Diet Myth News Flash: Eating Less Does Not Cause Fat Loss.

I'm all about shattering diet myths!

For example, you may have already seen the news flash that snacking doesn’t actually increase your metabolism, despite the fact that most “diet experts” tell you to graze on several small meals per day to keep that metabolic fire stoked.

Today, I’ve got another diet myth news flash for you: eating less does not cause fat loss.

Yes, you heard me right. You’re about to find out why eating less does not cause fat loss – but first you should know that today’s diet myth comes straight from Jonathan Bailor, author of a brand new book that I highly recommend you check out: “The Calorie Myth: How To Eat More, Exercise Less, Lose Weight and Live Better“.

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Why You’re Losing Muscle, Not Fat.

Let’s begin with a quote:

“The reduction of energy intake continues to be the basis of…weight reduction programs…[The results] are known to be poor and not long-lasting.”

– George Bray, Pennington Biomedical Research Center

Eating less does not create the need to burn body fat. Instead, it creates the need for the body to slow down. Contrary to popular opinion, the body hangs on to body fat. Instead, it burns muscle tissue, and that worsens the underlying cause of obesity. Only as a last resort, if the body has no other option, it may also burn a bit of body fat.

Why does the body hang on to body fat and burn muscle? To answer that question, let’s look at it another way.

What does our metabolism want more of when it thinks we are starving? Stored energy.

What is a great source of stored energy? Body fat.

So when our metabolism thinks we are starving, does it want to get rid of or hold on to body fat? It wants to hold on.

Next, what does our metabolism want less of when we are starving? It wants less tissue (which burns a lot of calories). What type of tissue burns a lot of calories? Muscle tissue. So when our metabolism thinks we are starving, it gets rid of calorie-hungry muscle tissue. Studies show that up to 70% of the weight lost while eating less comes from burning muscle—not body fat!

Burning all this muscle means that starving ourselves leads to more body fat—not less—over the long term. As soon as we stop starving ourselves, we have all the calories we used to have but need less of them, thanks to all that missing muscle and our slowed-down metabolism. Now our metabolism sees eating a normal amount as overeating and creates new body fat.

In the Journal of the American Medical Association, researcher G.L. Thorpe tells us that eating less does not make us lose weight, “…by selective reduction of adipose deposits [body fat], but by wasting of all body tissues…therefore, any success obtained must be maintained by chronic under-nourishment.” It is not practical or healthy to keep ourselves “chronically under-nourished,” so we don’t. Instead, we yo-yo diet. And that is why eating less is not an effective long-term fat loss approach.

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The Bad Side Effects Of Food Deprivation

Imagine watching TV and seeing a commercial for a new medication. The ad tells you the medication slightly improves your vision as long as you keep yourself chronically sleep-deprived. At the end of the commercial, a quieter voice lists the medication’s long-term side effects. One of them is that your vision will become much worse if you ever go back to sleeping a normal amount.

Would you ever use that medication? Of course not. You cannot go through life tired. Its temporary benefit is not worth its long-term side effects.

Now imagine another commercial.

This one is for a mail-order weight-loss meal program that slightly reduces your weight as long as you keep yourself chronically food-deprived. At the end of the commercial a quieter voice goes though the program’s side effects. The side effects include making you much heavier if you ever go back to eating a normal amount.

Would you ever use that program? Of course not. You cannot go through life hungry. To escape the superstition of starvation, let’s dive deeper into the science of its side effects.

My favorite experiment showing the side effects of eating less took place at the University of Geneva and involved three groups of rats all eating the same quality of food.

Normal Group: Adult rats eating normally.

Eat Less Group: Adult rats temporarily losing weight by eating less.

Skinny Group: Young rats who naturally weighted about as much as the adult Eat Less group immediately after this group ate less.

If the study were conducted on humans, the Normal Group would be typical thirty-five-year-old women. The Eat Less Group would be thirty-five-year-old women cutting calories until they fit into their high school jeans. And the Skinny Group would be high school girls who fit into size four jeans without trying.

For the first ten days of the study, the Eat Less Group ate 50% less than usual while the Normal Group ate normally. On the tenth day:

The Skinny Group showed up and ate normally.

The Eat Less Group stopped starving themselves and started eating normally.

The Normal Group kept eating normally.

This went on for twenty-five days and the study ended on day thirty-five.

At the end of the thirty-five day study, the Normal Group had eaten normally for thirty-five days. The Eat Less Group had eaten less for ten days and then normally for twenty-five days. And the Skinny Group had eaten normally for twenty-five days.

Which group do you think weighed the most and had the highest body fat percentage at the end? The Skinny Group seems like an easy “no” since they are younger and naturally thinner than the other rats. Traditional fat loss theory would say the Eat Less Group is an easy “no” as well since they ate 50% less for ten days. So the Normal Group weighed the most and had the highest body fat percentage at the end of the study, right?

Nope.

The Eat Less Group weighed the most and had the highest percent body fat. Even though they ate less for ten days, they were significantly heavier than those who ate normally all the way through. Eating less led the rats to gain—not lose—body fat.

MacLean at the University of Colorado describes this general metabolic behavior: “[When we eat less] metabolic adjustments occur…[which] contribute to a large potential energy imbalance that, when the forcible control of energy intake is relieved…results in an exceptionally high rate of weight regain.”

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Super Accumulation of Fat

Talk about side effects. Eating less was worse than doing nothing.

Why?

After our metabolism is starved, its number one priority is restoring all the body fat it lost and then protecting us from starving in the future. Guess how it does that? By storing additional body fat. Researchers call this “fat super accumulation.” From researcher E.A. Young at the University of Texas: “These and other studies…strongly suggest that fat super accumulation…after energy restriction is a major factor contributing to relapsing obesity, so often observed in humans.”

The most disturbing aspect of fat super accumulation is that it does not require us to eat a lot. All we have to do is go back to eating a normal amount. The Eat Less Group in the study gained a massive amount of body fat quickly while eating the same amount as the Normal Group and the Skinny Group. The metabolism was trying to make up for the past losses.

There is another reason: eating less slowed the metabolism. Put the same quantity and quality of food and exercise into a slowed-down fat metabolism system, and out comes more body fat.

The University of Geneva researchers discovered that the Eat Less Group’s metabolisms were burning body fat over 500% less efficiently and had slowed down by 15% by the end of the study. They remarked: “These investigations provide direct evidence for the existence of a specific metabolic component that contributes to an elevated efficiency of energy utilization during refeeding after low food consumption,” or once eating less stops.

Starvation does not make us thin. It makes us stocky, sick, and sad. It’s bad for health and it’s bad for fat loss. Your body just doesn’t work that way. Eating less does not cause fat loss.

Source:- http://www.bengreenfieldfitness.com/2013/12/diet-myth-news-flash-eating-less-cause-fat-loss/

Losing Weight When Your Brain Hits Below The Belt

PULLMAN, Wash. – If you’ve made a New Year’s resolution to eat right and trim down, be forewarned that medical science shows your brain has it in for you and will actively promote your failure on two different fronts. That’s not good news, of course, but you should know about it so you can strengthen your resolve as best you can.

Here’s the scoop. It’s relatively easy – particularly if you are significantly overweight – to lose a few pounds by reducing the number of calories you consume each day.

The problem is that your initial success will trigger a couple of responses in your body.

Metabolism

First, as you lose weight a hormone called leptin – which is produced by your fat cells – will start to drop in concentration. That change tells your brain that your stores of fat are decreasing. The brain responds to that report as if famine is on the way. The body makes changes to conserve its energies, and your metabolism will drop.

Metabolism – the rate at which we burn energy – is a major key to what our weight tends to be. Your metabolism may differ from that of John or Jane. But it also will change compared to what it was before you lost weight. The lower your metabolism, the easier it is to consume more calories than you burn in a day – triggering weight gain.

Calorie “handicap”

Here’s how that works in practice. Imagine you weighed 175 pounds for a number of years, but then your weight creeps up to 200 pounds. You go on a diet and successfully get back to 175. Congrats!

But your metabolism is likely to be slower at 175 than it would have been if you’d always weighed in at that amount. In other words, science has shown you have to eat fewer calories to maintain yourself at 175 pounds than you would have if you had always weighed 175.

This means that, depending on your weight loss, you may face a 300-500 calorie “handicap.” To beat that handicap you’ll have to eat that many fewer calories each day to maintain yourself at your new weight compared to someone who had never been overweight.

But the scientific news gets worse.

Less weight, more hunger

At your post-diet weight of 175, there’s a double whammy. Simply put, you’ll likely feel plenty hungry after your weight loss. The reason is that some other brain chemicals will be triggered that tell you that you feel peckish. In short, your appetite will be stimulated by the fact that you’ve lost weight.

So on the one hand you’ll need fewer calories than someone of your weight who has never dieted, while at the same time you’ll feel hungrier than someone who has always been slim and trim.

What’s a poor person sincerely trying to be faithful to a New Year’s resolution to do?

Good nutrition, exercise

For one thing, the experts agree it’s pointless to try fad diets like eating only dill pickles. Your best chance of success is to modify your diet toward eating right in a way you can do for the rest of your natural life. “Dieting” shouldn’t be about short-term weight loss based on serious deprivation – you need to find what works for you that you can sustain over the long term.

Another key to success is exercise – and yet more exercise after that. General medical advice is to get 30 minutes per day of moderate exercise. But to maintain weight loss, you’ll likely have to do more. Many advisors in medical science say a person needs to do an hour of exercise each day to keep off pounds shed through dieting.

Encouragement

Nothing about weight management is easy, and scientists are learning more and more about how and why it’s so difficult to lose weight and keep it off.

But if you’re like me, January is a good time to make some changes – changes you can stick with throughout all the weeks and months of this bright and shiny New Year. Others have done it successfully in the past – so let’s encourage one another to take on the serious but rewarding work of helping our health through diet and exercise.

Source:- https://news.wsu.edu/2012/01/03/losing-weight-when-your-brain-hits-below-the-belt/#.VMaYa9KsWgo

What’s Your Body Type?

Most people have combinations of the three body types. For example, some have an upper body that is ectomorphic and a lower body that is endomorphic, resulting in a slim upper body and a more fat-prone lower body, creating a pear shape. Sometimes the variation is not as clear-cut as having one body type for the upper body and another for the lower.

Height has little to do with body type, despite the fact that people tend to think of skinny people (ectomorphs) as tall and heavy-set people (endomorphs) as short.

Ectomorph	Mesomorph	Endomorph
Skinny, linear/ ruler appearance	Naturally lean	Smooth, round body
Lightly muscled	Naturally muscular	Gains muscle easily, but tends to be underdeveloped
Small joints/ boned	Medium size joints/ bones	Medium/ large joints/ bones
Low body fat (without exercising or following low calorie diets)	Naturally strong	High levels of body fat (may be overweight)
Small shoulders, chest and buttocks	Broad/ square shoulders	Small shoulders, high waist and large hips creating a pear-shaped physique
Long arms and legs	Body fat evenly distributed	Difficult to keep lost body fat off
Difficulty gaining weight	Losing fat is easy	Slow metabolic rate
Fast & efficient metabolism	Efficient metabolism	Attacks of tiredness/ fatigue
Hyperactive	Gaining muscle easy	Lose weight slowly
Difficulty gaining muscle	Responds quickly to exercise

DETERMINE BODY TYPE

Perhaps it was immediately obvious which body group you fell into. But, if it wasn’t think about how you react to food and exercise.

1.   METABOLISM

Do you gain weight quickly if you eat the wrong foods or after going on a lazy holiday? If you lose this weight rapidly after a change in diet or some exercise, you are probably a mesomorph. If you struggle to lose these extra pounds, then you exhibit endomorphic features. If you don’t put on any weight, you most likely are an ectomorph.

2.   EATING HABITS

Compare your eating habits with your appearance. If you consume a large amount of calories and are still thin, you are probably an ectomorph. If you eat a small number of calories and still appear thin and healthy you are probably a mesomorph. If you consume few calories and still appears heavy you are probably an endomorph.

3.   SIZE OF JOINTS/ BONES

To determine whether you are small, medium or larger boned/ jointed, encircle your wrist with your thumb and middle finger. If your middle finger overlaps your thumb, then you are small boned/ jointed (ectomorph). If your middle finger and thumb just touch, you have medium sized bones/ joints (mesomorph). If your finger and thumb do not touch then you are larger boned/ jointed (endomorph).

4.   THINK BACK!

To help determine your body type, think back to your adolescence, a time before age (metabolism slows as you get older, making you more prone to weight gain) and lifestyle transformed your body into what it is today.

5.   BODY TYPE CALCULATOR

Use this body type calculator to help you determine your body type.

6.     PICTURES

Look at some images of the various body types here and see if you identify with any of the body types.

ONE LAST THING …

Everyone has the potential to develop a great shape – regardless of his or her dominant body type. Losing inches, especially off your problem areas, can be accomplished through proper exercise and eating habits. If you are a large-framed person, though you will never be willowy, you can be slender and fit, wear a size 8 with room to spare and look super sexy in a bikini. However, it is futile for a person with strong mesomorph or endomorph characteristics to aim to be willowy like an ectomorph, this will only lead to disappointment and ill health. Even if this target thinness were reached, it probably would not look good, could be difficult in the extreme to maintain and would continue to have adverse effects on the body.

Do the right cardiovascular exercise for your body type to improve your body and get the results you want. Also,ectomorph workouts, mesomorph and endomorphs need to train differently when it comes to resistance training.

Source:- http://www.superskinnyme.com/body-types.html

How Can I Speed Up My Metabolism?

It’s not unusual to hear people blame their weight gain on a slow metabolism.

They’ve cut down on calories and take regular exercise yet they’re still not losing weight. The only other possible diagnosis, they expertly conclude, is a slow metabolism.

What is a slow metabolism? How does it affect your weight and can you do anything to speed it up?

Professor James Timmons, a metabolism expert from Loughborough University, gives your metabolism a closer examination.

What is metabolism?

Metabolism describes all the chemical processes that go on continuously inside the body to keep you alive and your organs functioning normally, such as breathing, repairing cells and digesting food.

These chemical processes require energy. The minimum amount of energy your body requires to carry out these chemical processes is called the basal metabolic rate (BMR).

Your BMR accounts for anything between 40% and 70% of your body’s daily energy requirements depending on your age and lifestyle. A ‘slow metabolism’ is more accurately described as a low BMR.

There are many calculators that work out your daily energy needs available online. Look out for calculators using the Harris-Benedict equation.

Do some people have a faster metabolism than others?

Body size, age, gender and genes all play a role in determining your metabolic rate.

Muscle cells require more energy to maintain than fat cells, so people with a higher muscle to fat ratio tend to have a higher BMR.

As we get older, we tend to gain fat and lose muscle. This explains why the BMR tends to decrease with age.

In general, men tend to have a faster metabolism as they have more muscle mass, heavier bones and less body fat than women, which is why their daily calorie allowance is higher.

Calorie allowances

An average man needs around 2,500kcal a day. For an average woman, that figure is around 2,000kcal a day. These values can vary depending on age and levels of physical activity, as well as other factors.

Your metabolism may be partly determined by your genes, although this is not yet fully understood. Genes definitely play a role in muscle size and your ability to grow muscles, both of which affect your metabolism.

Am I fat because of a slow metabolism?

People who struggle to lose weight often blame a slow metabolism. However, numerous studies involving thousands of people worldwide have failed to find evidence to support the widely held belief that overweight people must have slower metabolic rates.

In fact, the opposite appears true: overweight people may actually have a higher metabolism than their leaner counterparts,reflecting the energy requirements of maintaining a larger body size. When you account for differences in body size and composition, there is a remarkable similarity in energy expenditure between individuals.

Research has also shown that people tend to eat more than they think they do. When asked to write down everything they've consumed in a day, many people tend to report eating far less than they actually do.

More often than not, the reason you’re putting on weight is not because of a slow metabolism, it’s because you’re eating and drinking more calories than you're burning. It may be hard to accept, but staying on top of the number of calories you eat is key to losing weight and keeping it off. Our 12-week weight loss plan will help you lose weight by tracking your calories.

Can losing weight too fast slow my metabolism?

Crash diets and other calorie-restricted diets can reduce your BMR. With some diets, your body is forced to break down muscle to use for energy. The lower your muscle mass, the slower your metabolism. With less muscle and a slower metabolism, it then becomes a lot easier to put body fat back on after coming off the diet.

What can I do to speed up my metabolism?

It is claimed that certain foods and drinks can boost your metabolism, including green tea, black coffee, spices and energy drinks. The evidence behind these claims is flimsy, the effect on your metabolism is marginal at best and each person will respond differently to each product.

While you don't have much control over the speed of your metabolism, you can control how many calories you burn through your level of physical activity. The more active you are, the more calories you burn. In fact, some people who are said to have a fast metabolism are probably just more active — and maybe more fidgety — than others.

Here are the three most effective ways of burning calories:

Aerobic activity
Aerobic exercise is the most efficient way to burn calories. You should aim to do 150 minutes of aerobic activity, such as walking, cycling and swimming, a week. You can achieve this target by doing 30 minutes five days a week and breaking down your activity sessions in chunks of 10 minutes. To lose weight, you are likely to need to do more than 150 minutes a week and make changes to your diet. Physical activity guidelines for adults.

Strength trainingMuscle tissue burns more calories than fat tissue, so increasing your muscle mass will help you lose weight. Don't worry, you don't need to turn into Arnold Schwarzenegger! Aim to do muscle-strengthening activities on two or more days a week that work all major muscle groups (legs, hips, back, abdomen, chest, shoulders and arms). Examples of muscle-strengthening activities include lifting weights and high intensity bouts of exercise. Heavy gardening may also do the job.

Be active
Being constantly on the move and reducing time spent sitting down will help you burn more calories. Any extra movement helps burn calories. Look for ways to walk and move around a few minutes more each day than the day before. The more you move, the more calories you burn. Get ideas on fitting more activity into your day. 

Can certain medical conditions cause a slow metabolism?

Some diseases and conditions can slow a person’s metabolism, such as Cushing’s syndrome and hypothyroidism (an underactive thyroid), but more often than not, people’s weight is a matter of consuming more calories than they burn. However, if you feel that you may have a problem that’s not responding to lifestyle changes, seek medical advice.

This article is from the NHS site and you can read it here:-  

http://www.nhs.uk/livewell/loseweight/pages/how-can-i-speed-up-my-metabolism.aspx

      

Are You Lifting Enough Weight?

Blend Images - Dave and Les Jacobs/Brand X Pictures/Getty Images

If you lift weights, have you ever wondered whether you're doing it right? Specifically, are you lifting enough weight? According to a study done by the University of Michigan, many of us aren't. Researchers took beginners (both men and women) through a series of moves, allowing them to choose their own weight. After assessing their 1 rep max (the general standard for choosing weight), they determined that most chose a weight well below what was needed to stimulate muscle growth.

Are you guilty of going too light? If so, you may not be seeing the results you'd like. Learn more about why lifting heavier weights could change your entire body.

Why Lifting Heavy is the Key to Weight Loss

You know that losing fat involves increasing your metabolism. What you may not know is that muscle plays a huge role in raising metabolism. A pound of muscle burns about 10-20 calories a day while a pound of fat burns 5 calories. That means any growth in your muscle tissue is going to help you burn more calories all day long. In fact, strength training has all kinds of great effects on your body like:

• Increasing resting metabolic rate so you burn more calories, even while at rest.
• Making you lean and slim--muscle takes up less space than fat so, the more you have, the slimmer you are
• Strengthening bones and connective tissue, which can protect your body from injuries in daily life
• Enhancing balance and stability
• Building confidence and self-esteem

However...this only works if you're using enough weight to stimulate that muscle growth. In other words, if you can lift the weights you've chosen (for most exercises) more than 16-20 times, you might not see the kind of fat loss you would if you increased your weight.

So, why don't we lift more weight? For some, lifting weights is scary, especially if you've never done it before. The machines...the dumbbells...the people who seem to know what they're doing...it's enough to make anyone skip weights altogether. Aside from that, there are other fears that invade our minds, such as:

• It feels weird. The goal of weight training, if you didn't know, is to lift as much weight as you possibly can (with good form!) for the number of reps you've chosen. In daily life, we typically don't push ourselves to fatigue in anything we do, so this idea may not only feel foreign, it may feel downright miserable. That's one reason it's best for beginners to gradually work towards that.
• Fear of injury. Because our muscles burn when we challenge them with resistance, people often feel they're injuring themselves when they lift. And injury can be a real fear for beginners since injury can occur if you max out before your body is ready for it. Taking it slow while still challenging your body will help protect you from injury.
• Confusion. When you haven't lifted weights before, you may not know what's too heavy and what's too light. It may take some time to get a feel for your body and what it can handle.
• Fear of getting bulky. There's still a tired old myth running around that men should lift heavy and women should lift light to avoid getting big and bulky. Women hear this: Lifting heavy weights will NOT make you huge--you simply don't have the testosterone levels to build big muscles. Lifting heavy weights WILL help you lose fat.
• Fear of pain. The other thing about lifting weights is the psychological factor. The discomfort level associated with training to fatigue is pretty high...if you haven't lifted weights before, you may not be able to overcome that discomfort enough to lift as heavy as you're capable of. Again, this is one reason it's best to err on the side of caution (if you need to), while always working towards more challenge and more weight.

These fears often keep people lifting the same amount of weight for weeks, months or even years. Most of these fears are unfounded, if you take time to ease into a weight training program and work (slowly) towards the muscle fatigue that will make your muscles grow.

So, how do you choose your weights? Read on to find out How Much Weight You Should Lift.

How Much Weight Should You Lift?

How Much Should You Be Lifting?

For weight loss, science has found that lifting between 60-80% of your 1 rep max is the best way to stimulate muscle growth, which is what helps you lose fat. The problem is that most of us don't think much about how much weight we need, much less going through the process of figuring out 1 rep max for every exercise we're doing. In fact, I see many gym-goers lifting the same weights week after week, which is just one way to keep your body from changing.

So how do you figure out how much to lift if you don't know your 1 rep max? Typically, if you lift 60%-80% of max, you could do anywhere from 10-20 reps. Lifting at 80% and above takes you down to the lower rep range, which is where you'll be if you're trying to gain size. That means keeping your reps somewhere between 8-16, if you're lifting for weight loss and fitness. Your weights are determined by the number of reps you're doing.

For Beginners:

• Choose a weight you can only lift 16 times. You don't need to go to complete failure, but make sure you're challenging your body.
• Begin with 1 set of each exercise, slowly working your way up to 2-3 sets (i.e., adding a set each week)
• When you've added sets and have a solid foundation (after 6-8 weeks), add more weight so that you can ONLY do 8-12 reps.
• Continue to progress by adding a rep each week until you reach the max reps (no more than 16), increase your weight and drop your reps back down to 8-12.

For more on the specific guidelines of strength training, including choosing reps, sets and exercises, read Weight Training 101.

The important thing to remember when it comes to strength training is that you must give you your muscles more weight than they can handle--that's how muscles grow. The challenge of lifting heavy is just as much a mental game as it is a physical one and, if you haven't pushed your body's limits in a while, just the act of lifting weights may be all you can handle. If you're consistent with a basic program and build a solid foundation of strength, you'll be ready for the next step--lifting heavy and pushing your muscles to their limits. You'll be amazed at the changes in your body.

Source:

http://exercise.about.com/od/exerciseworkouts/a/liftingheavy.htm

The 6 Weight-Loss Tips That Science Actually Knows Work

Some of the weight loss articles out there these days are getting a little nutty. New scientific studies that shed light on how metabolism works are wonderful and valuable in their own right, but when findings get morphed into magical new “tips” for losing weight, something’s amiss. Some recent pieces in prestigious journals, which have sought to dispel the myths of weight loss and of the individual diets themselves, suggest that the medical community is also getting tired of the hype and the unfounded assumptions that permeate the public discussion.

When it comes down to it, the things we know to be true about weight loss are relatively simple, and certainly few. They’re also extremely effective when actually carried out. So, from the researchers who have studied this stuff for decades, here’s pretty much everything we know about weight loss today, whittled down to six points about how the body actually gains, loses, and maintains its weight.

(Photo credit: Wolfgang Wildner)

1. Dieting trumps exercising

We hear a lot that a little exercise is the key to weight loss – that taking the stairs instead of the elevator will make a difference, for instance. But in fact it’s much more efficient to cut calories, says Samuel Klein, MD at Washington University’s School of Medicine. “Decreasing food intake is much more effective than increasing physical activity to achieve weight loss. If you want to achieve a 300 kcal energy deficit you can run in the park for 3 miles or not eat 2 ounces of potato chips.” It’s as simple as that. Some studies have borne out this dichotomy, pitting exercise against diet and finding that participants tend to lose more weight by dieting alone than by exercise alone. Of course, both together would be even better.

The problem is that when you rely on exercise alone, it often backfires, for a couple of reasons. This is partly because of exercise’s effects on the hunger and appetite hormones, which make you feel noticeably hungrier after exercise. “If you walk briskly for an hour and burn 400 kcal,” says Klein, “and then have a beer and a slice of pizza afterwards because the exercise made you feel hungry…you will eat more calories than you have burned.” It may not always be beer and pizza, but people do tend to naturally compensate for the calories they expend.

“This is an adaptive system,” adds David Allison, PhD. “For every action there’s a reaction; that’s a law of physics, not of biology, but it seems that it also works in biological systems. This is why we often overestimate quite radically an effect of a particular treatment.” He points out that public health campaigns that, for example, urge people to take the stairs instead of the elevator or go on a nightly stroll – or, for that matter, even eat fewer calories – are unlikely to work, since they may fail to take into account the body’s compensatory mechanisms that can totally counteract the effect.

The other problem with exercise-without-dieting is that it’s simply tiring, and again, the body will compensate. “If the exercise made you tired so that you become more sedentary the rest of the day, you might not experience any net negative energy,” says Klein. Some of the calories we burn come from our basic movements throughout the day – so if you’re wiped out after exercise, and more likely to sit on the couch afterwards, you’ve lost the energy deficit you gained from your jog.

2. Exercise can help fix a “broken” metabolism, especially during maintenance

“People used to come into the doctor’s office and say, ‘My metabolism is broken!’” says James Hill, PhD, at the University of Colorado. “We never had any evidence that it actually was, until recently. We were wrong – it was!” While exercise may not be as important for weigh loss as calorie restriction, as Hill says, it’s important in another way: It begins to repair a broken metabolism.

“A lot of what we know in this area comes from NASA, of the bed-rest studies,” he says. “Within a couple of days of non-activity, the metabolism becomes inflexible. You start moving again, and it does start to change.” Your metabolism may not ever go back to “normal” (more on this below), but the evidence indicates that it can indeed pick up again, in large part through moving your body every day.

This is a large part of why exercise is critical in the maintenance phase, which is well known to be more difficult than the weight loss phase. Essentially, it buys us some wiggle room, says Michael Jensen, MD at the Mayo Clinic. “Exercise is very, very important for maintaining lost weight, and people who are not physically active are more likely to gain weight. We think it’s partly because in the extra calories burned from physical activity, you have a bit more flexibility in food intake, so you’re not so much relying on ridged changes in eating habits; it makes it more tolerable.”

3. You’re going to have to work harder than other people – possibly forever

Though exercise can help correct a metabolism that’s been out of whack for a long time, the grisly reality is that it may not ever go back to what it was before you gained weight. So if you’ve been overweight or obese and you lose weight, maintaining that loss means you’re probably going to have to work harder than other people, maybe for good. “The sad thing,” says Hill, “is that once you’ve been obese or not moving for some time, it takes a little more exercise to maintain. It doesn’t come back to normal.” It’s not a pretty reality to face, but coming to grips with it is important, he says, so that you won’t get frustrated when you discover that you have to do more work over the long term than your friend who was never overweight.

Building muscle can help your body burn a few more calories throughout the day, but it’s also likely that you’ll have to work harder aerobically in the long run. “It’s not fair, but that’s the way it is,” adds Hill. “Once you understand it, though, you know it and it’s better. Because you can work with it.”

4. There’s no magical combination of foods

We often think that if we can just discover the “right” combination of foods, we’ll magically lose weight or maintain what we’ve lost. There are low-fat diets, low-carb diets, low glycemic diets, Paleo diets, and a lot of iterations of all of these. Jensen points out that in fact there doesn’t seem to be any “right” diet, and there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that one particular diet will work better with an individual’s specific metabolism. “The big myth out there,” he says, “is that there’s a magical combination of foods – be it protein, vegetarian, and what have you – that’s going to be unique because of its unique interaction with your metabolism. We know pretty much that any diet will help you lose weight if you follow it. There’s no magic diet. The truth is that ALL Diets will work if you follow them.”

5. A calorie IS a calorie!

And for energy balance, it’s the number of calories that matters. Weight loss on the Twinkie Diet proves this principle: Last year, Mark Haub at Kansas State University lost 27 pounds eating junk food. And this is pretty good proof of concept, says Yale University’s David Katz, MD, who has written extensively on the futility of the “is a calorie a calorie?” debate.

It’s certainly true – at least in theory and sometimes in practice – that all calories are created equal. “From the standpoint of body weight,” adds Marion Nestle, PhD, of NYU, “a calorie is a calorie no matter what it comes from. You can gain weight eating too much healthy food as well as unhealthy. From the standpoint of health, it’s better to eat your veggies…. It’s just a lot easier to overeat calories from junk food than healthy food. But it can be done.”

But the source of calories obviously matters for other reasons. One, says Katz, is that “the quality of calories is a major determinant of the quantity we ingest under real world conditions.” First of all, no one overeats veggies, so on a practical level, that’s a non-issue. “But where the calories come from does matter in that they influence satiety,” he adds, and this is partly psychology and partly biology. In fact, the food industry has carved out a whole new area of food science to study the “bliss point,” in which foods are created to increase the amount it takes to feel satiated and full. On one hand, says Katz, “we have the ‘bliss point’ science to tell us that the food industry can process foods to increase the calories it takes to reach satisfaction. We have the reciprocal body of work, including the Harvard study of the ONQI, showing that ‘more nutritious’ means, among other things, the opportunity to fill up on fewer calories.”

It’s true that types of foods you eat may, over time, affect your metabolic profile, so they may also matter in this way, but when it boils down, sticking to any reduced-calorie diet will create the energy deficit needed to lose weight. So the point is not to question what a calorie is, but rather to understand that we need to “trade up” our foods, says Katz – exchange the very dense, calorie-packed foods for foods that are less calorie-dense and more nutritionally dense: these are the ones that are bulkier, less energetically rich, have more or higher quality protein, are lower on the glycemic index, and more fibrous.

6. It’s all about the brain 

As my colleagues have reported (here and here), when it comes down to it, it’s not the body or the metabolism that are actually creating overweight or obesity – it’s the brain. We all know intuitively that poor decisions are what make you gain weight and better ones are what make you lose it. The problem is that over time, the poor decisions lead to significant changes in how the brain governs – and, amazingly, responds to – the hunger and satiation processes. Years of any kind of behavior pattern lay down neural tracks, and overeating is no exception.

The good news is that there’s increasing evidence that the brain can, in large part, “fix” itself once new behavior patterns emerge (i.e., calorie restriction, healthy food choices, and exercise). While there may be some degree of “damage” to the brain, particularly in how hunger and satiety hormones function, it can correct itself to a large degree over time. The key is that the process does take time, and like any other behavior change, is ultimately a practice. “We want to change behavior here,” says Hill. “Anyone that tells you it’s going to happen in 12 weeks, that’s bogus. We’re trying to rewire the brain. Neurobiology has told us so much about what’s going on in weight gain and weight loss. It takes a long time to develop new habits, rituals, routines. This takes months and years. But it will happen.”

*  *  *

So boiling it down even further: reduce calories, eat better, exercise, and most of all, remember it is a practice that has to be repeated over time – months or years. The fact that you’ll have to work harder at maintenance than your never-overweight best friend is depressing, but it’s worth coming to terms with. And, most important to remember, your brain (the organ behind all this, after all) is plastic, and it will respond to the changes you make – better than you think. And so will your body.

This article is by Alice G Walton, a contributor to Forbes, and you can read it here:- http://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2013/09/04/the-6-weight-loss-tips-that-science-actually-knows-work/