Any diet that replaces high fat foods and alcohol with healthy fruit and vegetables will reduce the total energy that you consume and promote weight loss.

The diets that I have read aren’t necessarily bad some of them are quite nutritious and balanced. It’s the claim that your liver needs cleaning to lose weight that concerns me.

Weight gain is simple; it comes about by eating more food [energy] than we need to survive.

If you change your diet to include plenty of fresh, nutritious, low fat food from all the main food groups, drink plenty of water and exercise every day you will lose weight.

It has nothing to do with having a dirty liver but everything to do with cleaning up your lifestyle.

Yes it is true; some people do inherit the ability to store more fat than others do.

But you still can’t use that as an excuse, all it means is that you have to work a little harder and be more careful about what you eat.

Unfortunately that’s the way you’re made like some really gifted sports people who effortlessly show their skills whilst others really struggle to make the grade.

Some people just have to work harder to get there. Something to think about the next time you blame your genes. If your parents are over weight and their parents are over weight and so on, it is quite possible that you have inherited the gene, but if your dog is over weight then it’s environmental.

Alcohol contains many calories, it also slows down the fat burning process, but it doesn’t have to be given up to lose weight.

Just reduce your alcohol intake to a sensible level and increase your activity and you can still enjoy a few drinks.

To burn off the energy of one standard alcoholic drink you need to do 10 minutes of walking. That’s a lot of walking for some come Saturday morning.

Once again it’s more about being sensible and limiting yourself to 2 a day for women and 4 a day for men with at least 3 alcohol free days per week.

Moderation is the key

There is no credible published scientific evidence to support this claim.

Once again it’s not so much what you eat as to how much of something you eat that will determine whether you gain or lose weight. Nothing in moderation is fattening, but everything in excess is.

How did the human race survive centuries ago without the knowledge of blood types? They ate what they could find and worked very hard to find it.

Imagine if you had 3 different blood types under the one roof, how difficult would meal preparation be? It would be a nightmare that I think many of us couldn’t be bothered with!

This statement couldn’t be further from the truth.

When you do a sit-up you isolate the abdominals and work them anaerobically, which means without oxygen.

Body fat needs oxygen to burn to supply us with energy. During a sit-up you are using another fuel derived from carbohydrates, called glucose.

There is still much debate over this subject, but put simply life would get pretty boring only eating protein.

Completely removing whole food groups like carbohydrates is fairly unhealthy long term.

It’s carbohydrates that supply us with all of our fibre for a healthy digestive system, energy to live, vitamins, minerals etc. There are even some studies that suggest high protein diets increase the risk of developing Gallstones, Osteoporosis, Heart Disease and certain Cancers.

Most people claim remarkable weight loss results with high protein diets but what they fail to tell you is that what you lose is not all fat. Yes, you do lose weight on a high protein diet but the majority of what you lose is water and muscle.

Carbohydrates are stored in the body as glycogen; glycogen holds 3 times its own weight in water.

So when you reduce carbohydrates you reduce your glycogen stores which reduces the water bound to it. It’s not uncommon to lose 4 or 5 kilo’s in the first few weeks on a high protein diet, but remember most of it is not fat.

When you reduce your muscle and water your metabolic rate is significantly reduced as well. This is the reason you regain all of that weight plus more very quickly after you have finished the diet

Every Pharmaceutical and Nutritional Supplement Company in the world today would love to be the first to develop a pill that could strip off body fat.

To-date there has been nothing developed that even comes close to turning the Obesity epidemic around.

If only the dreams of many could be realised. Take a pill or some herbal concoction and your excess body fat falls off you, revelling this beautiful, healthy physique.
Unfortunately many of us have fallen pray to very clever marketing campaigns that make outlandish claims about weight loss. Like diets, if they were successful then why are there so many overweight people in the world.

The unfortunate truth for many is that you can not replace sensible, low fat healthy eating and plenty of exercise with a pill.

Australians spend billions of dollars every year trying to find an easy way. Save your hard-earned money and invest in a good pair of training shoes, replace your junk food with fruit and vegetables and watch your body shape change

There must be nearly as many diets out there as there are grains of sands on a beach. Every day I hear of a new weight loss miracle. If these miracles were so successful then why isn’t everyone slim?

Every time you turn the television on or open a women’s magazine someone is reporting on a new and improved, easy to do diet plan, guaranteed to shed all the weight you want. Put simply, Diets don’t work!

Unless you can do whatever it takes to lose weight for the rest of your life you will simply regain all that lost weight and in most cases more, when you can no longer sustain the torture.

Why? Because when you restrict your energy intake below healthy levels your body automatically goes into survival mode.
A 10% reduction in energy intake results in an immediate [within 24 hours] reduction in metabolic rate of up to 20%.

If this didn’t happen then every time we went without food for an extended period, we would waste away to nothing and the human race would never have survived.
The message here is, don’t diet, learn to eat sensibly and get plenty of exercise.

There is no credible scientific evidence or physiological reason to making this statement. Your body can not tell whether it is 4 minutes past 12noon or 11:58 am.

This statement would have us believe that if you ate a carbohydrate meal in Coolangatta at 11:30 am and drove over the border to Tweed Heads during daylight saving [12:30pm] you would be fatter.

It sounds quite ridiculous when you look at it like this. Your body can and will digest all foods at all times of the day, even whilst you are asleep.

More to the truth of the problem is that most people over eat later in the day when they are relaxing. The simple solution to the problem is to not stave yourself during the day, eat sensibly and often so that when you get home from work you are not famished and gorge everything in sight.

Reducing the fat content of your meals will result in weight loss for some and improve your long-term health.

The problem with this statement is that a lot of people see it as a free ticket to eat as much low fat food as they like. All foods contain energy and any excess energy will be converted to body fat.

An example of this is that people will replace one high fat biscuit with three low fat ones, thinking that because it’s low fat it’s ok to eat more. Many low fat varieties of foods have a lot of added sugar resulting in more calories being consumed.

When replacing high fat foods with their low fat versions, be sensible with the amount that you eat. Remember, ‘if you don’t use it you’ll wear it’.