If you’re spending hours down the gym working your abs but you have yet to see your six pack emerge; if you’re sweating buckets in your cardio class but still not losing any weight, or you’re drinking eight glasses of water every day but still feeling sluggish and thirsty, it may be that you have fallen for some of the more common fitness myths that are in circulation. Here’s a guide to help you sort the fact from the fiction.
Diet myths
If you believe that skipping breakfast will help you to lose weight, you’re falling for one of the most common diet myths around. In reality, skipping a meal at any time of the day or following a diet that replaces a meal with something of a much lower calorific value will simply leave you feeling hungry and tired. The most likely response to such feelings is to head for the nearest high-fat, high-calorie snacks. You may also find yourself compensating by simply eating far more at other times of the day.
Another widely believed myth is that low-fat foods will help you lose weight. The reality is that many low-fat have much higher levels of sugar to make sure they continue to taste good after all the fat has been removed. Always check the ingredients of any food you want to consume as this will be a far better guide to the contents than just the label. You also need to manage quantities carefully. Just because a food has half the calories of your usual fare, don’t give in to the temptation to eat twice as much of it.
Many books and YouTube videos claim that certain foods will help you burn fat if you eat them. No such food actually exists as every food contains calories, even if only very few. This means the only way to lose weight and burn fat is to ensure you are taking in fewer calories than you are using up.
Drinking myths
While it’s good to stay hydrated throughout the day, the idea that this is best achieved by drinking eight glasses of water is a complete myth. The fact is that every individual person has different hydration needs, so what is just right for one person could be too much or too little for another. The best guide is to look at the colour of your urine each time you go. Ideally, it should be pale yellow all the time; if it becomes darker, you’re dehydrated, and you need to top up your reserves.
If you believe that a glass of wine or two in the evening helps you get a good night’s sleep, you’re falling for another common myth. Alcohol causes your body to lose water, so you are likely to have to wake up during the night to use the toilet. In the morning you’ll be dehydrated, which is why you sometimes wake up with a headache.
You may also believe that your ability to drink increases with age, but in fact the opposite is true. Our bodies lose fluid and increase their levels of fat as we age which means the concentration of alcohol in a person’s bloodstream actually becomes higher.
Failing to understand the harm that alcohol can do causes issues all across society but is of particular concern to pregnant mothers. Last year it emerged that around four out of ten women carried on drinking during pregnancy, despite government guidelines advising them not to do so.
Not only should you stop drinking alcohol, but by the time you are 10 weeks pregnant, you should also give up tea, coffee and other sources of caffeine. Staying fit and healthy while pregnant is essential if you want to give your baby the best start in life, but drinking too much caffeine will make it difficult for your body to stay properly hydrated and, in the worst-case scenario, can lead to a number of complications.
Exercise myths
Another common myth regarding pregnancy is the idea that you shouldn’t exercise once you become pregnant. The opposite is true, and regular exercise while carrying your baby will improve both your health and that of your unborn child. The key is not to push yourself any harder than you did before you became pregnant.
Looking through a list of exercise classes at your local gym, or a shelf full of workout DVDs in your local store, it’s easy to believe that specific exercises will produce results in specific parts of your body. Unfortunately, it simply doesn’t work that way. Although increasing the amount of exercise you do will reduce your body fat, you can’t control where the fat itself will be lost from.
This means there is little point spending hours carrying out crunches or sit-ups because they will not do anything to reduce the fat around your belly. A far better way to reduce the levels of fat over your whole body is to do more resistance training or cardio – once you’ve lost weight, you can target specific areas of your body to tone. On similar lines, many women shy away from training with weights because they don’t want to get bulky, but women simply don’t produce enough testosterone for this to happen. Using weights will increase the amount of lean muscle in your body and this, in turn, will make you burn fat faster and achieve your goals much more quickly.
Take it easy when you exercise and listen to your body. The idea that no pain means no gain is another long-discredited myth. The discomfort you feel after a long session at the gym is known as Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness and is your body’s response to the exercise and a way of preparing your muscles for further stress in the future. Always allow any such discomfort to fade before returning to the gym and don’t be fooled into thinking that the more agony you feel, the more your muscles will grow.
Finally, don’t be fooled into thinking that working up a sweat means you’re burning lots of calories. Your body produces sweat in order to cool you down, so while some of what you produce may be down to physical exertion, the background heat in the studio space where you work out is a major contributing factor too.