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Fat Loss Myths

  • Method Health
  • Feb 3
  • 11 min read


"Is spot training effective?"

Sorry. The majority of weight loss studies suggest you are not able to volitionally choose where fat is reduced by targeting exercise to a specific area, traditionally called “spot reduction.” Yes, as you lose weight, people have different responses or areas in which they lose fat first, so you do have unique individual “regional fat reduction.”(read more) This does not mean you should stop doing sit-ups, squats, or arm exercises as

1) building muscle in that area will make these areas stand out in body fat percentage giving the illusion of “spot training” and

2) some evidence suggests that some effect of local fat loss can occur, but it is not yet replicated strongly (read more)

So until more research is released, strong opinions are not warranted due to most evidence for exercise or topical creams showing no effect on local fat reduction (read more).

 

 

What about “toning”?

Physiologically, not one adaptation explains what people want when training to “tone” but rather a combination of physiological changes. Toning can be thought of as a look achieved through a combination of spot reduction or increasing the look of leanness of a particular body area through resistance training, dehydration practises, and tanning. Again, you can’t choose where you become leaner in your body but it is still possible to increase muscle while reducing fat mass, a process called “body recomposition”, particularly if you complete progressive resistance training (read more). At the muscle level, change of appearance is explained by growing muscle size or atrophy of muscle. No other physiological process in the muscle explains what people mean by toning. So again, focus on weight loss and resistance training for muscle growth in areas you want to “tone.”

 

If you want to “tone” and lose fat in a specific area, it is best to just aim for whole-body fat loss (which exercise can help achieve by increasing daily energy expenditure compared to energy intake) while completing weekly resistance training in the areas where you want the muscle to grow or show. 

 

“My diet is the best diet.”

 

For weight loss, there is no best diet. The best diet for achieving weight loss is an eating pattern that allows a consistent weekly energy deficit that does not promote a post-weight loss rebound effect or a Yo-yo pattern where the diet was so restrictive or hard that weight is regained again.

 

All the diets you have heard of, such as the “low carb,” “low fat,” “juicing,” “detox,” “carnivore,” “paleo,” “fasting or time-restricted eating,” “dairy-free,” or “gluten-free” all achieve weight loss the same way. They all work by restricting certain food groups, making it hard to overeat (read more). The problem is that they are not sustainable long-term, making maintenance of your new weight difficult. In the long term, you might be affected by nutrient deficiencies. There may be aspects of each type of diet that feel right, such as food choices you enjoy, reducing highly processed calorie-dense meals, reducing intake of food groups you individually are not tolerating digestive-wise, and reduced feelings of hunger (due to high fiber, protein or water consumption) and early success with short term weight loss that makes a diet feel right for you.

 

These factors are unlikely to be similar, so each person will have their own “best” weight loss method. In the long term, as you practice different weight loss dietary patterns, you should think about shifting your dietary habits toward how you will eat when you lose weight. Principles from a high protein, plant-based, Mediterranean, DASH diet or MIND diet might have some utility for sustainable long-term eating habits as they promote sustainable dietary behaviour. A description of these diets, along with many great eating principles, will be included in future articles.

 

“Exercise is really good for weight loss.”

Kind of. Exercise has heaps of benefits, but to summarise, exercise burns less energy than we think, our trackers aren't very accurate, different people burn different amounts of energy completing the same amount of exercise, we tend to compensate later in the day, we tend to not compensate for becoming more efficient over time. Let's expand further.


  • Exercise itself “burns” less energy than you think it does. Our activity trackers (phones, watches, exercise machine estimates) and energy expenditure prediction equations are inaccurate enough to warrant them not being very helpful for most people.

  • “Constrained energy” theory testing has identified that we compensate for exercise by reducing energy expenditure later in the day when not exercising.

  • People lose different amounts of weight when given the same dose of exercise.

  • As you do more exercise, you literally become more efficient and will burn less energy with the same dose of exercise. Gradually increasing exercise across weeks while also making nutritional changes to reduce weekly energy intake will account for the naturally decreased energy expenditure during exercise due to you becoming fitter. 

  • Overall, burning 500 calories from exercise or reducing 500 calories from your diet tends to result in equal weight loss after many weeks.

 

This does not mean stop exercising when trying to lose weight. Here is why:

  • Most studies find combining exercise with an energy deficit is more effective long-term for weight loss.

  • The dosage is the key. We tend to find only after more than 300 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise per week that weight loss purely from exercise is more feasible, but it tends to be easier to also aim to improve diet quality and reduce portion size across time to guarantee sustainable weight loss.

  • More exercise literally means you have less time to eat, which also might be helpful for reducing energy intake during the day. 

  • Maintaining high levels of physical activity and exercise is helpful for reducing any regain in weight after you finish a weight loss phase.

  • Exercise is helpful for appetite regulation and can be a useful tactic to be distracted through a craving time period.

  • Exercise, especially strength training, reduces the amount of muscle you lose during weight loss, with some losses inevitable, especially with greater energy restriction diets not paired with exercise or when becoming very lean. The amount of muscle you lose during weight loss can predict your rate of regain with the more you lose the faster your potential weight gain.

  • Exercise has hundreds more benefits, even if not perfect for losing lots of weight. Many might be disheartened by the lack of effect of exercise on weight loss and stop exercising completely. Hopefully, this information helps you exercise more than less for other more effective reasons than losing body fat.

 

“Cardio is better than strength training for weight loss.”

Actually, for every minute, strength training, when combined with an energy deficit, is technically better for long-term weight loss outcomes than aerobic exercise. However, it is just easier for most people to complete more minutes of aerobic exercise than strength training but it is still best for your overall health to still do both aerobic and resistance training to meet and exceed the Australian Physical Activity guidelines.


Maintaining lean mass (muscle) during a calorie deficit means your daily energy expenditure will stay slightly higher than if you did not have this lean mass, which will mean you eat more food and don’t have to reduce energy intake as much. Aerobic exercise does not assist in maintaining muscle during a calorie deficit. So, heavy resistance training makes weight loss much easier and might be more efficient for weight loss per minute than just completing aerobic training.  

 

“I’ve got a slow metabolism.”

Metabolism only reduces after 60 years old on average. If you are the same weight as someone else, it's likely you will have a similar metabolic rate to them. Most reductions before and after 60 years of age then can largely be explained by lifestyle-related changes in internal organ and muscle mass. A “reduced metabolism” happens at the same time as ageing when our daily behaviour and work/family/social commitments reduce the ability to maintain a bodyweight-maintaining diet while completing the less regular weekly exercise.


This gradual change in lifestyle can feel like “ageing” but is best explained by the gradual reduction of fitness and strength and increased food intake compared to your daily energy expenditure. These combine to make physical tasks more difficult, giving the perception that “age makes things harder.” I am not discounting the effect of aging; it is just a negligible factor compared to the effects of changes in lifestyle factors. Also, age is non-modifiable, so it is not worth focusing on when we know that all ages have the ability to lose weight. 


Genetics can affect your food reward/appetite regulation compared to another person, increasing individual susceptibility to becoming overweight in our current “obesogenic” environment (listen for more). This does not mean weight loss is impossible. If you believe you have “bad” genetics for maintaining a healthy body weight, you need to pay more attention to other factors that influence weight gain, including the effect of individual (eating habits and food preferences), lifestyle/social (exercise, occupation, sleep, mental stress management, social support, family habits, etc) and environmental factors (access to healthy foods) will wash out most genetic effects on appetite. 


Some might respond and say, “But I hardly eat any food anyway.” Our response to this should be that often, we underestimate how much we are eating, which makes us blame a diet as not being effective or our genetics when really we are just eating more then we think. There are no non-responders to an energy deficit, but maybe a “did not respond” to a certain amount of energy restriction. Similar to what is encouraged for “non-responders” to exercise, where simply increasing the dosage/volume or weekly exercise reduces “non-response,” making lifestyle choices that allow you to move more and eat less in general regardless of what you are already eating will reduce your body weight. If you think you are not losing weight across weeks but don’t want to take away more food as you believe you are hardly eating anything, you can either complete an energy intake audit with a food tracker or diary that is assessed by yourself or better, an independent assessor like a dietician or continue to eat even less or/and move even more. 


Metabolism reduces during weight loss simply because you have less body mass, requiring an energy supply. At the same time, your appetite increases due to the body's protective response to this current state of “volitional starvation.” Embracing daily hunger as a positive indicator of weight loss while making lifestyle changes to account for weight loss effects is a very important principle to master to have successful weight loss phases.


Newer obesity medications like GLP-1 agonists or surgery are beneficial as they affect your appetite regulation and change other factors that help you tolerate eating less. They do not directly increase metabolism, and previous attempts to develop wide-scale drugs that do this have not been successful due to the severe side effects of these drugs during clinical trials. Yes, short-term medication use or surgery do not change unhealthy eating behaviors and habits that might reduce their overall effectiveness for some. No “get out of jail free cards” exist for weight loss. All methods (including receiving only nutrition coaching in the form of this article) have pros and cons.


Often blaming the metabolism is also paired with “it's my hormones.”

  • Rare endocrine disorders affect the difficulty (not ability) of losing weight, often through changing appetite regulation, mood states, and perceived daily fatigue rather than only directly decreasing metabolism. This means weight loss is still possible but is more difficult for these rare individuals. For most of us though, it is a complex interplay of our lifestyle choices, social commitments, access to healthy food, or nutrition education that affect our ability to lose weight rather than hormonal mechanisms that are contributing to nutritional behaviour. Be skeptical if you hear that this “one” thing is the reason you cannot lose weight, as this is likely a red flag of well-intended advice lacking the complex understanding of the barriers to maintaining or reaching a healthy body weight. 

  • There will be future articles on common questions below, but here are some quick references for now to ease any curious concerns (click here).


“What about cortisol?”          


“What about hypothyroidism or low thyroid hormone?”


“What about during menopause?”


“What about testosterone?”

 

“Fast weight loss is better than slow weight loss.”


Yes and no. Faster initial weight loss can be very motivating and can predict long-term success in some people. However, slower weight loss has been shown to predict less loss of muscle mass and less likelihood of regaining weight after a weight loss period. 


If you place a short-term timeframe on weight loss, it's likely you will regain this weight as the habits you need to lose lots of weight fast tend not to be sustainable in the long term. However, for some, this might be okay if the reason to lose weight was for a short-term goal like a wedding or the beach season, or being Tom Hanks in Castaway. Nevertheless, we advocate for maintaining low levels of fat mass life long to optimise your health, and “Yo-Yo” dieting might have negative health effects in the long-term.

 

“Weight loss only benefits the overweight.” or “I’m a normal weight, so I don’t need to lose weight.”

 

Weight loss has significant health benefits even in those within “normal” weight ranges. You can still have health-harming fat around your internal organs if you consider yourself “normal weight”.


This is not meant to fear monger but hopefully to inform those with what appears to be “hidden” fat, which might affect the development and progression of life affecting conditions like osteoarthritis, diabetes or cardiovascular disease.  Improvement in or reduced progression of these conditions with weight loss or exercise-induced body recomposition is a healthy life goal. 

 

“Losing weight is easy.”

The principles for losing weight can be simple but not easy in the long term. We all have many barriers to resisting weight loss and weight maintenance. Our body will resist weight loss. Appetite and craving will increase the more you lose weight, which should be interpreted as a positive indicator of weight loss (increased appetite is not something to fight or fix but is interpreted like fatigue after challenging exercise), but resisting can be challenging. Seek a good team of support, seek professional guidance, trust the process, and use every weight loss attempt as feedback (rather than “failure”), as each time you try and lose weight, you will be using the feedback from the last weight loss phases to get better at losing weight. 


Many might find themselves in a neverending lifestyle of “trying to lose weight,” which probably isn't great mentally for having a healthy relationship with food and your body image. Weight loss “failure” can cause a change in feelings of self-worth and reduce positive body image. Your weight does not reflect your value as a person, as common medical stigma can suggest. Any history of “diet” failure should not be reflected as a “failure” of being valuable but reflected as a self-empathetic and non-judgmental learning process toward one aspect of your life that reduces the negative health effects of being overweight.  


To have successful non-judgmental periods of weight loss, if possible, give yourself several blocks of multiple months of attempting weight loss followed by 1 to 4 weeks long “diet breaks” in between weight loss phases to practice weight maintenance or living and eating how you would like for the rest of your life when not trying to lose weight. Each block of months of attempted weight loss and then weight maintenance will provide information about how to improve the next time you attempt weight loss and what factors you need to maintain after a weight loss phase to maintain your leanness. Reframe any previous diet “failure” as a lesson of specific practices or habits that were not helpful for weight loss at that time. During every weight loss diet period you attempt, you will learn more about food, appetite, exercise, and social factors that make it easier or harder to lose and maintain weight for life.


 

 

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