Myth: All fat in the body is bad. The goal of exercise and diet is get rid of as much fat as possible.
Reality: Women need fat to look young. But, there are different qualities of fat ranging from the most healthy, which is brown fat, to the least healthy, which is yellow fat. Brown fat is necessary for your skin and body to look young and for a women to have a youthful-looking face and body. Fat creates the contours that women desire, but only if that fat adheres tightly to the underlying bone or muscle and the underlying skin.
Myth: The "right" diet works for women of any age.
Reality: Due to hormonal changes during the course of a woman's life, female fat metabolism typically changes dramatically. A "one-size-fits-all" diet for all women of all ages, therefore, is inappropriate and doomed to failure. Instead, women should modify what they eat as their metabolism changes with age. As estrogen decreases with age, overall metabolism slows down, and two changes are necessary to maintain weight and a youthful body. First, women have to increase lean muscle mass. Second, women must tighten up on the carbohydrate selections. These changes are built into the Post-Menopause programs in The Brown Fat Revolution.
Myth: The skinnier you look, the younger you look.
Reality: Absolutely wrong! Visual youth is created by curves in both the face and body. The loss of these curves, with or without wrinkles, is not the goal if you really want to look young. Instead, The Brown Fat Revolution eating program is designed to carefully incorporate hydrophilic (water binding) carbohydrates into fat, muscle, and skin making them looked full and toned -- in a word, young! You should train to create the best shape possible. And you should eat to reflect this shape so that you don't cover all of your hard-earned beautiful shape with yellow fat.
Myth: If your face looks "tired," your only recourse is a facelift.
Reality: Most women look "tired" because they ARE tired! But they also look tired because they are losing volume in their cheeks. The cheek fat flattens and moves toward the jaw line to create the dreaded "jowl" and a flatness where the "apple" of the cheekbone existed. Most times, adding more volume by changing the diet or modifying the workout program can refresh and renew the look of the face. A face that has lost volume and is "lifted" by diet and exercise will be a tighter face!
It may sound strange coming from a plastic surgeon, but the truth is that the vectorized, wind-blown artifact of old school plastic surgery has never been my objective, nor is it the goal of more advanced techniques. Today, women want to look refreshed and renewed, not weird. To help women achieve that look, we now focus on volume replacement rather than on tightening.
Myth. To burn more fat, don't eat for an hour before a workout and two hours afterwards.
Reality: Muscles require nutrients to achieve maximal results. You have to feed your muscles before and after you exercise so that you can build lean muscle mass, which turns up the volume on the rate of fat burning. The carbohydrates in a pre-workout snack supply the instant fuel necessary for an optimal workout, and the carbohydrates in the post-workout snack replenish the drained muscles and facilitate repair. Lean muscle is more efficient at burning fat than short bursts of increased metabolism that are produced by exercise alone. So use the nutrients to build lean muscle, and make sure you eat before and after exercise to make the workout efficient and most effective. You will burn more fat that way, and you will get more mileage out of every workout.
Myth: Long, intense, sweat-producing cardio exercises are the best way to lose weight.
Reality: Studies have shown that both fat loss and cardiopulmonary strengthening are most efficiently achieved with sprinting rather than long cardio exercises. You can "sprint" on an machine at the gym. The principle is this: first do the exercise (for instance, on a stationery bike) at a comfortable rate and intensity, and then ramp up the effort to maximal strength and /or rate, and keep up this pace for as long as you physically can. That's one cycle. Then return to that comfortable strength/rate, and ramp up to maximum strength and/or rate again through several cycles of "sprinting."
Myth: Weight training will make you "bulk up."
Reality: Properly performed, weight training is excellent for increasing lean muscle mass to create the shadows in the arms and legs, not bulky muscles. Once you have removed yellow fat from your arms and replaced it with brown fat, the underlying contours of both the biceps and triceps muscles can be appreciated visually in the shadows of light created at the skin level. With The Brown Fat Revolution Exercise Program, you create these muscle edges that make you look lean and "cut" rather than bulky. The resistance program in The Brown Fat Revolution is designed to produce this beautifully female shadow effect.
Myth: If you do hundreds of abdominal crunches a day, your belly will look flat.
Reality: Although women tend to believe that abdominal crunches will keep their bellies flat, the truth is that you can do hundreds of crunches each day and still have a bulging abdomen, because a poochy belly is usually caused by yellow fat either above the muscle or inside the abdomen. In The Brown Fat Revolution, we buttress all the abdominal wall muscles with the core curriculum and diminish the yellow fat both on top of and below muscles. Both are necessary to achieve that flat, sexy abdomen.
Myth: Protein powdered drinks are adequate meal replacements.
Reality: Protein drinks are good "in a pinch" so that you do not eat other less desirable, more readily available foods such as white carbs! However, protein drinks are processed differently by the body than actual food and will not give you the level of nutrition that you need to make brown fat. It is more natural and efficient for the stomach and intestines to process nutrients -- that is, protein, carbs, fat, vitamins, minerals -- when they are delivered naturally. In short, you assimilate more nutrients with real food than with powders. But powders can be tempting because they are so simple to use. For this reason, I recommend protein powders only for the times when you just cannot get real food, such as when you're traveling or for a mid-day snack at work. The rest of the time, eat! When you plan ahead, and you bring along your own protein-rich foods, then you won't have to rely on protein powders.
Myth: If you eat just one meal a day for a while, you'll lose weight rapidly.
Reality: If you eat only one meal a day, your body will think that no food is available and go into "starvation mode," holding onto every calorie that you take in. Then you will very quickly hit the wall on your weight loss campaign. The Brown Fat Revolution eating program is designed to convince your body that plenty of food is coming (after all, you're eating six meals a day), so it will not hold onto unnecessary calories.
Myth: Raw veggies are significantly more nutritious than cooked vegetables.
Reality: Not necessarily true. he nutritional value of a vegetable can be diminished by overcooking it in water. But, if you steam your vegetables, the nutritional value is similar to eating them raw.
Myth: If you have a piece of chocolate cake at dinner, you can work it off the next day by extending your cardio workout.
Reality: Working off dietary variances with more exercise is difficult at best and ineffective at worst. It would be better to eat your cake without guilt (and without dread of the upcoming increased workout) and to decrease the amount of carbs in the diet the next day. Use modulation of food, rather than exercise, to compensate for food. Then you won't feel you must "compensate" yourself for the extra workout effort, and you won't find yourself gaining yellow fat weight.