Leah:
Hello and welcome to the Ideal Nutrition Podcast. I am Leah Heigl and I’m here with my co -host Aidan Muir. And today we will be addressing six common myths around weight loss. So personally, we don’t love to spend a lot of time just unpacking myths. think sometimes it can be not as helpful as basically just spending time going over what actually does work and strategies around weight loss that matter. But I think in this particular context, addressing some of these myths can be particularly helpful just to allow you to navigate this space with a little bit more clarity. We’re gonna do this in no particular order, but we are gonna split it up into two separate podcasts just to keep it nice and bite-sized.
Aidan:
The first myth we’re gonna cover is to lose fat, you need to keep insulin as low as you can. This is partly based on people talking about how insulin is the key for fat loss. The mechanisms for this are related to two potential things, potentially about insulin increasing fat storage and decreasing fat breakdown, which is true, or also insulin increasing appetite, which there’s a bit there as well. But we’ll go through them. Let’s start with that first one. So sometimes people imply that it is impossible to lose fat while insulin is in our system. But not only is it possible, but insulin is in our system a lot of the time. People clearly are losing fat while it is in our system. There’s research looking at that as well.
It decreases fat breakdown, but it’s not like it’s impossible to lose fat while it’s in our system. I could go deep on that. Actually, we’ll go deep on that. In our show notes, I’ve added a bunch of studies by Kevin Hall and these are just examples, but like, it’s looking at this insulin and fat loss concept. We’ve spoken about this before on the podcast, but one of the clearest examples is that in one of his studies, it was like a low carb versus higher carb or lower fat diet. There’s a 20% difference in insulin in the groups where in the higher carb group insulin was high and they both had the same fat loss. If insulin was the secret and the thing that mattered the most here, that wouldn’t be possible.
I wouldn’t disregard insulin or anything like that, but it’s clearly not the main thing we need to focus on. With the appetite thing, I’ve just got one quick thing that I would want to add on to unpack this whole insulin and appetite thing. A lot of people are in this camp of thinking that insulin spikes are the thing that cause appetite to get out of control and that leads to obesity.
This is one of the main factors in the insulin carbohydrate model of obesity. But let’s just take one moment to look at this from the other angle. You could use this as a hack to gain size if you wanted to. If you ever come across a skinny person who’s struggling to get enough calories in and they want to gain size or an athlete who struggles to eat enough or whatever, you can use tricks around this. Theoretically, you could have simple carbohydrates, like say 20 to 30 grams of simple carbs, 15 to 30 minutes before a meal.
You use that too spike insulin, get super hungry and then eat a massive meal. In fact, I’ve seen people say this from the opposite angle about being like, this is why you shouldn’t eat bread before a restaurant meal and stuff like that. But this hack just doesn’t work. Like it doesn’t solve it for these people. It doesn’t allow them to eat noticeably more. And obviously the whole appetite thing is a really, really complicated topic because there’s so many things that go into it. We start looking at like how palatable the foods when we add carbs and fat together and all of these kinds of things.
But I like to use that hack as a bit of an angle about being like, if this was a really powerful thing, we’d be able to use it in the other direction. And we don’t seem to be able to use that. I’ve seen so many people try and not have much success with it. So I wouldn’t be overly concerned about it.
Leah:
Myth number two is carbs cause weight gain. And this can be looked at from the point of view of somewhat related to that insulin myth in that a lot of people will say, well, if we have a lot of carbs, then our body releases a lot of insulin. There’s a lot of insulin in the system we can’t lose weight, but obviously just going back to what Aidan just unpacked, we know that this is not necessarily true. What I do think is worth unpacking here and what also leads to this misconception is just how glycogen is stored with water weight and the impact of dietary carb intake has on this.
So if we have a lot of carbs coming in, then it’s highly likely that we’re going to be storing more carbs as glycogen and therefore also storing water alongside this. A really good example is if you are on a low to moderate carb diet and then you have a really high carb meal and wake up much heavier the next day. This isn’t necessarily fat gain or muscle gain, but it is an increase in glycogen and water weight. And these shifts in scale weight can lead to that, like I said, misconception that carbs equal weight gain, but again, it is just this more transient water and glycogen that is not actual physical muscle mass or fat mass. So carbs do not directly cause weight gain outside of just those kinds of shifts in glycogen and water weight, unless there is a calorie surplus. And that’s when carbohydrates can absolutely be stored at turned into fat and then stored as fat or muscle and then have that actual increase in true scale weight?
Aidan:
That glycogen and water thing is also really underrated because there are plenty of people who have, say, adopted a low carb diet and every time they add carbs in their scale weight, God unquote, skyrockets. And if they’re self-analysing and looking at being like, what do I respond best to? The logical conclusion without that knowledge would be, every time I add carbs, my body weight goes up. Maybe a lower carb diet works for me. Whereas if you zoom out and you have this knowledge, you’d be like, okay, for likeccone or two days it would go up and they would just remain stable from that point as well.
Going really deep on that carbs cause weight gain thing, I like to use extreme examples for looking at stuff like this. Would never use it with a client, but it’s something that I think is worth talking through. There’s a relatively famous study that’s called the Rice Study. I don’t actually have the study title in front of me, but it’s, call it the Rice Study, where, and it is in the show notes if you wanted to check this, but where participants lost an average of 63.9 kilos. So that’s a lot.
It involved 160 participants with very high starting body weights. They also had really large improvements in fasting blood glucose levels and their two hour post meal blood glucose levels as well. So the insulin response improved as well. They pretty much just exclusively ate carbs, largely rice, but from memory, they also had a fair bit of fruit and sugar as well. I use that as an example about being like their carb intake was quite high. If carbs in isolation were the things that were causing weight gain, How did they not only lose weight, but how did they lose so much weight? How did they lose 63 .9 kilos on average? Like it’s such an extreme outlier study, but it’s so worth being aware of for this topic.
Leah:
The next myth we’re gonna talk about is ‘it’s not calories, it’s hormones’. And this is another one relatively easy to unpack because they both influence each other. It’s not this one or the other type of thing that we’re looking at. I would like to think that there’s no one out there, probably naive of me, but I’d to think that there’s no one out there who’s like, no, calories are literally all we need to focus on. We do not need to focus on anything else no matter what. It is both of them that matter. And they influence each other in the fact that our hormones will influence our calorie intake to a degree, like we have hunger and formless hormones, our hormones will affect our calorie expenditure. I could go through hundreds of examples of that, but we could just talk about thyroid hormones, even leptin has a role to play in our energy expenditure.
So we’ve got one side of the equation being like our intake is affected and the other side that is our expenditure being affected. But then we can take it further and be like, our intake affects our hormones. And also our output affects that as well. Like these things are constantly influencing each other. I don’t like just using one example because people like cling on to it. But if we just charted a male’s testosterone levels and put them into a massive calorie deficit for a long period of time, their testosterone is going to drop. Our intake is affecting our hormones. That’s one of so many possible examples. So it’s a myth to say it’s not calories, it’s hormones, because they both matter and they both interplay with each other.
Leah:
Myth number four, eating breakfast boosts your metabolism or, quote unquote, kickstarts your metabolism is something that we see a lot. Well, if we look at the research, especially looking at really tightly controlled research on this topic, there is really no difference in total output through metabolic rate over the course of the day, whether someone has breakfast or not. So again, over that 24 hour period, it’s pretty similar in terms of metabolic rate. It doesn’t have a huge impact on this out put component of calories in versus calories out. If anything, the better thing to be looking at is how does me eating breakfast versus not eating breakfast affect the rest of my eating behaviours across the day and take a personal approach to whether you actually end up consuming breakfast or not. But something that you don’t really need to consider is its impact on metabolism.
Aidan:
Leading on from that, the next myth is skipping meals slows down your metabolism. Part of that’s already been addressed with the breakfast stuff because if you skip breakfast and like doesn’t have this impact like we know that we’ve already got a little bit to start with there. Metabolic rate just does not appear to be noticeably affected by meal frequency within reason. Research looking at this from multiple angles has looked at things like intermittent fasting all the way through to small frequent meals has not found any consistent differences when total calories are matched. Every now and then you can look at an individual study and it will seem like there’s differences but if you just take one step back look at the research as a whole just does not seem to matter.
Leah:
The last one we’re going to touch on for this episode is cheap meals massively ramp up your metabolism. So talking about a lot of things that quote unquote, increase versus slow down your metabolism. But if we look at acute data in this particular context, sure, it seems like this could make a huge difference. Like after we have a meal that is higher, much higher calorie than what we are consistently consuming, we might see this increase in acute metabolic rate, but the response from the body is too short term. So one day of eating more calories just does not seem to make too much of a difference over the course of let’s say a week or a month. And typically the amount of calories that you’re consuming in that one meal or over that one day is going to outweigh the potential increase in energy expenditure. So from a metabolism perspective, I don’t see why someone would use cheat meals or cheat days, but there may be other reasons in terms of psychological break from dieting that could be worthwhile.
Aidan:
Awesome. We’ll go on to the next one. Now we’re going to be going through five more myths. I believe this will be posted back to back. So I think it’d be interesting for me to see the stats and see who listens to the next one as well, if there’s any drop off or anything like that. But I just want to this a bit of an experiment and see. So let’s get on to the next one.