Common Dieting Myths that dont work

The most prevalent dieting myths many individuals believe is that eating fewer calories will help you lose weight. This might be true initially, however, your body needs a certain amount of calories every day called your resting metabolic rate. An estimate of your resting metabolic rate can easily be calculated by taking your weight and multiplying it by ten (i.e. add a zero at the end of your weight). If you eat less than this amount of calories than your body will think that you're starving and in an effort to protect itself, will slow down your metabolism and start storing food, usually as fat, instead of metabolizing it.

This starvation factor is one reason why it's so important to not skip meals like breakfast. When you go to sleep your body's metabolism slows down. When you wake up eating breakfast is an important step to re-awakening your body's metabolism. If you start your day with a workout before breakfast, or just skip breakfast your body is burning calories it has in storage. This might sound like a good idea, however, this triggers the starvation mentality in your body sooner, resulting in your metabolism staying slow even after your first meal and more of that meal being put back into storage rather than being metabolized.

Another way we trigger the starvation mentality in our bodies is when we eat the same thing for an extended period of time. This means if you're on a diet that stipulates you only drink juice or eat salad, your body will start to think that there's a famine occurring and activate it's starvation protocols, slowing the metabolism and storing food. Or bodies created these safety protocols over hundreds if not thousands of years. As a result, on a genetic level our bodies crave variety in the food we eat due to the variety of food our ancestors ate while still hunters and gatherers. Taking this into account, the only time our ancestors would eat the same thing over and over again was when they were facing a starvation, which is why diets that severely restrict your diet make our bodies think that it's starving.

One of the biggest issues of these dieting myths is that when you lose weight initially half of the weight lost is from fat and the other half is from muscle, but when you stop dieting the weight you gain back is all from fat. Whenever you start a diet you want to include an exercise element as well. This is because muscle burns seventy times more calories than fat. So if you're only dieting and you're losing half your initial weight loss from muscle, you're hurting yourself more because you're decreasing your body's ability to effectively burn calories.


Catherine E.P. Gray is the President & Founder of Inside-Out Beauty, LLC a full service image consulting company based in New York City that enables clients to achieve their personal and/or professional image goals by addressing all the interrelated aspects of one's image.