30 Jan

Common weight loss myths & misconceptions

Weight Loss Myths & Misconceptions

Nowadays, when it comes to losing weight, people will want to try everything and anything they can and this can lead to them searching around online and finding “facts” about things that just aren’t true. As a result, they end up incorporating things into their lifestyle that just are not necessary and can be very difficult to sustain over a long period of time.


One of these weight loss myths is that carbohydrates and fat make you gain weight and fat; I can confidently say that this is without a doubt one of the most common misconceptions that many people often become confused about. Losing weight all comes down to the amount of calories that you’re consuming on a day-to-day basis, you need to be within a caloric deficit, which basically means being around 500 calories or less below your maintenance calories. Carbohydrates contain 4 calories per gram and fats contain 9 calories per gram, so fat is more calorie-dense but as long as you don’t eat so much of it that it puts you over your maintenance calories, you aren’t going to gain weight and the same thing goes for carbohydrates. So you don’t necessarily need to cut out carbohydrates or fats from your diet although some people do respond well to different types of diets whether it be low carb and high protein or high fat and low carbs etc.

 
Crash diets are becoming quite a popular thing recently amongst people who are trying to lose weight and in reality, they can be effective if done on a very short time schedule but they are near enough impossible to sustain over a long duration of time. A crash diet involves suddenly dropping your calories well below maintenance calories to almost shock your body into losing weight as you are essentially putting your body into starvation mode. However, the problem that a lot of people encounter is that they are able to lose weight over a couple weeks until their body becomes used to the extremely low calories and you pretty much come to a plateau of weight loss.

 
The major issue here is that your calories are already so low that it’s unrealistic to decrease them even further as you would literally be starving your body of vital vitamins and minerals and making yourself unhealthy. This is why I would recommend not going onto a crash diet as you will not see any progress after a certain point, when losing weight, the main things that you need to consider are your calories. Ensure that you’re in a small deficit to begin with, once you notice you’re not losing any more weight, slightly drop the calories again and again and I guarantee that over time you will lose weight effectively without having to take any extreme measures.