Ten Exercise and Nutrition False Beliefs

By Dr. Ellis
People Hold Many False Ideas About Nutrition and Exercise
Here are ten common ones:
1. You Can Change Your Metabolism or Metabolic Rate
This is a major false belief and it’s championed everywhere you look. Your resting metabolism relates to your body size. If you gain weight, metabolism increases a bit and likewise if you lose weight it decreases. But you do not have volitional control over your metabolism any more than you can control your temperature. These, and many other functions, are regulated features of life.

2. Add a Lot of Muscle and Become a Fat-Burning Machine
Adding muscle is not easy. Muscle at rest burns 5 calories per pound over 24 hours and fat burns 2 calories per pound. So, added muscle AT REST doesn’t do much to increase you calorie burn.

3. You Can Get Rid of Fat by Working Out and Changing It Into Muscle
Fat is fat and muscle is muscle — you cannot convert one into the other.

4. Eating Non-Fat Foods Means You Can Eat All You Want
Calories control your weight, so eating less fat and eating more carbohydrates and protein will increase your calorie intake and you’ll get fat.

5. You Can Target Specific Areas of Your Body to Lose Fat
There is no such thing as spot reduction of fat tissue. You accumulate fat in areas dependent upon your own body’s fat-storage pattern.

6. Eat Many Small Meals a Day to Increase Calorie-Burning
This is an old false belief as it has been around for years and forms the basis of many modern-day, popular weight loss plans. The idea is that it uses up calories to burn the newly consumed food. Research clearly shows that the digestion and processing of food uses about 10% of your total daily calorie burn. This is known as the Thermic Effect of Food.

7. Carbohydrate is the Preferred Fuel of Your Body
This is another major blunder that causes people many problems and makes most diet and weight loss programs ineffective. Fat is the preferred fuel and, in fact, 90% of your calorie burn at rest comes from fat. The body will burn what you feed it and if you eat more carbs then it’ll burn more of those but it’s really programmed to burn fat.

8. This Exercise Burns 3 Times More Calories Than This or That Exercise
This is another great marketing tool. You body can only burn so many calories per minute. You can train yourself to burn more per minute but there is still an upper limit. You burn more calories depending on the amount of muscle that is active during the exercise.
9. Running is Better Than Walking
You’ll burn more calories per minute running but walking is good enough to become very fit and you’ll enjoy it more.

10. The Fat You Eat Turns Into the Fat on Your Body
Actually, the body doesn’t very easily store the fat you eat as body fat unless you eat it with carbohydrates. It is the carbohydrates that you eat that get rapidly converted to body fat. This textbook biochemical fact is unknown and the promotion of the ‘fat to fat theory’ is the undoing of many people’s efforts to control body weight.

Misty notes:
I think the one thing that most do not understand is that a calorie is a measurement of energy and at 9grams per kcal, fat is your superior choice. It's what we refer to as nutrient density!