If you tell someone that you're thinking about losing weight or have already started a weight loss journey, you can expect them to have something to say. Weight loss is a huge cultural topic, and everyone's got their own opinions about what works best. This can make it tricky to know what's fact and what's fiction.
Below, we break down five of these common misunderstandings about weight loss and healthy living:
1. Even if you lose weight, you’ll most likely regain it.
When starting a new weight loss plan, there can be a deep-seated fear of regaining all the weight, that all your hard work and effort have gone to waste. Try to remove this preemptive fear of failure and start your weight loss plan on a positive note.
Maintaining weight loss is possible! Losing weight by embracing healthier lifestyle choices (like eating healthy foods and moving your body) versus adopting a quick-fix fad diet makes any weight loss more sustainable for you. Remember, your body will change as you lose weight, so it’s important to regularly check in with yourself and your progress and adjust your goals when you need to.
2. You can’t eat fruit if you want to lose weight.
If you’ve ever bitten into a perfectly ripe mango or fresh summer watermelon, you know that fruit can definitely be sweet. Fruit does contain (natural) sugars, which can make some people wary.
However, the sugar in fruit also comes along with benefits like high-water content, essential vitamins, and dietary nutrients like fiber, making fruit a great choice for a healthy snack. If you are watching your sugar closely, opt for fruits like berries, guava, and papaya which tend to be lower in sugar.
3. The only way to lose weight is through intense calorie restriction.
Many “crash” diets appear to work because they have you restrict calories to an unsustainably low level, or ask you to avoid entire food groups that have essential vitamins and nutrients.
This kind of weight loss plan can’t work in the long run, and restricting calories too much is not healthy. Your body needs a certain amount of food to nourish itself and keep it running smoothly for daily tasks. Restricting certain food groups can also result in serious rebounds as your body starts to crave food groups like carbs. And let's be real—no one can resist cookies forever (and that's ok).
4. You don’t need to eat well, you just need to exercise harder.
Have you ever heard the saying, “You can’t outrun a bad diet?” Some people think that exercising regularly is a free ticket to eat whatever they want. But like most things in life, it's all about balancing workouts with healthier eating choices.
When you exercise more, your body needs more energy to fuel those workouts—so make sure you’re fueling your body with healthy foods that will keep you full and energized, instead of “rewarding” yourself for a run with some pizza.
5. Losing weight is all about self-control.
If you’re eating healthier and exercising more and still having trouble losing weight, it’s easy to be hard on yourself and think you’re not strong enough and that you’ve “failed” at your goals. But for some people, diet and exercise alone aren’t enough. In these cases, a prescription weight loss medication like CONTRAVE may help.
CONTRAVE is uniquely designed to reduce hunger and control cravings, so you can lose weight and keep it off. (The exact neurochemical effects of CONTRAVE leading to weight loss are not fully understood.)
Talk to a doctor to see if this could be the right option for you.
What do all these weight loss myths and misunderstandings have in common? They’re all very black and white. The truth is, the process of losing weight will look different for each person. The most important part is to continue working on your goals, in your own way.
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