10 Common Myths about Weight Loss and Nutrition
By Cambiati™ Wellness Programs
- Your body is a bank account: burn more calories than you take in and you will
automatically lose weight.
- There is no connection between food, mood, energy and mental clarity.
- Cardio exercises are great for burning fat (working out in the "fat burning zone" is
optimal for losing body fat).
- Everyone has food cravings and they help tell you what nutrients you need.
- When you eat doesn't matter as long as you keep the amount you eat under the
right number of points or calories or within the right zone, etc.
- Foods such as bananas, carrots, and almonds are good snacks in between meals
if you are trying to lose weight.
- Widening middles, arms that wave back, losing muscle and/or gaining a pot belly
are inevitable parts of aging.
- Orange juice is a great way to start the day.
- Drink a beverage with your meals to increase your daily water consumption.
- Always eat before you work out in the morning.
- Debunking Myth 1: Your body is a bank account: burn more calories than you take in and
you will automatically lose weight.
The body works more like a chemistry lab than a calculator. Even small amounts of the wrong food or beverage (or, some of us would swear, even looking at the wrong food!) will cause people to gain weight overnight. Weight gain or loss has as much to do with food sensitivities (often hidden), the timing of meals, imbalances of good bacteria and yeast in the gut, and hormonal effects of foods, as with calories.
- Debunking Myth 2: There is no connection between food, mood, energy and mental
clarity.
A high saturated fat and high sugar diet changes the balance of bacteria and triggers the inflammation response in the body. Gluten can have the same effect, even in non-allergic or apparently non-sensitive individuals, explaining why some people feel so much better without gluten, even if they test negative for an allergy.
- Debunking Myth 3: Cardio exercises are great for burning fat (working out in the "fat
burning zone" is optimal for losing body fat).
Many devoted athletes are frustrated by the lack of weight loss even though they are burning many hundreds of calories in their cardio exercise. What is going on? During the stress of long cardio workouts, the body draws on muscle tissue as fuel.
The body's hormonal system, interpreting the long workout as an early stage of starvation, calls for the storage of belly fat as a survival mechanism. These hormonal effects are stronger than the calorie-burning effects of exercise. Cut short your long cardio sessions and incorporate high-intensity interval training into your day by Burstacizing™.
- Debunking Myth 4: Everyone has food cravings and they help tell you what nutrients
you need.
If you are fighting cravings all day long, it can be a sign that you are not properly nourishing your body. Feeling unsatisfied after you eat can signal a lack of nutrition and hormonal balance in the foods you just ate. But what your mind craves is not necessarily related to what your body needs.
You may be surprised to learn that eating certain foods increases your appetite and cravings for it and other foods. Those trigger foods stimulate our appetite in ways that can leave us feeling out of control. This has more to do with bacteria and yeast imbalances than in signaling a nutritional need for that food.
Notice whether eating bread as an appetizer before a restaurant meal makes you eat more during the meal or tempts you to eat the dessert you had originally planned to skip. If so, you may want to avoid that trigger food so that your cravings go away.
- Debunking Myth 5: When you eat doesn't matter as long as you keep the amount you
eat under the right number of points or calories or within the right zone, etc.
The truth is calories matter, but the nutritional content and timing of your meals matter more. The hormonal effects of food trump calories.
When you eat is crucial to weight loss and health. For example, a meal or snack near bedtime interferes with the body's ability to release human growth hormone, preventing you from entering deep sleep, building muscle, and repairing damage to your body.
- Debunking Myth 6: Foods such as bananas, carrots, and almonds are good snacks in between meals if you are trying to lose weight.
Even nutritious snacks will raise blood sugar and insulin levels. Insulin signals the cells to use the food you just ate as energy and to store fat. Eat nourishing meals that balance your hormones and snack instead on beverages.
- Debunking Myth 7: Widening middles, gaining arms that wave back, losing muscle and/or gaining a pot belly are inevitable parts of aging.
It is true that people naturally lose some muscle mass as they age. It is also true that you undergo hormonal changes that affect your metabolism.
Many people become insulin resistant, which may make them more likely to have blood sugar issues, become pre-diabetic and to thicken around the middle. This means you may not be able to eat like you did when you were younger.
It is also common for activity levels to change. At some point, most of us stop doing the things that kept us fit in our youth. We stop playing sports or running because our knees or back hurt.
We no longer make time to go to the gym. More than aging, it is our lack of activity that makes it hard to stay fit and build muscle.
Toxicity levels also come into play because belly fat is one of the places where the body locks away toxins, picked up from food and beverages, skin care products, and the environment. To shelter itself from the toxins, the body stores them in fat.
- Debunking Myth 8: Orange juice is a great way to start the day.
Many people think that orange juice is a health food because of the wonderful nutrients that are in oranges.
The challenge with orange juice is that it raises insulin and blood sugar very quickly. That's why diabetics use it to raise blood sugar when they are having trouble stabilizing their blood sugar.
For someone who is overweight or trying to lose weight, drinking orange juice and most other fruit juices, by increasing blood sugar and insulin, leads to the triple whammy of craving carbohydrates and sugar, feeling hungry, and storing fat. Switch to a nourishing herbal tea and fresh water to start the day. Then follow with a hormonally balanced meal.
- Debunking Myth 9: Drink a beverage with your meals to increase your daily water consumption.
Digestive challenges plague most of the adult population and many kids. Acid reflux, upset stomach, gas, bloating, and constipation are the norm rather than the exception.
One reason is that the digestive enzymes in the mouth are diluted when we consume beverages with food, preventing them from doing their work digesting and absorbing food.
- Debunking Myth 10: You must eat before you work out in the morning.
Your cells can use food (glucose), stored energy (glycogen), or fat as fuel. If you are trying to lose weight, it is an ideal time to use your stored fat as fuel. When you wake in the morning, you have several hours of stored fuel in your glycogen cells.
While there are certainly medical conditions where this would not be recommended, most commonly you can activate those fat stores by drinking beverages and starting to move briskly in the morning.
- Avoid the triple threat: Sugar, salt and fat in combination cause just about everyone to overeat. (Ever eat a whole plateful of boiled potatoes? No? How about a whole bag of oily, salty potato chips?)
- Drink your way to better health: Increase your consumption of water, incorporate low-calorie, nutrient-rich additives like juiced parsley or spinach (or a dry-greens powder product), and substitute these for monster energy drinks, sodas, and fruit juices that overload you with sugar and fail to contribute to your health.
- Think veg: eat more vegetables and make your meals as colorful as possible to obtain a diversity of nutrients and to satisfy your dual desire for food that is varied (crunchy, soft, crisp) and aesthetically pleasing (so many shapes, colors, and textures).
- Health food may be making you fat: You may have no symptoms except for being tired and a bit thick around the middle, but it's probable that you have a sensitivity to a "health food" you are eating. Try a hypoallergenic diet for a few weeks to find the culprit.
We have all noticed how small actions can make a big difference in our lives. We wake up one morning completely out of sorts. Then someone smiles at us, or says they really enjoyed the talk we gave last week, or rubs our dog's belly, then suddenly we're engaged in the world again, and ready to face the day with a renewed energy.
Our mission at Cambiati™ Wellness Programs is to inspire people to make the small changes that lead to a healthier, happier life.
At Cambiati™, derived from the Italian cambiare, meaning to change, we practice remarkably simple and effective principles of well-being and vitality and incorporate them into our 28-Day Weight Loss JumpStart Program.
This group program not only addresses biochemical barriers to wellness, but also incorporates unique coaching methods drawing from nutrition, fitness, group dynamics, and addiction science.
Many participants from across the country have learned to read their body's reactions to foods, understand their own metabolism, and break free to better health and well-being.
About Ti Caudron, Cambiati's Chief Inspiration Officer:
We're not your mother's or your father's weight loss and wellness company! We try to cut through "accepted truths" of weight loss and well being to find methods that work based on our experience with thousands of clients over the years and our voracious review of new scientific studies.
Reflecting this tireless search for breakthroughs into wellness and ways to help our clients achieve their health goals, we have a Chief Inspiration Officer, Ti Caudron.
Always probing for new discoveries and observing how people really act and react in the world, rather than how people have assumed that they do, Ti is a perpetual motion machine, a whirl of positive energy constantly churning out new insights and ideas. Co-founder of Cambiati™ Wellness Programs, Ti has an unconventional yet scientific perspective on wellness and weight loss that is rooted in her statistics, economics, and quantitative methods background.
When Ti (with a PhD in economics from Johns Hopkins University) left the strategy consulting world to start a health and fitness business, she noticed that people kept getting stuck somewhere short of their weight loss and fitness goals. She also noticed that many people never felt completely well—there was always some nagging health issue or two.
Over the years, she has spent thousands of hours gathering quantitative data on metabolic dysfunction and working directly with clients, always watching, processing, and synthesizing their experiences and the latest scientific findings, trying to discover what was blocking their progress.
Drawing on these lessons, she worked with her clients to help achieve a new healthful balance in their lives and her own. These breakthroughs drove her to develop a universal and accessible program to help more people transform their lives.
As a lifelong learner and thought leader, Ti is constantly discovering, teaching, and speaking about topics related and tangential to the field of wellness. She has National Certifications in Group Exercise (American Council of Exercise) and Personal Training (APEX Fitness, Aerobics and Fitness Association of America, National Academy of Sports Medicine, CrossFit).
Ti also received specialized training in Lifestyle & Weight Management Consulting, Overcoming Weight Loss Resistance by the world renowned weight loss and nutrition expert JJ Virgin, and learned holistic cooking methods at Bauman College.
She also taught Business Practices to nutritionists at Bauman College and was an invited speaker at the Metropolitan Fire Chiefs Conference and the Fire Rescue International Conference. Ti is a member of the American Association of Nutritional Consultants and on any given day you may see her running with her lab shepherd mix, Stanley, or stretching at the gym.
For more information, visit www.cambiati.com
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Cambiati™ Wellness Programs
3100 Oak Rd, Suite 130
Walnut Creek, CA 94597
Phone: 925-280-4442
E-mail: info@cambiati.com
Disclaimer: These statements ahve notbeen evaluatedby the Food and Drug Administration and are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.
Cambiati™ Wellness Programs is not affiliated with or endorsed by any specific retailer of products nor are any of its programs medically supervised. Copyright 2010 TwentyEight LLC. May not be copied or reprinted without permission.
