THE 5 BIGGEST FAT LOSS MYTHS AND MISTAKES

THE 5 BIGGEST FAT LOSS MYTHS AND MISTAKES

The road to nowhere is paved with excuses.

—MARK BELL

For thousands of years now, a lean, muscular body has been the gold standard of the male physique.

It was a hallmark of the ancient heroes and gods, and it has remained a revered quality; it has been idolized in pop culture, achieved by few, but coveted by many.

With obesity rates over 35 percent here in America (and steadily rising), it would appear that getting shredded and becoming one of the “physical elite” must require superhuman genetics or a level of knowledge, discipline, and sacrifice beyond what most people are capable of.

Well, this simply isn’t true. The knowledge is easy enough to understand (in fact, you’re learning everything you need to know in this book).

Sure, it requires discipline and some “sacrifice” in that no, you probably don’t have the metabolism to eat a large pizza every day and have a six pack, but here’s the kicker: when you’re training and dieting correctly, you’ll enjoy the lifestyle. You’ll look forward to the gym every day. You’ll never feel starved, you’ll get to eat foods you love, and you won’t suffer from overpowering cravings.

When you find this “sweet spot,” you’ll look and feel better than you ever have before and find it infinitely more pleasurable and valuable than being lazy, fat, and addicted to ice cream and potato chips. When you can get into this “zone,” you can do whatever you want with your body. The results are inevitable; it’s just a matter of time.

Most people never get there though. They either lack the will or desire to get there (they don’t have their “inner game” sorted out), or they lack the know-how required to make it happen, or both.

Well, in this chapter, we’re going to address the five most common myths and mistakes of getting ripped. Like the muscle-building fallacies, these errors have permeated the health and fitness space and mucked things up for millions of people.

Let’s dispel them once and for all so that they can’t block your path to achieving the lean, muscular body that you desire.

MYTH & MISTAKE #1

WATCHING CALORIC INTAKE IS UNNECESSARY

If I had a penny for every person I’ve spoken with who wanted to lose weight but didn’t want to have to count calories…well, you know the rest.

This is about as logical as wanting to drive across the state without paying attention to the gas tank. Could you do it? Maybe. But it’s going to be a lot trickier and more stressful than it should be.

Now, I won’t be too hard on these people because they often don’t even know what a calorie is. They just don’t want to be bothered with having to count something or worry about whether they can “afford” one food or another, and I can understand that.

Here’s the truth, though: whether you want to call it “counting” calories, meal planning, or something else, to effectively lose fat, you have to regulate your food intake.

You see, the metabolism is an energy system and operates according to the laws of energy. Losing fat requires that you keep your body burning more energy than you’re feeding it, and the energy potential of food is measured in calories.

Chances are this isn’t news to you, but I want to quickly review the physiology of fat loss just in case you’re not convinced that fat loss boils down to the mathematics of energy consumed versus energy burned.

The underlying scientific principle at work is energy balance, which refers to the amount of energy you burn every day versus the amount you give your body via food.

According to the laws of physics underlying this principle, if you give your body a bit more energy than it burns every day, a portion of the excess energy is stored as body fat, and thus you gain weight slowly. If you give your body a bit less energy than it burns every day, it will tap into fat stores to get the additional energy it needs, leaving you a bit lighter.

You see, any given time, your body requires a certain amount of glucose in the blood to stay alive. This is vital fuel that every cell in the body uses to operate, and certain organs like the brain are real glucose hogs.

When you eat food, you give your body a relatively large amount of energy (calories) in a short period. Glucose levels rise far above what is needed to maintain life, and instead of “throwing away” or burning off all excess energy, a portion is stored as body fat for later use.

Scientifically speaking, when your body is absorbing nutrients eaten and storing fat, it’s in the “postprandial” state (post meaning “after” and prandial meaning “having to do with a meal”). This “fed” state is when the body is in “fat storage mode.”

Once the body has finished absorbing the glucose and other nutrients from the food (amino acids and fatty acids), it then enters the “postabsorptive” state (“after absorption”), wherein it must turn to its fat stores for energy. This “fasted” state is when the body is in “fat burning mode.”

Your body flips between “fed” and “fasted” states every day, storing fat from the food you eat and then burning it once there’s nothing left to use from the meals. Here’s a simple graph that depicts this cycle:



The lighter portions are the periods where your body has excess energy because you ate. The darker portions are the periods when the body has no energy left from food and thus has to burn fat to stay alive. As you can see, we burn quite a bit of fat when we sleep.

If the lighter and darker portions balance out every day—if you store just as much fat as you burn—your weight stays the same. If you store more fat than you burn (by overeating), you get fatter. And if you burn more fat than you store, you get leaner.

This is the fundamental mechanism underlying fat storage and fat loss, and it takes precedence over anything related to insulin or any other hormones or physiological functions.

Simply put, you can’t get fatter unless you feed your body more energy than it burns, and you can’t get leaner unless you feed it less energy than it burns.

Contrary to (currently) popular belief, it doesn’t many how many carbohydrates you eat or how high your insulin levels are throughout the day. Energy balance is the first law of thermodynamics at work: fat stores can’t be increased without the provision of excess energy, nor can they be reduced without the restriction of energy.

That’s why research has shown that so long as they’re eating less energy than they’re burning, people lose fat equally well on high-carbohydrate or low-carbohydrate diets.

The bottom line is that the types of foods you eat have little to do with losing or gaining weight. In this regard, a calorie is a calorie. That isn’t to say that you should eat nothing but junk food to lose weight, however. What you eat does matter when we’re talking about maintaining optimal body composition. If you want to lose fat and not muscle, a calorie is not a calorie, but we’ll talk more about that later.

So, with that out of the way, let’s get back to calorie counting. What people usually dislike most about it isn’t the counting but the trying to figure out what to eat while on the run every day or what to buy when rushing through the grocery store.

When you have a 30-minute window for lunch and run to the nearest restaurant, you don’t want to have to load an app and try to estimate calories. You want to just order something that sounds healthy and hope for the best.

Unfortunately, these quick, “healthy” meals have hundreds more calories than you might think. Repeat that for dinner, with a few random snacks thrown in for good measure, and you’ve simply eaten too much to reduce your total fat mass. You’ll have stored just as much, if not more, fat as you burned, and your weight will remain the same or go up accordingly.

So the real problem isn’t counting calories but failing to make and follow a meal plan that allows you to eat foods you like while ensuring that you burn more fat than you store over time.

Sure, it’s easier to just heat up a big plate of leftovers or grab some fast food for lunch and carry on with your day, but that convenience comes with a price: little or no weight loss.

MYTH & MISTAKE #2

DO CARDIO AND YOU’LL LOSE FAT

Every day, I see overweight people grinding away on the cardio machines. And week after week goes by with them looking the same.

They are under the false impression that grinding away on an elliptical machine or stationary bike will somehow flip a magical fat-loss switch in the body. Well, as you now know, that’s not how it works.

Cardio can enhance fat loss in two ways—burning calories and speeding up your metabolic rate—but that’s it.

And since I’ve brought it up, let’s talk briefly about the “metabolic rate.” Your body burns a certain number of calories regardless of any physical activity, and this is called your basal metabolic rate (BMR). Your total daily energy expenditure (TDEE) for a day would be your BMR plus the energy expended during any physical activities.

When your metabolism is said to “speed up” or “slow down,” what this means is that your basal metabolic rate has gone up or down. That is, your body is burning more or fewer calories while at rest.

Cardio, especially a variety I recommend called high-intensity interval cardio (HIIT), can increase your basal metabolic rate through what’s known as the “afterburn effect.” While that sounds fancy and is often used in sketchy marketing pitches for sketchy products, it’s simple: your body continues burning additional energy after you exercise.

But here’s the thing with cardio: if you don’t also eat correctly, that nightly run or bike ride won’t save you.

Let’s say you’re trying to lose weight and have unwittingly eaten 600 calories more than your body has burned for the day. You go jogging for 30 minutes at night, which burns about 300 calories, with maybe another hundred calories burned from the “afterburn” effect.

You’re still 200 calories over your expenditure, and that means no reduction in total fat stores for the day—and maybe even an increase.

You could continue like this for years and never get lean; instead, you could slowly get fatter. This is the most common reason why people simply “can’t lose weight no matter what they do.”

MYTH & MISTAKE #3

CHASING FAD DIETS

The Atkins Diet. The South Beach Diet. The Paleo Diet. The HCG Diet (this one makes me cringe). The Hollywood Diet. The Body Type Diet.

It seems like a new fad diet pops up every month or two. I can’t keep up these days.

While not all “latest and greatest” diets are bad (Paleo is unnecessarily restrictive but quite healthy, for example), the sheer abundance of fad diets being touted by ripped models and actors is confusing people as to what the “right way” to lose weight is (and understandably so).

The result is that many people jump from diet to diet, failing to get the results they desire. And they buy into some pretty stupid stuff simply because they don’t understand the physiology of the metabolism and of fat loss like you now do. Or they don’t want to accept it.

Regardless, the rules are the rules, and no fancy diets or snake oil supplements will help you get around them.

As the old saying goes, the best diet is the one you can follow, and as you’ll see, a flexible, balanced approach to eating is by far the most enjoyable and thus the most effective. Once you experience this for yourself, you’ll fully realize how asinine many of the fad diets taking gyms by storm are.

MYTH & MISTAKE #4

DOING TONS OF REPS GETS YOU SHREDDED

Many “gurus” recommend that you follow a high-rep, low-weight routine to “shred up,” but this is the complete opposite of what you want to do.

The reality is that your body is “primed” for muscle loss when you’re in a calorie deficit, and by focusing exclusively on muscle endurance (higher-rep ranges), you’ll set yourself up for rapid strength loss, with the potential for significant muscle loss as well

The key to preserving strength and muscle while losing weight is to lift heavy weights. The goal is to continue progressively overloading your muscles, which ensures protein synthesis rates remain elevated enough to prevent muscle loss.

There are fat-loss benefits to heavy weightlifting as well.

A study published by Greek sports scientists found that men who trained with heavy weights (80 to 85 percent of 1RM) increased their metabolic rates over the following three days, burning hundreds more calories than the men who trained with lighter weights (45 to 65 percent of 1RM).

Yes, hundreds more calories. That’s significant.

And if you want to really score extra calories burned, focus on compound lifts like squats and deadlifts, because these are the types of lifts that burn the most post-workout calories.

The bottom line is getting that shredded look is just a matter of having a fair amount of muscle and a low amount of body fat—and nothing else. There aren’t any special exercises that “bring out the striations,” and burning your muscles out with tons of reps does nothing to improve your overall look.

MYTH & MISTAKE #5

TRYING TO “SPOT REDUCE” FAT

Pick up just about any fitness magazine, and you’ll find workouts for getting a six pack, slimming the thighs, getting rid of love handles, and the like.

I wish it were that simple.

While research has shown that training a muscle results in increased levels of blood flow and lipolysis (the breakdown of fat cells into usable energy) in the area, it’s not in a large enough quantity to matter.

The reality is that training the muscles of a certain area of your body burns calories and can result in muscle growth, both of which certainly can aid in fat loss, but it doesn’t directly burn the fat covering them to any significant degree.

You see, fat loss occurs in a whole-body fashion. You create the proper internal weight loss environment (a calorie deficit), and your body reduces fat stores all over the body, with certain areas reducing faster than others.

You can do all the crunches you want, but you’ll never have a six pack until you’ve adequately reduced your overall body fat percentage, and that’s more a function of proper dieting than anything else.

Ironically, if you want an area of your body to be leaner, training the muscles without also ensuring you’re reducing your body fat percentage will only aggravate the problem. The muscles will grow but the layer of fat will remain, which will only result in the area looking bigger and puffier.

I often run into this with women who get into weightlifting without also addressing their body fat percentage. This is why many women believe weightlifting makes them “bulky.” They started weightlifting to look lean, toned, and athletic, not to have even more trouble fitting into their clothes.

This is why I often repeat a simple rule of thumb: the more muscle you build, the leaner you have to be to avoid looking big and bulky. A woman who has built an appreciable amount of muscle (one or more years of weightlifting) will want to stay at or under 20 percent body fat to maintain the “athletic” look of toned arms, a tight stomach, shapely legs, a big butt, etc. For us guys, we need to stay at or under 10 percent for the look we’re usually after: fully visible abs, small waist, vascularity, “dense”-looking muscles, etc.

Now, we all have our “fat spots” that plague us, and that’s just genetics for you. Some guys I know store every last pound in their hips, while others are fortunate to have their fat accumulate more in their chest, shoulders, and arms more so than their waistline.

Rest assured, however, that you can lose as much fat all over your body as you want, and you can get as shredded as you want; you’ll just have to be patient and let your body lean out in the way it’s programmed to.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Like building muscle, many people approach fat loss completely wrong and thus fail to achieve their weight goals.

But, just like building muscle, the laws of healthy fat loss are very simple and incredibly effective. Carry on to learn the laws and how to put them to work for you.