If you feel like dieting information has become a blur of confusion and advice that doesn’t even make sense, then you’re not alone. There are so many diets for sale on the market and published as the next best thing that the counsel we’re getting from the “experts” seems to be leading us farther and farther astray. In a recent article, dieters asked the pros who have been studying nutrition, diets, health and exercise not to produce the next fad but to promote real health and real answers. Here’s the shocking guidance they offer.

Most diets today use the word “science” to promote the validity of their claims for weight loss and health. According to these actual scientists who have studied successful dieters for an astonishing number of years, the promotional “science” of dieting is very contradictory to the real science of healthy nutrition and fitness.

Weight loss happens in two successive stages that have to be approach in different ways in order for it to be successful. The first stage is actually losing weight. This lasts an average of 3 – 6 months during which time you can expect a 10% weight reduction as a reasonable goal. If you make it to 6 months you’re considered a success story. James O. Hill, the director for Human Nutrition at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver says that if you haven’t lost all the weight you want to in those 6 months you probably won’t. Weight is genetic. When you were at your lowest healthy weight in your adult life, you were most likely at the lowest healthy weight you can get to. Hill says that if you still have a lot of weight that you’d like to lose after your 6 months, the best approach is to take a few months and successfully maintain that weight before trying food restriction to lose even more. Food restriction, he says, is really the only way to lose weight. No gimmick or diet is going to do it for you. You’ve simply got to cut fat and calories in a way that you can maintain for life.

Hill reports that during stage one food restriction has everything to do with the weight loss and exercise plays a very small role at this time. “You can restrict you food intake by 500 to 1000 calories starting tomorrow, but you have to work out for a long time, at a high intensity, to burn as many calories.” He reminds us that there are lots of emotional and health benefits of exercising, but the benefit to you won’t come until stage two: Maintenance. This is when exercise becomes so important. When you burn a few hundred extra calories a day, you can eat a little more and keep your nutrition plan bearable for life. Hill says that successful dieters work out rigorously between 60 – 90 minutes a day.  

Another contradiction is that the idea of a fat-burning zone is a myth. Ralph La Forge from Duke University said that “In order to burn only fat, you would have to go at such a slow pace that you’d burn only two to three calories per minute. You’d have to walk 50 miles to get a decent workout.” No thanks!  

Related Articles
	Overcoming Your Weekend Weakness “Everybody’s working for the weekend” – so goes the 1981 hit by Loverboy. And it’s so true. No matter what you do for a living – whether you love your job or hate it – the weekend looms ahead joyously. It’s the one thing we can focus on when everything else is falling apart. It’s our idealized oasis   ...Read more		Looking and Feeling Younger With The Calorie Restriction Diet The Calorie Restriction Diet, or CR, is said to be the simplest and yet the most complex diet ever created. It was designed by Dr. Roy Walford whose research in rats showed that those fed a severely restricted diet lived 50% longer than average, which is the desired result of this “diet” that is not   ...Read more