They are extremely unhealthy.
Eating a Lot of Protein is Bad For Your Bones and Kidneys A high-protein diet has been claimed to cause both osteoporosis and kidney disease.
It is true that eating protein increases calcium excretion from the bones in the short term, but the long-term studies actually show the opposite effect.
In the long term, protein has a strong association with improved bone health and a lower risk of fracture.
Additionally, studies don’t show any association of high protein with kidney disease in otherwise healthy people.
In fact, two of the main risk factors for kidney failure are diabetes and high blood pressure. Eating a high-protein diet improves both.
If anything, a high-protein diet should be protective against osteoporosis and kidney failure!
Bottom Line: Eating a high protein diet is associated with improved bone health and a lower risk of fracture. High protein also lowers blood pressure and improves diabetes symptoms, which should lower the risk of kidney failure.
Sugar is Unhealthy Because it Contains “Empty” Calories It is commonly believed that sugar is bad for you because it contains empty calories. It’s true: Sugar has a lot of calories with no essential nutrients. But that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Sugar, primarily because of its high-fructose content, affects metabolism in a way that sets us up for rapid fat gain and metabolic disease. Fructose gets metabolised by the liver and turned into fat, which is secreted into the blood as VLDL particles. This leads to elevated triglycerides and cholesterol.
It also causes resistance to the hormones insulin and leptin, which is a stepping stone toward obesity, metabolic syndrome and diabetes.
This is just to name a few. Sugar causes a relentless biochemical drive for humans to eat more and get fat. It is probably the single worst ingredient in the standard Western diet.
Bottom Line: The harmful effects of sugar go way beyond empty calories. Sugar wreaks havoc on our metabolism and sets us up for weight gain and many serious diseases.
Low-Carb Diets Are Dangerous I personally believe low-carb diets to be a potential cure for many of the most common health problems in Western nations.
The low-fat diet peddled all around the world is fairly useless against many of these diseases. It simply does not work. However, low-carb diets demonised by nutritionists and the media) have repeatedly been shown to lead to much better outcomes. Every randomised controlled trial on low-carb diets shows that they: Reduce body fat more than calorie-restricted low-fat diets, even though the low-carb dieters are allowed to eat as much as they want.
Scientific Fact: Short, high-intensity interval training burns calories up to 48 hours AFTER your workout. That means you burn calories while you sleep!
Scientific Fact: Lower-intensity aerobic (cardio) activities only burn calories while the activity is being performed
Scientific Fact: Anaerobic (strength-training) workouts increase EPOC much more than aerobic exercise does
High-Fat Foods Will Make You Fat It seems kind of intuitive that eating fat would make you get fat. The stuff that is gathering under our skin and making us look soft and puffy is fat. So eating fat should give our bodies even more of it.
But it isn’t that simple. Despite fat having more calories per gram than carbohydrate or protein, high-fat diets do not make people fat. As with anything, this depends on the context. A diet that is high in fat AND high in carbs will make you fat, but it’s NOT because of the fat. In fact, diets that are high in fat (and low in carbs) cause much greater fat loss than diets that are low in fat.
Let’s face it, we’re all creatures of habit.
…And when it comes to your fitness and fat-loss, staying in your comfort zone will only prevent you from achieving your “wow” body. So if you’ve been repeating the same workout routines over and over, you’ve got to change things up if you want to get better results.
In fact, did you know, it only takes 3 weeks for your body to adapt to a workout routine at which point you STOP getting results?
When you begin a crash diet, you might actually experience a quick loss of kilo`s within the first week or two of following the plan. While this may make the diet appear to be working, I caution you that another reason might be responsible for why you are losing the weight so quickly. It isn’t because you are losing fat, but because you are using up your body’s store of glycogen, and, with the used glycogen, water. Neither of these losses are permanent. The only long-term weight loss solution is to lose fat, but most crash diet regimens do not promote long-term fat loss.
