WARNING: Don’t Fall For This Fat Loss Myth
By Ryan Maier
I'm going to spout off for a moment. Please forgive me ahead of time.
I'm so tired of seeing this myth being passed around as fact. I see it all over Pinterest, on TV shows, and I even saw it at the doctor’s office! Aaaaarghh!
What myth am I talking about?
We’ve all heard this myth. You know it well I'm sure -- the one that goes like this: A pound of fat is roughly 3500 calories. Therefore, in order to lose one pound of fat per week, we only need to create a caloric deficit of 500 calories per day. Sounds easy enough, right? Heck yeah! It's just math after-all. Math doesn’t lie. ::Facepalm:: (Just to be clear, our bodies don't run on math. No matter how easy they make it sound.)
And, If it’s so easy, then why the heck is everyone still fat?
Ok, I’ll try to control myself. Let’s start over. So, you watch The Biggest Loser, you read all the magazine articles, you pin all the best fat loss tips on Pinterest, you listen to your doctor’s recommendations,
you read the stories of others who lost weight, and they all swear by the calories in vs. calories out way of losing weight. I mean, it is still considered fact that if you are eating less calories than you “burn”, you'll lose weight. I’ll get into all that in a different post.
For now, I want to set the record straight for you poor people out there that are still starving yourselves, walking around like zombies, mad at the world because your 3500 calories per pound formula just doesn’t seem to be giving you the results you were promised.
But first, I want to be clear about something; I am not saying that you won't lose body mass (notice I didn't say fat) if you are in a caloric deficit -- this is inevitable. But, there is no set number of calories your body burns every day -- it's an ever-changing number. There's simply no way to quantify it.
That fact, paired with all the other quantifiable facts we do know about fat
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