Fitness, weight-loss and body toning: 5 busted myths

1. Calories don’t count: FALSE!

Of course they do! The only way to lose weight is to put our bodies in a situation where they are in calorie deficit; in other words, the amount of the calorie intake has to be less than the amount we use up during our daily exercise. It’s physiological; mathematical. The deficit can be created by reducing the calories in our diet or by increasing the amount of calories we use in our workout. If the calorie balance is the opposite, having a higher calorie intake and what we use, fundamentally, we will gain weight.

Please note that the idea that the lower the calorie intake, the better, is also false. The calorie intake/use needs to be well balanced!

2. Carbohydrates will make you gain weight: FALSE!

It isn’t the carbohydrates in themselves that will make you gain weight but the increased amount of calories that they contain (see above explanation). Carbohydrates will make you gain weight if you eat an excessive amount, just like eating too much fat or protein would. That’s right, even proteins, if eaten in excessive quantities will make your body transform them into adipose reserves!

If you stop eating carbohydrates, you will surely lose weight, but you won’t just be losing body fat but also lean body mass and water.

3. Squats will make the legs bigger and won’t tone my glutes: FALSE!

I often see girls who prefer to do glute kick-backs with or without cables while exercising their glutes instead of squats because they think that their legs will get too muscular as they don’t feel their glutes getting a workout in the same way as the legs.

The glutes are big and strong muscles, and therefore, they need to be stimulated in the appropriate way in order to activate them and thereby tone them. Most likely, if you can’t feel your glutes getting a proper workout while doing your squats it means that you’re not doing them correctly. The most common mistakes that people do is either not going down into a proper squat or not bending the knees in the right way. Squats and other similar exercises are only efficient if done properly and when well integrated in the complete workout.

4. I don’t have to do a chest workout: FALSE!

Why shouldn’t we? The chest muscles are amongst our biggest muscles on our upper body and not to incorporate them in our workout is truly a mistake. Our organism is one big machine and can’t be divided into sections. If you want good overall results, both in terms of weight-loss and in terms of muscle mass, one has to do a workout which incorporates the whole body. Leaving out one body part will only slow you down in accomplishing your goals, even in the other parts of your body.

5. I have to do sit-ups in order to lose belly fat: FALSE!

Localized weight loss doesn’t exist. Despite there are those that claim that their particular workout will be efficient in one particular part of the body, the extensive research that has been done in this field prove that they’re simply not true. Coming back to what I said earlier, if I want to improve a certain part of my body, I have to work on the body as a whole. Wasting time at the gym or at home doing endless repetitions of all the various types of sit-ups you can think of, simply won’t be effective. I’m not suggesting to eliminate them either, but to integrate them into a HIT-style workout and also by combining weights, which will give you much better results. Exercises such as sit-ups won’t make you lose belly weight but they will be an important part of your overall workout, both in terms of losing weight, in terms of improving your posture and in your overall well-being.