Top 10 weight loss myths

There are many so-called weight loss tips that will not bring you closer to your goal. On the contrary, since your time and willpower are limited, it is best to avoid them as much as possible.

Carbohydrates in the evening

That would mean you can't eat rice, pasta, or potatoes after 6 PM - and even worse, no Haribos!

How do the proponents of this strategy justify such a horrific method?

Every time you eat a carbohydrate-rich meal, insulin is released. Since you are inactive at night, the insulin sensitivity of your muscles is low, but that of your fat cells is high. As a result, carbohydrates go mainly to your fat tissue and are not burned in your muscles.

The only problem is that it doesn't seem to work that way in practice.

So you can eat carbohydrates after 6 PM as long as you don't fill your belly with Haribos, potatoes or pasta in the evening to the point that you are no longer in a calorie deficit.

Low Carb

This allegedly slimming wisdom still seems to be true in the minds of many people who want to lose weight. However, it is based on a very fundamental misunderstanding: Low carb followers see fat burning as a synonym for BODY fat burning.

However, your body - to put it simply - first burns the energy in the food you have just eaten.

When you drink olive oil, the fat burning is higher because your body burns the fat of the olive oil. Only when it has burned the dietary fat does your body begin to burn its own fat.

If, on the other hand, you eat bread, then the fat burning is lower, because your body burns the carbohydrates of the bread. Only when it has burned these carbohydrates, does it begin to burn body fat.

However, body fat burning is identical in both situations (assuming the bread and olive oil had the same number of calories).

So you don't need to eat low carb to burn more body fat. As long as you are in a calorie deficit, you will lose body fat.

Cardio

Don't be fooled by this weight loss wisdom, which sounds very plausible at first. Because it is also a myth.

It is true that when you jog in the fat burning zone, for example, you burn the most body fat PROPORTIONALLY at the moment of jogging. However, you are probably more interested in how much body fat you lose absolutely throughout the day.

There is an interesting article on this by Dr. Brad Schoenfeld. In this article he describes that after cardio training the body burns more of the type of nutrients that were not burned during cardio training.

For example, if you ran with a very high heart rate and burned a lot of carbohydrates while running, then your body would mainly burn fat in the time after the cardio workout.

However, if you have been running in the fat burning zone and have burned a lot of fat while running, then your body will burn more carbohydrates after the cardio workout. So this balances out!

Instead of focusing on cardio training within a specific heart rate zone, it's better to focus on the total calories burned during training. For example, if you run for 30 minutes at a high heart rate, you will burn more body fat overall than if you run for the same amount of time at a lower heart rate.

So you won't necessarily optimally lose body fat if you perform your cardio workout in the fat burning zone.

Sugar

This statement is, in fact, wrong. It is not sugar that makes you fat, but only a calorie surplus. However, it is very likely that you eat more calories than you burn, for example, if you eat a lot of chocolate or Haribos or drink iced tea.

This is simply because such sugary foods usually don't fill you up very well and you eat way too much of them (who can stop after one piece of chocolate? Very few!). Accordingly, it is a good idea for most people to eat fewer sugary foods if they want to lose weight.

However, if you are careful not to be in calorie surplus, then you don't have to worry about sugar.

Calories

Wrong! Calories are the MOST IMPORTANT thing when losing weight! On to the next weight loss myth...

Cheat Day

The term "cheat day" is often used to refer to a day when you are allowed to eat all the great-tasting foods, in any quantity, that you have been avoiding during the week. Taking a cheat day is not a good idea for most people for the following reasons:

1. To achieve a really positive effect on the metabolism, you would have to no longer be in a calorie deficit for several days or even weeks.

2. There is a great danger that you will eat so many calories on cheat day that you will wipe out the calorie deficit you have accumulated during the week. This is not unlikely, especially if you are very hungry at the end of a diet.

3. You eat many more calories on cheat day than on the other 6 days. This could lead to you being much less active on the other 6 days because you lack energy and therefore burn fewer calories.

If you then eat 3x as many calories on cheat day as on the other days, it is still unlikely that you will feel 3x as energetic on this day and thus move 3x as much. So you probably won't be able to make up for the lack of exercise you had on the other 6 days on cheat day.

It is therefore wrong that your metabolism will fall asleep if you do not have regular cheat days. You will probably even harm your weight loss progress if you have a cheat day once a week.

Many reps

This is a rumor that has persisted for decades. The assumption of its proponents is that strength training with low reps (and a lot of weight) will make the muscle grow, and strength training with high reps (and little weight) will 'define' or 'tone' the muscle. However, this assumption is not tenable at all.

You will get lean and toned muscles only if you change your body composition so that you have a lot of muscle mass and little body fat.

You can build muscle with both low and high reps. It's best to train in the 6-15 rep range and make sure you get close to muscular failure on each set. To make sure you are training hard enough, you can do a strength test.

You can find instructions on how to do this in our last blog article. Then, to lose the fat for the 'toned' muscles, you need to eat fewer calories than you consume - not do higher reps during strength training.

Negative calories

Celery, pineapple and cucumbers are popular candidates here. They are said to contain negative calories. That is, your body uses more energy for processing than it takes in.

It is true that your body does consume energy when it processes a food. However, this consumption is only 1-30% of the calorie content of a food.

If you eat very protein-rich foods such as meat, then it is about 30% and if you eat or drink very fatty foods such as olive oil, then it is about 1%. But for a food to really have NEGATIVE calories, this effect would have to be over 100%!

However, such a food has not yet been discovered - except perhaps water. Water contains no calories, but your body needs to bring the water to body temperature in order to use it. For this it needs a few calories. However, this is only a very small effect and is hardly significant.

Many small meals

How many meals you eat in a day does not determine whether you lose or gain weight, nor does it directly affect the activity of your metabolism.

However, you may feel sluggish if you eat only 2 meals a day, for example. This would then probably lead to you moving less and thus burning fewer calories than if you were to spread the same amount of calories over several small meals.

In this case, it would be better to eat several small meals. However, if you like to eat only one or two meals a day and you feel fine, there is no reason to eat more often.

Intermittent fasting

There are different forms of fasting. However, almost all forms have in common a very low meal frequency per day. So this is the opposite extreme from the previous myth.

Accordingly, the same applies here: Meal frequency will not affect how much weight or fat you lose if the calories and activity level are just as high as they would be at a higher meal frequency.