5 Biggest Nutritional Lies You’ve Been Told

Dr. Nick Galante, M.D. - Certified Medical Doctor (M.D.) Harvard Medical School

1. You Need To Starve To Lose Weight. This isn’t only false, but detrimental to loosing weight. It’s true that you need to take in less calories than you are expending in a given day to lose. But starvation is way too extreme. A 500 calories a day deficit is enough to lose a pound a week.

There are several problems with starvation mode. First your body will start looking to the protein in you muscles for fuel, so you will lose muscle mass and look less lean. The goal is to keep as much muscle as possible when trying to lose weight. Next is that starving yourself forces your body into a panic and causes release of massive doses of stress hormones like cortisol. The end results is that you actually will start storing more fat and holding onto the fat you have because your body thinks it needs to perverse fuel. Last is that your metabolism will come to a grinding halt. Where as your basal metabolic rate may have been 2000 calories per day prior to starving yourself, it may drop to 1000 calories per day, forcing you to starve yourself even more to see minimal results. This becomes a vicious cycle.

2. Too Much Protein is Bad For You. You hear this all the time. That eating too much protein is bad for your kidneys and your health. To date there has not been a single study to conclusively support this notion. Protein is the key building block to muscle. The more muscle you have, the better you will look and the higher your metabolism. More muscle equals less fat, plain and simple. What's more, is that protein requires the most energy for you body to process. In scientist speak, it’s the most thermogenic of the macronutrients. Lastly, protein tends to be more filling than fat or carbohydrate on a calorie for calorie basis. You should aim for 1 gram or protein per pound of body weight. Again studies have shown that even at 1.25g of protein per pound of body weight had no effect on one’s kidney function.

3. A Calorie Is A Calorie. While at its most basic level this is fundamentally true, it is so often misunderstood. Sure, if you need to eat 2000 calories a day to maintain your weight, regardless of if comes from chicken, brown rice, and broccoli or big macs, you will stay the same weight. But your body composition will change if you start eating dirty all the time. Your energy levels will decline due to huge swings in blood hormones. Your muscles will waste away because they are not getting enough of their building blocks (protein). And your metabolism will be slow because you’ll be missing vitamin, minerals, and cofactors which grease the wheels of your metabolism. Plain and simple: you are what you eat.

4. Red Meat s bad for you. Red meat gets a very bad wrap. It gets blamed for cancer, heart disease, and high blood pressure. While most red meats are terrible for you, eating the right kind of red meat can help you can maximize muscle gain, fat loss, and your overall health. The problem is that people tend to not eat lean red meats. And they burn the hell out of the meats they are cooking. This is indeed horrible for your body for all the reasons mentioned. But lean red meat is high in iron, creatine, and packs more protein gram for gram than any other animal source. Make sure you trim the fat off your meat and if grilling, the burned or chard-to-a-crisp parts.

5. If I Eat Low Fat or Fat-Free Foods, I Won’t Get Fat. Although the low fat craze has come and gone its effects are still being felt and seen by the millions of overweight and obese Americans. The problem with low fat or fat free foods if that, almost without fail, “low fat” equals “high sugar”. And, “high sugar” equals, “gets stored as fat very quickly”. Good Fats are an essential part of a balanced diet and if chosen wisely will help you gain muscles and actually lose fat.

To learn more about Other Nutritional Tricks and how to Burn More Fat and Lose Weight, Click Here.