7 Diet Concepts That Make You Fail

Avoid these 7 diet concepts and your road to weight loss and diet success becomes that much easier!

Late Night Eating

This is an evergreen among dieters: don’t eat after x pm, because whatever you eat after the magic time ends up on you as fat.

Does it seem logical to you that 5,000 kcal eaten at 5.59 pm vanish into thin air, but eaten at 6.01 pm make you buy new jeans?

Best Workout For Weight Loss Is X

Yep, running burns more calories than biking, which burns more calories than walking. But the best fitness activity to aid your diet with is not the one that on paper gets rid of the most calories!

Spot Reduction

Maybe you have only one specific area that troubles you: your thighs, belly or arms are where you’d like to be a little thinner.  It should be enough to exercise only that one area, shouldn’t it? If only it were so!

Sweat Is Fat

What happens when you do fitness? You sweat. It’s reasonable to assume that it’s literally fat that’s melting there, isn’t it? So why does visiting a sauna make no difference on your fat layers?

Fat Makes You Fat

If you want to lose fat, you should avoid eating it, right? It looks so obvious that what you want to get rid of you shouldn’t put in your body in the first place.

Food That Burns Calories

The idea that you can lose weight by eating is so alluring I have hard time blaming weight loss acolytes for believing in it. But the people who want you to believe it suffer from a slight math problem!

Afterburn Effect

The afterburn effect was the buzzword in fitness circles in the last years: 30 minutes of intensive fitness and for the next 24 hours you turn yourself into a nuclear reactor running on calories. In reality it’s more like having an extra 5W bulb.

How To Really Do It

The true way to weight loss and your dream weight doesn’t rely on any of these fads. It works like this:

• Get your calories under control. It doesn’t matter what diet you follow as long as you burn more calories than you eat.
• Don’t overestimate the effect of fitness. No matter how much you run, bike and swim, you can always eat more. Your fitness activities are auxiliaries to whatever you accomplish under calorie control.
• Don’t think eating healthy is enough. To your body, 5,000 excess calories from healthy food or 5,000 excess calories from fast food are just that: 5,000 extra calories.

Picture courtesy of Dani Lurie.