Ten Exercise and Nutrition False Beliefs

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People Hold Many False Ideas About Nutrition and Exercise

Here are ten common ones:

1. You Can Change Your Metabolism or Metabolic Rate

This is a major false belief and it’s championed everywhere you look. Your resting metabolism relates to your body size. If you gain weight, metabolism increases a bit and likewise if you lose weight it decreases. But you do not have volitional control over your metabolism any more than you can control your temperature. These, and many other functions, are regulated features of life.

2. Add a Lot of Muscle and Become a Fat-Burning Machine

Adding muscle is not easy. Muscle at rest burns 5 calories per pound over 24 hours and fat burns 2 calories per pound. So, added muscle AT REST doesn’t do much to increase you calorie burn.

3. You Can Get Rid of Fat by Working Out and Changing It Into Muscle

Fat is fat and muscle is muscle — you cannot convert one into the other.

4. Eating Non-Fat Foods Means You Can Eat All You Want

Calories control your weight, so eating less fat and eating more carbohydrates and protein will increase your calorie intake and you’ll get fat.

5. You Can Target Specific Areas of Your Body to Lose Fat

There is no such thing as spot reduction of fat tissue. You accumulate fat in areas dependent upon your own body’s fat-storage pattern.

6. Eat Many Small Meals a Day to Increase Calorie-Burning

This is an old false belief as it has been around for years and forms the basis of many modern-day, popular weight loss plans. The idea is that it uses up calories to burn the newly consumed food. Research clearly shows that the digestion and processing of food uses about 10% of your total daily calorie burn. This is known as the Thermic Effect of Food.

7. Carbohydrate is the Preferred Fuel of Your Body

This is another major blunder that causes people many problems and makes most diet and weight loss programs ineffective. Fat is the preferred fuel and, in fact, 90% of your calorie burn at rest comes from fat. The body will burn what you feed it and if you eat more carbs then it’ll burn more of those but it’s really programmed to burn fat.

8. This Exercise Burns 3 Times More Calories Than This or That Exercise

This is another great marketing tool. You body can only burn so many calories per minute. You can train yourself to burn more per minute but there is still an upper limit. You burn more calories depending on the amount of muscle that is active during the exercise.

9. Running is Better Than Walking

You’ll burn more calories per minute running but walking is good enough to become very fit and you’ll enjoy it more.

10. The Fat You Eat Turns Into the Fat on Your Body

Actually, the body doesn’t very easily store the fat you eat as body fat unless you eat it with carbohydrates. It is the carbohydrates that you eat that get rapidly converted to body fat. This textbook biochemical fact is unknown and the promotion of the ‘fat to fat theory’ is the undoing of many people’s efforts to control body weight.

These ten false beliefs are the tip of the iceberg and are the basis of my next book : EXPOSED! The Great Diet Book Scam. The proliferation of an endless stream of weight loss books is never-ending because people continue to fail at weight loss.

It really is simple if you know all the facts as I spell out in Ultimate Diet Secrets lite.

Change Your Metabolism and Lose Weight Fast Now

I love the rags at the supermarket checkout lines — all the weight loss plans splashed all over the covers of the magazines.

Promises that if you just eat this special food, or follow this exercise program, that your metabolism will shoot through the roof and those pounds will finally melt off your body like never before.

What Are the Real Facts About Your Metabolism?

• metabolism is like gravity — it’s part of Mother Nature’s Laws
• it’s not modifiable
• sure, if you gain or lose weight then metabolism will increase of decrease respectively
• the change won’t be significant

How about the idea that you don’t lose weight because you have a slow metabolism? More hogwash. Your metabolic rate (how fast your body burns calories) is dictated by your body size.

There are two main parts to your metabolic rate: resting metabolism and activity metabolism. For most people the resting metabolism is 70% of their total daily calorie burn.

The one you can change is the activity part — that’s where moving your body comes into play.

Add Muscle and Increase Your Metabolism

Adding a good bit of muscle is tough to do, but no matter, muscle at rest burns few calories; in fact, a pound of muscle at rest burns 5 calories in 24-hours and a pound of fat burns 2 calories per 24-hours. Forget about this.

Amazingly, most people have heard about and believe this myth — anothet major reason for weight loss failure.

Why Weight Loss Remains So Confusing

Do We Question So-Called “Authority” — or Do We Just Let It Go?

The nightly news reported on the new weight loss study released yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The study was the brainchild of two of the pre-eminent medical institutions in the world: the Harvard School of Public Health and the Pennington Biomedical Research Center at LSU.

Seventeen names represented the authorship of the article. The purpose of this multi-year study was to establish if diet composition — how much protein, fat, or carbohydrate in the diet — would impact weight loss.

The researchers validated the well-known fact that calories dictate what happens to body weight over the long haul. Although there were four different dietary combos of the three major food types, the results showed that diet composition was not a factor in weight loss.

There were problems with this study:

• participants lost weight during the first six months and then began to regain weight during the next eighteen months
• this result parallels 50 years of weight loss research showing that people never lose weight at the pre-trial predicted rate
• people do not stick to a weight loss regimen in which calories are reduced — they can’t and I’ll tell you why in a moment

The researchers concluded “that diets that are successful in causing weight loss can emphasize a range of fat, protein, and carbohydrate compositions.” It’s important to emphasize that the range of carbohydrate intake was between 35%-65% of the day’s total calories.

Few People Have the Experience and Backgroud to Make the Following Analysis

Here’s the important point that these researchers do not know: for carbohydrates to contribute to weight loss, the daily composition of the carb intake must be at or lower than 25% of the day’s total calorie intake.

What’s the real result of this study?

Just more confusion.

So, the breaking news covered by all the media is now that diet composition does not matter in weight loss — a totally false conclusion!

We just fall deeper into the quicksand. Here’s what else our research elite just don’t get:

• the reason subjects started regaining is because they could no longer stick to a calorie-reduced diet
• Why? Because they were hungry
• the body rapidly converts carbs to body fat and this process is brisk when carb intake exceeds 25% of calories
• the blood then clears of fuel and ravenous hunger sets in
• the body wants to go back to its original weight
• at 24 months, the average loss among the 4 groups was about 8 pounds — that stinks — 2 years for a lousy 8 pounds
• and, I’ll bet in another year that most will be back to where they started or heavier

We’ve seen the same problem with researchers who study a low carb diet. They simply have no practical experience in it and follow the fatally flawed Atkins’s version. In this study, they did not follow a true low-carb diet, again, because they have no practical experience in knowing what that actually is.

Yet, these researchers, coming from trusted centers, will have the last say and the country will now believe that diet composition makes no impact on weight loss.

Yes, calories do count, but if one cannot stay on a calorie-reduced diet, he has no chance of succeeding in weight loss and certainly if he did lose some, in maintaining the loss. To succeed in calorie-reduced diets, carbs must be dropped to at least 25% of total daily calorie intake, and better yet to below 15%.

Introducing Dr. Ellis’s Ultimate Diet Secrets lite

UDS-lite: My Pared-Down Version of the 600 Page Ultimate Diet Secrets

Now, I Do Love Ultimate Diet Secrets Because it’s a Book All About My Life’s Work

I’ve got everything in there that I’ve learned during the last 48 years about bodyweight regulation including:

• diet
• exercise
• and all of the important factors involved in the process

But since I introduced UDS in late 2002, there were those who said it was too big and some who simply did not want to plunk down $60 for a weight loss book, as you’ll see.

Book advisors had warned me about this, but I paid no heed.

I knew what I wanted to write and that it was far different than any book ever written about this subject before, and so did my readers.

But, I’m all about giving people what they want and I don’t want anyone who’s interested in weight loss and weight control to miss out on the most ground-breaking information ever presented on this topic because of issues related to size and price.

So, because of consumer demand, I put UDS on a post-holiday diet and trimmed it down by 350 pages. Amazingly, readers will still get all of the critical information they need for success. I know that I never could have written UDS-lite first; it could have arisen only out of the larger book.

How’d I Do It?

I cut out some of the chapters that were not directly related to the weight loss process. These included:

• Chapter 24 (Refined Foods: Sugar and White Flour)
• Chapter 25 (Vegetarianism)
• Chapter 6 (Plumbing the Depths of Academia: Cholesterol and Heart Disease)
• Chapter 21 (my detailed analysis of all the flaws, misinformation, and downright bad ideas behind most of the popular weight loss plans)
• and the Epilogue to my personal story

I also combined several Chapters and cut down on a lot of my autobiographical Chapters (even though my readers love them). In UDS, I used many pages to detail all the science and WHYS about how the body regulates its weight, so out went a lot of that, leaving you with just the HOW TO DO IT and enough explanation about the WHYS so you understand the basics of HOW it all works.

Instead of keeping the big page format for the paper, I folded it in half, reducing the page size to 5½ by 8½ inches.

Several years ago one of my clients said, “Give it all to me in 150 pages.” I argued that I couldn’t possibly do that. But, I was wrong… I could, but I needed to write the big book first to act as a template for UDS-lite.

The result? The best weight loss book ever written (and the only one you’ll ever need) is now available in a quick-reading, right-to-the-point, more standard size and price, and it’s absolutely competitive with an SRP of $24.95 as a printed book and $20.95 as an e-book.

Which Version is Right for You?

• if you want to become an expert in the subject of weight control and know everything possible about the subject, buy Ultimate Diet Secrets — UDS big
• if you want to know and fully understand the science about how the body regulates its weight so you’ll truly understand all the processes involved and how you can control them, buy Ultimate Diet Secrets — UDS big
• if you would like to read more about my background, the years I’ve put into researching and studying all this information, buy Ultimate Diet Secrets — UDS big
• if you want to read all about the ‘other’ diets and exercise routines I’ve tried over the years and what the results were, buy Ultimate Diet Secrets — UDS big
• buy Ultimate Diet Secrets — UDS big — if you want the most information — information that will truly give you control over your weight and dramatically improve your quality of life

Also, as you’ll see on my Order Page for UDS-lite, when you buy either the printed or e-book version of the full-size Ultimate Diet Secrets, you’ll get e-book versions of the other two books in this series, my Spectrum Training System — my resistance training guide, and Vitamin & Mineral Hoax, my guide to supplements — a $32.90 value), absolutely free!

However, if you just want the crucial information you need to control your weight, buy lite:

• if you want all the HOW-TOs but don’t care to know all the WHYS (the science behind it all), buy UDS-lite
  and if you aren’t interested in my background or my research (maybe you’ve already decided you trust my advice), buy UDS-lite
• if you just want a quick-reading book that gets you on the path to weight loss success as fast as possible and you don’t want the free training guide and supplement guide, buy UDS-lite
• or if you just don’t want to or can’t spend $60 to become an expert on weight loss, buy UDS-lite
  and if you decide later that you want any of the missing information from UDS, you’ll see that on the Order Page, every chapter of the full-size book is available for purchase as an e-book (or e-chapter)

You simply can’t go wrong — just buy the extra chapters you want at any time.

And remember: there’s no book out there on weight loss that even comes close to what I am offering, regardless of which version you choose. What I teach is the way it works, this was true 3 million years ago and will be true 3 million years from now unless we up-end our genetic make-up.

You Don’t Start a Weight Loss Diet Thinking That It Will Fail

But Failure is the Most Common Outcome or There’d be No Obesity Epidemic

If You Don’t Care That You’re Not in the Shape You Want, You Wouldn’t be on this Site

My primary life goal was not a job, or an education, or a family; it was to solve my overweight and “I’m-too-fat” problem. I got fat at age twelve.

I solved it. I learned HOW to do it. It was an enormous amount of work and took a great deal of time and then effort. I tried all the plans and vegetarianism too and failure was most often the outcome. You see, all the plans out there don’t actually teach you HOW weight control works.

• they’re just a plan
• and if the plan doesn’t work then you’re stumped
• and on you go to the next one
• it’s an endless merry-go-round

What I learned is that there’s only one thing that dictates weight control and that’s Calorie Balance.

Now, it’s more complicated than that, and that’s what I teach in my body of work.

OK, if calories control, then any diet MUST, somehow, cause one to eat fewer calories than he burns. Simple. But, you’re never taught this basic principle. You go from one diet plan to another as if there’s some sort of magic to each one, that it’s somehow different than all the others.

Lets Look at Some of the Major Diet Programs of the Last Twenty Years: An Analysis

Dr. Atkins’s Low-Carbohydrate Plan

First published in 1972 with several later variations, the main crux of Atkins’s plan was a major reduction in carbohydrate intake.

Atkins’s maintained that calories don’t count from day one. Some have argued that he never said that, but that notion simply does not stand up to scrutiny.

How does Atkins’s plan reduce calorie intake?

• a low-carbohydrate eating style leads to more fat burning in the cells
• the body switches from carbohydrates as the primary energy source of fuel to fat
• fat also releases from the fat cell
• the body, therefore, goes from a storage mode to a fat fuel release and burn mode
• this keeps fat fuel in the blood
• this fat bathes all the cells in the body meeting their fuel requirements (calorie needs)
• these cells no longer send a feeding signal to the brain
• hunger is turned-off and food intake decreases, automatically, by about 1/3 

I like the low-carb diet but not Atkins’s Version of it. There’s too much missing from his Plan to make it workable and his Induction Phase (first step in following the Plan) is gruesome for most.

Zone by Dr. Barry Sears

I’ve long enjoyed these philosophical battles between those competing for the diet throne. Zone is a variation on the low-carb plan and proposes a 20/30/40 ratio for protein/fat/carbohydrates. Dr. Sears gets to be politically correct by keeping the fat intake at the recommended 30% level set by the medical Establishment.

How did he arrive at these ratios? I just told you why for fat (politically correct, but not biochemically correct).

So Sears worked from an agenda, not wishing to rankle anyone, and not from facts.

Why 40% for carbs? Dr. Sears believes that ketones in the blood are a bad thing as do most doctors. You see, ketones were first discovered in the blood and urine of diabetics. But no one took the time to understand that there are two types of ketosis: physiological, and pathological. One OK, the other not.

• ketones arise when fat cells release a lot of fat
• they’re made in the liver
• insulin dictates fat release from the fat cell
• carbohydrate intake dictates insulin release
• all pretty neat basic biochemistry that few know much about

So, in the Zone Plan, he keeps carbs up and insulin up and no ketones form.

This is very important: a low-carb plan begins to work its magic when daily carb intake is less than 25% of total calories. I teach the details of this in my work. You can see, then, that 40% in the Zone is simply too high to effectuate fat release and its subsequent hunger-squashing result.

How does Zone reduce calorie intake? In the same time-honored way all the others do: a menu. You get a menu to follow which is sort of like portion control. The menus are ALWAYS calorie restricted. No MAGIC, just following the calorie rule.

But, you’re never taught any of the basic rules so you fail when you stop with the menu (which you will).

Weight Watchers

A very interesting plan. Again, there are few people or companies who will stand up to the medical Establishment and other card-carrying members of the “fat-and-cholesterol-are-bad” crowd. Weight Watchers won’t.

Not much to say here:

• WW uses a point system rather than deal with calories
• WW believes people are just sick of the calorie deal
• in addition, WW believes that most people don’t understand the Calorie Theory or just plain don’t believe it 

WW also gives a menu and uses points.

The worst part of this diet is that it’s low-fat, so when you reduce your calorie intake and those carbs get converted to body fat, there’s little fuel left in the blood and hunger, painful hunger, is the result. Not too many people can overcome hunger.

Nutri-System

This company was started right here in my own home town of Philadelphia by Harold Katz the former owner of the Philadelphia 76ers.

Since then it has been out-of-business and re-birthed many times. In its most recent re-incarnation it adopted the meal plan routine and tied it to pre-packaged foods. Perfect way to control calorie intake.

It also embraced the Good-Carb/Bad-Carb Movement started by the so-called science of the Glycemic Index (GI). I cover that in detail on another page.

But, just to show how silly this is lets look at the GI: One feeds 50-gram portions of carbohydrate foods to test the blood glucose response to them. Now, a 50-gram portion of potato measures 1 1/2 X 1 1/2 X 1 inches — that’s it.

You can’t apply the GI to mixes of foods and to foods/meals that contain more than 50-grams — the test is precise, but the marketer’s use of it isn’t. 50-grams won’t be much of a meal.

Besides all of the above, the GI does not work and good-carb/bad-carb is all rubbish.

Why? That 50-gram portion of potato will yield glucose blood levels and an insulin response that shuts off fat release and maxes out carbohydrate conversion to fat. I hash out all of these details in my book Net Carb Scam.

Will some other carb give a higher glucose response? Yes, but that’s meaningless as the fat-shutting-off is already complete by the ingestion of 50-grams of any carbohydrate food.

How does Nutri-System reduce calories? Portion control, same way as everyone else.

Eating Right 4 Your Blood Type

This may be the most ridiculous book ever published on weight control.

What does one’s blood type have to do with calorie balance?

Absolutely Nothing.

Just for kicks (I knew the answer) I searched in the National LIbrary of Medicine for weight loss and blood type.

How many research papers came up on this subject? None, zero, nothing at all.

If there is any weight loss, again it’s calories. In fact, one of the 4 blood type diets is a low-carb diet so that’ll work to reduce calories.

The South Beach Diet

Another cardiologist, similar to Dr. Atkins’s background, wrote this book. He even admitted in its pages that he knew little about nutrition. Pretty easy analysis on this, similar to those above.

It’s important to outline that this is NOT a low-carb diet as most people believe it is.

It’s based on the woeful Glycemic Index (yet another one). And, boy, does he mess this up big time.

How do people lose weight on this plan? You guessed it — a menu. Checking out the daily calorie intake for the plan for the first two weeks shows a calorie intake of 1,500-1,700 calories per day. Very few people won’t lose weight eating so few calories.

Sonoma Diet

This recent addition to the diet wars bases its program on the so-called Mediterrannean diet, one that’s argued to be heart-healthy although no compelling evidence supports this contention.

In fact, its emphasis on olive oil and wine might be the two main factors that would convey health advantages.

Reasearch proves that alcohol consumption confers major health benefits (and that’s spirits and beer too).

During World War II the French tried to make a liter of wine available daily to its citizens and two liters to its soldiers!

How does Sonoma reduce calories? Portion control and menus. Again.

Here’s Why All These Plans Don’t Lead to Sustainable Weight Loss

It’s very clear that most plans employ the same methods of menus and portion control. Free-living people don’t, in reality, eat that way. No wonder weight loss failure is at an epidemic level:

• you never learn HOW it all works and when you quit the plan, you’re done for
• the twists, turns, and tweaks that are created are based on beliefs and ideas rather than science
• many doctors can’t read the science anyway such as the one who penned The South Beach Diet

What About Calorie Diets Such as the 1,500 Calorie, 1,200 Calorie, and 1,000 Calorie Diets?

Of course if you follow them, they’ll work. Unfortunately, most people mis-report what they eat and don’t lose.

I see this all the time. But if you’re burning 2,200 calories per day and you only eat 1,200, you’ll have to lose, nothing else is possible. But, in everyday life, people think they’re eating a reduced calorie diet when they’re not. This is why so many people believe that the Calorie Theory is false.

Your best combo is my Ultimate Diet Secrets lite and Net Carb Scam books. After reading them you’ll be educated at the highest level.

Ultimate Diet Secrets lite will get you on the straight path to weight loss success using the right diet plan.

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