5 Weight Loss Mistakes (All Beginners Make)

Check out my client Bret’s transformation where he lost a whole bunch of fat

It’s true: losing weight is hard work.

But most people are making it harder than it has to be because they believe in long-standing myths about fat loss.

So in this video, we’re gonna go over the 5 most common false beliefs about fat loss

that are slowing down your results and some may even be flat out preventing you from losing any weight at all.

Let’s start with Myth number 1:

Cardio is the best exercise for fat loss. This is a very common misconception and lately, it’s been reinforced by a handful of cherry-picked studies.

When most people think of weight loss, they think of people in sweatpants running outside, huffing and puffing.

There are two problems with this line of thinking:

first, almost no one enjoys doing it, especially not on a daily basis, and

second, there’s a much better way to burn fat and burn it faster.

Most forms of cardiovascular training only burn calories while you’re actually exercising.But what if you could increase the number of calories you burn while sitting still?

Wouldn’t that benefit you a lot more since you don’t spend the majority of the day exercising,it would make a lot more sense to increase your overall metabolic rate, wouldn’t it? Well,

you actually can: by growing your muscles. It used to be believed that just one pound of muscle would burn 50 calories per day,

but over the years research has shown that new muscle mass is not quite as metabolically active as we used to think.

In fact, other organs in your body like your heart, your liver, and your digestive system use far more calories per pound than muscle mass.

But by performing strength training and focusing on increasing muscle mass it still holds true that you can drastically increase your metabolism.

Sure you’re not burning 50 calories per day from each pound of muscle, but you’re still burning 3 times the calories that you would burn if it was pounds of fat instead.

You also continue burning fat after the workout is over. On top of that research has shown that by starting a strength training program you can increase your metabolism by almost 8 percent,

.

because not only do you get a boost from adding on new muscle, but all the muscle tissue that you already had on your body that you’re now putting more stress on with a strength training program, all that muscle will increase its daily energy demands

The point is that by engaging in a resistance training program your body does, in fact, need a lot more energy to maintain muscle strength and size.

Now if we put the unmatched benefits that weight training will have on your metabolism aside, we still have the incredible benefits that weight training can provide for your hormones.

Fat burning and muscle building hormones like testosterone, hunger, and appetite suppressing hormones like leptin and ghrelin,

and your insulin levels are just some of the positive effects that weight training will have on your body.

Many people ruin their metabolisms and create hormonal imbalances with years of poor choices with their diet and exercise habits.

And consistent weight training is the best and one of the only ways to stop and reverse these problems.

Don’t get me wrong, cardio is great to help you burn some extra calories. But if you want the best aesthetic results,

and you have to choose…lifting weights is more important than cardio. Now even though any kind of weight training is better than not doing it all,

you might be thinking what exercises should you do to burn the most fat?

Well, research has shown that total body exercises and exercises that involve larger numbers of larger muscle groups like squats and deadlifts…

Those kinds of exercises with heavy loads are the best not only for burning fat, but they’re also great for building muscle mass and increasing your testosterone levels.

So, lift weights, build some muscle and it won’t be long before you see that you’re losing fat faster than ever while also looking leaner and stronger.

Cardio you can use to help burn extra calories, but make sure you’re picking the best type of cardio.

This actually leads us the right to our next myth Running is the best cardio for fat loss.

Most people’s first choice of cardio is running. And don’t get me wrong, running is great. It builds your endurance, your lung capacity,

it keeps your heart healthy and gives you that nice feeling of euphoria known as the endorphin high.

But running also has several problems. Besides not being the best for fat loss, if you overdo it running can also be plain bad for you.

When running, your joints have to catch and decelerate a force of up to four times your body weight, and each foot strikes the ground up to 100 times a minute.

That adds up to a lot of stress on your ankles, knees, and hips, especially if you carry extra weight.

And if you want to burn a lot of calories, and your primary way to do it is by running, you need to run a lot!

The second problem with running is that even though it does burn on average 100 calories per mile, the fat burning stops there.

Luckily, there’s another type of exercise that creates less stress on the joints AND keeps you burning fat long after you’re done sweating.

You’ve most likely heard of it before it’s known as high-intensity interval training.

Most HIIT sessions only last for 15 to 20 minutes, but due to an effect called Excess post-exercise oxygen consumption or EPOC,

it can keep you burning fat for up to 38 hours after exercise. That’s a day and a half of calorie burning with no extra effort!

There are many ways you can do high-intensity interval training.

My favorite way is to use weights for total body exercises in circuits in which you combine multiple exercises back to back for a timed interval.

If you’re doing it correctly, you’ll notice that you’re really winded by the time you reach your rest interval.

By combining intervals of high-intensity work with periods of rest or low effort work like jumping rope or slow jogging,

you’re essentially pushing your body to the limit multiple times per session, which will give you that fat burning effect that you’re after.

Let’s move on Myth number 3:

Sit-ups will give you a flat stomach. Don’t worry I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this one.

By now, we should all know that spot reduction is a myth, but there are still people who believe that by only doing sit-ups they’ll get a flat stomach with visible abs.

Unfortunately, there are still plenty of unnecessary fitness gadgets out there that unethical people searching only for profits promote as capable of producing targeted fat burning results.

So especially for beginners, it becomes very difficult to sort out fact from fiction and navigate around these myths.

But the real truth is that cutting away the body fat that sits on top of your abs mostly happens in the kitchen.

You will need to get to a low enough body fat percentage to reveal a six-pack. If your body fat percentage is too high no amount of situps will build bulky enough abs to pop out through the fat.

Focus primarily on your diet and on doing compound movements that burn more fat during the workout and during the recovery process.

Compound movements like squats and deadlifts for example. Those take priority over doing ab workouts.

If you have additional time to consistently commit to developing your core, feel free to throw in ab specific workouts utilizing weights to build up your ab muscles as well.

This way they can stand out more once you lower your body fat percentage enough.

Next, we have…Myth number 4:

More sweat means more fat loss. It sounds so logical: if you sweat more, of course, you should be burning more fat.

I mean it even looks like you’re actually melting your fat away. However, I assure you this is not true.

You sweat because your body is regulating its temperature so it doesn’t overheat. You can sweat while sitting on a hot summer day,

but that doesn’t mean you’re burning fat! Forcing yourself to exercise in a sauna or running on a hot day while wearing extra clothes can burn extra calories because of greater stress,

but it won’t create a large enough difference to cause you to lose any more fat than exercising normally.

Exercising at higher temperatures can also be dangerous which really makes it look even more senseless from a risk to a reward standpoint.

Also, I’m sure you know that if you weigh yourself multiple times per day, you’ll see that your weight will go up and down several pounds in just one day.

This is due to water weight. Water weight isn’t fat – it’s water stored in your body and you’ll usually retain more water if you eat more salt and carbs.

All that sweating will do is it’ll cause you to lose some of this water weight. This is not exactly what we’re after.

This can give you a false sense of accomplishment because your water weight will vary depending on what you eat,

how much you sweat and for women, even the time of the month plays an important role.

That’s why it’s important to focus on losing fat consistently over weeks and months and not to worry too much about the small day to day changes.

Let’s move on to the final myth Myth number 5:

Eating fat makes you fat… Man…If only! I wish it was this simple. That would mean we could all just binge on anything as long as it only contained either carbs or protein.

That’s obviously not the case. Dietary fat actually provides many benefits for fat loss like assisting in the production of fat-burning hormones as well as slowing down digestion and decreasing appetite.

At the end of the day, there are really only two things that’ll make you fat and they usually go hand in hand.

One is eating more calories than you use. And

two is creating hormonal imbalances like insulin resistance

which will lead you right back to taking in more calories than you wind up using. And in regard to the insulin,

it turns out healthy fats are actually the least insulinogenic of the three macronutrients…protein, fats, and carbs.

You can also easily manage calories, insulin, as well as your other hormones just by sticking to whole single-ingredient foods.

It doesn’t matter as much if the calories are coming from carbs, proteins, or fats when the majority of your diet revolves around eating healthy natural real food.

Real unprocessed food in the form of protein, carbs, and fats is naturally filling, it can be used more efficiently by the body, and it helps restore healthy hormonal function.

It’s been proven with research that high carb and low-fat diets can both help reduce calories, ultimately reducing body fat.

A study involving over 600 people proved that avoiding fats or carbs was not the key to a successful diet plan.

The 600 people were divided between 2 groups low carb and low fat, and almost everything else remained identical.

After a year researchers found that some people in each group lost a lot of weight, others lost a little bit of weight, and some even gained weight.

But both charts for weight loss in the low fat and low carb groups matched almost identically.

This was because some people were able to stick to a low-fat diet with no problems. Others couldn’t stick to it at all.

The same thing happened in the low carb group. If there’s one thing that this study proves it’s definitely not that fats are worse than carbs or that carbs are worse than fats.

It’s the fact the true determining factor of whether a diet plan will result in you successfully losing fat comes down to adherence.

Healthy single ingredient sources of fats, carbs, and protein can all help you create a diet plan that you can actually stick to.

That’s it guys I really hope that this video has helped shine a light on these five very common fat loss myths.

If you enjoyed this tips make sure you subscribe to the channel and hit that bell icon to get notified when I release more free tips and tricks just like this.

Please feel free to ask any questions you have in the comments below and let me know what other fat loss myths you see people believing in that I didn’t get a chance to address in this video.

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To find out more you can click the link in the description or you can visit our website directly at gravitytransformation.com