Weight Loss Tips- 3 Lies Your Best Friend Told You

When talking weight loss with friends its typical to hear some wild stories; How "so-and-so" dropped 30 pounds in a day from eating only tootsie-rolls is standard envy talk at cocktail parties. Most of the chatter is easy to dismiss, and even good for a laugh. However, some weight loss gossip is a little harder to distinguish as bad advice since it contains some elements of truth.

These are the lies that continue to get recycled in conversations between friends. Some can hinder your weight loss efforts, but others could be downright hazardous to your health.

Lie#1: Target reduction of fat is possible through dieting. This is simply not true. You can't force your torso to spot reduce under any conditions, regardless of what type of exercises you do. "Doing a bunch of sit-ups every day will make your stomach flat" is just a big, fat lie. Instead of reducing fat in that area, you could reduce muscle mass. For this reason, your focus should not be on exercising the offending area with a gazillion reps of any one kind of exercise. Instead, adopt a healthy diet to drop pounds overall and increase your metabolism. Reduce the blanket of fat on your tummy first, and then you will start to see the reward for all those crunches, but not until.

Lie#2: Cardio exercises alone will help you lose weight. While it is true that cardio exercises can help you lose fat, it is not true that this is the best way to burn calories. As a matter of fact, the amount of fat you will lose doing cardio isn't as much as you would with weight training.
Not only does training with weights help you burn fat throughout the workout, but keeps you burning fat even after you leave the gym. Working large muscle groups creates a reaction in the body to repair deep muscle tissue and burning a lot of calories is required to accomplish that.

Lie#3: A drastic cutting of calorie intake reduces body fat. This myth induces many a mortal to sacrifice themselves to the alter of crash dieting. Unfortunately, this practice harms instead of helps and simply isn't a possible long-term solution anyway. It just doesn't work.
Your body will actually begin slowing down efforts to burn calories as it goes into the starvation mode from being deprived of needed nutrients. While in starvation mode, your metabolic rate is stalled and your body starts burning, you guessed it... muscle tissue (not fat, which is kept in reserve for energy).

The results is you will not lose much fat at all. If you lose any weight, it will be from your valuable muscles. Worse yet, once you return to your normal diet you'll likely gain extra weight, since muscles help your body burn fat more effectively. There are some things you can do to accelerate your fat reduction as you get fit and lose weight.

Some weird little tips passed around actually work without harming. However, the timeless advice is still built on a foundation of healthy eating and good exercise habits. Don't believe everything you hear when it comes to weight loss advice. It's fine to enjoy the diet ramblings of your side-kicks, but take those tips with a grain of salt and stick to proven guidelines if slimming down is on your plate.

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