10 Diet Myths Debunked

“English: A language that lurks in dark alleys, beats up other languages, and rifles through their pockets for spare vocabulary”

Our language is a bastard. In fact, of 80,000 English words, roughly 28% originate from Latin, 28% from French, and 25% from Germanic languages, so more than 3/4ths of English kinda… isn’t.

What’s worse is we use this language to tell each other things that aren’t so. Oh, I don’t mean lying, though that’s certainly a bad thing. I mean the “conventional wisdom” that gets spread around as fact, when really there’s no basis for it.

(Yes, this happens in other languages too. I was stuck for a lead-in, okay?)

1. “Don’t Eat Before Bed“.

One diet tip we often hear is “don’t eat for X hours before bed”. The theory is that your metabolism slows so much during sleep that the food will get converted straight to fat.

The reality is that your metabolism actually slows more when watching TV or sitting at a computer than when you’re asleep – but overall, what matters is what you eat and how much, not when.

Sleep does play a role in metabolism. Not enough sleep can cause you to gain weight. But that’s independent of whether or not you ate right before bed.

Your level of physical activity comes into play too – if you regularly hit the gym, doing a reasonably intense level of activity, you’ll continue burning calories long after your workout. If you weight lift your body will use some of your stored energy to rebuild muscle and add new tissue, which is how muscles get bigger.

But no matter when you eat, your body will store surplus calories as fat. If you want a bedtime snack and haven’t eaten much that day, go ahead! If you eat large meals all the time and still reach for something to munch on before bed, you may be adding enough extra calories every day to pack on pounds.

2. “Eat negative calorie foods”

Some well-meaning people advocate eating supposed negative calorie foods, which are thought to take more calories to digest than they contribute to your system. As I wrote back in April of this year, negative calorie foods don’t exist.

Ask yourself this: If you were trapped on an island with nothing but apples to eat (apples featuring prominently on many ‘negative calorie’ food lists), would eating the apples make you starve faster than not eating anything? If you answered yes, please email me. I’ve a lovely bridge to sell you.

3. “Liquid calories don’t count”

Seriously? Some people actually believe this? A fruit smoothie, especially the store bought kind, can have between 500 and 1,000 Calories. Some coffees from national chains? They may as well be meals.

When an average woman’s recommended daily food intake is 2,000 calories, and she picks delicately at her food but slams back 5 margaritas at a Mexican restaurant, she’s just had 125% of her daily calories from her drinks alone. The three bites of burrito and five chips are just icing on the cake.

Whether it’s from fruit drinks, soda pop, alcohol, or whatever, liquid calories are energy just like the ones from food you chew. They’re just less filling and most often less nutritious too.

oh, you drink diet soda pop instead? Read on…

4. “Diet Drinks are good for weight loss”

Well, the makers of sugar water want you to think their aspartame substitutes will help pare off the flab that their original recipe helped you put on, but it doesn’t work that way.

the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio performed a study in which they followed more than 600 people, ranging from twenty-five to sixty-four years old, for up to eight years and found that those drinking diet soda — even as little as one can or bottle a day — did not lose weight and were significantly more likely to become overweight than those who drank regular soft drinks or none at all.

Wait – what? The current theory is that aspartame makes your brain feel a “reward”, and the desire for more sweets is intensified. The more of these fake sweet products you eat or drink, the more sweets you want. That’s on top of the aspartame induced headaches, insomnia, seizures, and other neurological and behavioral disturbances in sensitive individuals.

Yum.

5. “Chubby kids should be put on diets or they’ll be fat all their lives”

Kids should absolutely be taught about having a healthy attitude towards eating, even if they prefer slurpees and snickers to water and fruit. Childhood obesity is on the rise, and those balloons need to be popped.

But if you’ve a child who is 10 or 15 lbs. overweight, nagging them about dieting or putting them on a restricted diet will most likely lead to them eating when you’re not around, and likely more than they’d eat otherwise, while at the same time crippling their self esteem.

A better approach is to help them make basic improvements in their diets by substituting healthier item – baked-in-store whole grain bread as opposed to commercially manufactured white bread, for example.Cutting down or eliminating junk food will do wonders too, but be prepared for resistance on that one.

Increasing their physical activity while decreasing video games and computer time will also be a tough battle for some, but will go a long way to keeping the kid’s metabolism up. this will slow the weight gain while they continue to grow in height. Children go through dynamic phases of growth, and a low-calorie diet could cause problems with that. What they need is nutrients and activity, not bland food and a complex.

6. “People put on Winter Fat”

Okay, let’s think about this now. When you’re cold you shiver as a response to make you warm up. That takes energy. So why do people think we’re like bears, and put on extra fat during winter? False causality.

Bears pack on fat in the fall because they’ll be asleep for months and need that energy to stay alive. We pack on weight in the winter because there’s Thanksgiving followed by Christmas, and dinner parties around a roaring fire seduce you into eating and drinking more high calorie foods than would, say, a summer’s day of jet skiing, hiking, or just walking a park trail.

7. “Yo yo dieting permanently screws up your metabolism”

This was something I was concerned about when I underwent 100 days of starvation. As it turns out, though, just as my metabolism adapted to the ultra-low calorie intake in an effort to keep me alive (by consuming my muscle mass for needed energy, as well as slowing my fat burn to make it last longer) it’s also slowly going back to ‘normal’ now that I’m eating again.

In fact researchers in Canada looked at fifty-two overweight women who’d been dieting on and off for an average of 18 years. They measured the womens’ resting metabolic rate, then compared those numbers with what their metabolism was expected to be based on their weights, heights, and ages. The result: There was no difference between actual and predicted metabolic rates in all but four dieters.

So even if you’ve lost and regained weight several times over, don’t give up.

8. “Avoid red meat – it’s all fat.”

This one is true – sort of. Prime and choice grades of meat have lots of ‘marbling’, which is fat in the muscle. But lean cuts with fewer than 30 percent calories as fat are available.Can’t someone help us tell which meats we should buy?

Look out! Here comes a Snyderman. “When buying meat,” says Dr. Nancy Snyderman “it’s best to look for ‘select’ grades of lean cuts like top round and tenderloin as well as extra-lean ground beef. They are among the lowest in fat”.

To make life a little easier, check out my handy meat guide here.

9. “Diets don’t work”

First, if you eat anything in your lifetime you’re on a diet. “Diet” simply means what you eat, not that you’re specifically eating to lose weight.

See how smart I am? But let’s put aside pedantry and pretend “diet” actually just means restricting your food intake. Self-help books, ad slogans, and other reliable sources of info- I’m sorry, I almost got through that with a straight face. *ahem* Those sources drill into us the mantra that diets don’t work.

Why? Because catch phrases like that help people sell things, even if the information in the phrase is crap.

Virtually every “diet” has some element of truth to it and will help you lose weight, whether in the short term or long. The difference is if the diet is one you can stick to, such as switching from 3 large meals a day to 6 small ones (easy) or swearing off your daily 6 litres of regular coke and family-sized bag of cheezies in favour of water or other low-calorie drink and nuts mixed with raisins (a little harder for sugar addicts, but not the end of the world).

10. Fat makes you fat.

Ugh. This bit of bogusness was popularized by Susan Powter and other hucksters of her kind. As I said above, catch phrases are usually crap and this one was no exception.

Yes, there are some fats that are bad for you in large quantities. Know what else is bad for you in large quantities? Water. And oxygen. But fat in moderate quantities can be beneficial, such as the fats in fish meat, olive oil, and so on. Eating fat doesn’t make you fat. Eating too much, whether fat, carbohydrates, or protein, will blimp your butt.