10 Weight Loss Myths to Waste Your Time

Weight Loss Ideas You Should Ignore
By Paul Rogers.

Losing weight – and most if it should be fat – is important for people who are overweight, in terms of body mass index (BMI) and waist circumference. It is also important for athletes, bodybuilders and recreational body shapers who want to get rid of those last few pounds.

With weight loss, it seems as if everyone has an angle, but most strategies are useless or insignificant.

What works for weight loss is to burn more calories in physical activity than you consume in food calories -- an excess of energy used compared to energy consumed. If you doubt this in any way, consider what happens to people on starvation diets in prison or who’ve been lost at sea or in the wilderness for many weeks or months with insufficient food. The body eventually uses all stored forms of energy, including muscle, to support itself for as long as possible. Then you die, mostly in a skeletal state.

But during weight loss (intentional or not), the body does try to prevent this happening — and this is a survival mechanism developed over several millions years of human evolution — by lowering its energy-burning rate in response to low-calorie consumption. The human body makes changes in all sorts of ways to adjust to changing circumstances. This is called “homeostasis.”

Variations exist in how much weight individuals can lose in response to diet and exercise, but in the end, changing energy balance is the only major thing that matters. I make this point because trivial approaches such as drinking green tea or eating chili peppers or drinking coffee (caffeine) or taking some herbal supplement or other may have a very small effect on fat loss that could easily be negated by the body adjusting to that challenge over time by altering its metabolism. Consistent deficits in energy intake and expenditure over months and years is what you need to concentrate on.

Here are 10 weight loss approaches that could waste your time:

1. Eat According to Your Metabolic Type

The origin of this idea in the modern diet business can be traced to The Metabolic Typing Diet. The general idea dates from the 1970s and perhaps even before that.

The premise is that we all have a “metabolic type” — an individual metabolism that can be manipulated by dietary choices. According to this, we all fall into three metabolic types. And how do you know your metabolic type? Usually, the practitioners of metabolic type diets ask you a range of questions about your body shape, natural food choices, energy levels and many other things. Some may charge for blood or urine tests.

No doubt, you will soon be offered a genetic test that is supposed to identify your best nutrition and training habits based on your genes, which, presumably, create your metabolic type. Already similar services are being promoted to health and fitness enthusiasts — for a fee of course.

There is no evidence that metabolic types have any validity for weight management or fitness training, including weight training. Our genes can influence how our bodies works, but genes are not faultless determinants of physical function — or behavior for that matter. Genes interact with the environment, in this case, with food and physical activity. The idea that we have a metabolic type that reacts rigidly to diet in a certain way because of a genetic component is false, or at least only partly true. Food and exercise are just as likely to change the way these genes function as genes are to demand certain foods for health, perhaps even more likely.

2. Don’t Eat Carbohydrates Because They Turn to Fat

This one still persists, even after all the debunking that has been done. It is a persistent myth of misplaced emphasis that derives from the low-carb diet movement. First, some carbohydrates can be converted to fat and stored, but this is only significant if you overeat. Fructose in corn syrup and cane sugar is more likely to do this than glucose from starches, such as grains.

Second, even if some carbohydrate turns to fat, it is not permanently enshrined in some fat larder on your hips, legs, belly, arms and butt until the end of history. Mostly, you can burn it off just like you can burn off dietary fat that is eaten and stored. What matters is the total calories you consume and the energy calories you expend.

3. Eat Foods that Boost Metabolism or Decrease Appetite

While it is true that chemical substances, such as amphetamines, boost metabolism so that you burn more calories and this helps you with weight loss, amphetamines are powerful substances and few naturally occurring herbs or extracts have this type of effect. Or, if they do, products, such as ephedra, may not be safe for casual consumption. The FDA says ephedra is unsafe.

Other plant-derived substances touted as useful weight loss supplements are caffeine, capsaicin (chili), green tea, hoodia and many others sold as natural remedies. Some, such as hoodia, are supposed to be appetite suppressants.

The main issue with these weight loss solutions is that they aren’t solutions. Some may provide a small benefit, but mostly they cost you extra money and distract from the main game, which is getting your food intake and exercise plan working for you over the long term. There’s no harm in consuming coffee, chili and green tea as part of a normal diet. Spending big on supplements or exotic herbs for this purpose is bound to disappoint you if you don’t address the major factors in weight management.

4. Negative Calorie Foods Can Help You Lose Weight

This one is only for the very naïve. The idea that certain foods use more energy in digestion than they contain in calories is not to be believed, especially when lists of such foods includes fruits that contain significant calories in natural sugars.

If you eat a diet of green leafy vegetables and fruit, you probably will lose weight, but that’s because, overall, you will have reduced your calorie intake substantially. Try the Calorie-Count database to see how many calories are in various foods.

5. You Can Spot-Reduce Body Fat

This one is easy. No, you can’t. Spot reducing means targeting a particular body region for preferential fat removal, for example, doing crunches to rid your abdominals of extra fat. What you feel when you are doing crunches is muscle contraction and fatigue. The effort (energy expenditure) to create this is distributed across the body by increased heart rate, blood distribution and lung activity.

6. You Should Do Low-to-Moderate Intensity Exercise to Burn Fat

Low-intensity exercise burns more fat than glucose (blood sugar) as a percentage of total energy, and high-intensity exercise burns more glucose than fat. Even so, the total energy expended for a given time period is more important, because you can still burn fat at high intensity, even though the percentage of the total may be lower.

In addition, when you burn glucose doing high-intensity exercise, such as running fast or hard weight training, you empty your blood, liver and muscles of glucose, which then stimulates fat burning when you’re not exercising. You don’t have to exercise at a low-intensity to burn fat. Fat-burning “zones” were invented to sell treadmills and stationary cycles with electronic displays.

7. Low-Carb Diets Have a Metabolic Advantage

Just about all well-designed scientific studies on low-carb diets say that there is no such thing. Theoretically, diets with more protein should have a slight advantage, because protein makes you feel fuller, and it also takes a bit more energy to digest. This is a modest advantage, though, and likely to be insignificant in the long term, which is what 12-month comparison studies of low-carb diets have shown.

Low-carb diets may indeed be more effective for some people in the short term, but it will be because they impose calorie restriction on the dieter rather than providing any special fat-burning advantage.

8. Eat Many Small Meals Rather Than Three Big Meals

Many small meals, as opposed to three main meals, is supposed to enhance weight loss by making you feel full for longer. In a technical sense, this is supposed to prevent blood glucose from dipping low in between meals, which may cause you to become hungry and overeat during the next main meal.

Like many of the myths about fat loss, there is strong acceptance of this premise on many health and fitness sites. Weight trainers and body builders tend to be strong supporters of this idea. The problem is, there is no substantial evidence that it works. Even though a few early studies reported benefits, more recent evaluation has not found solid evidence to support this idea.

In fact, increased meal frequency may lower the “thermic effect of food,” which is the energy required to digest food. This would theoretically result in just the opposite of the outcome anticipated by the “small meal” supporters, showing a comparative increase in weight.

Even so, this idea is not as outlandish as some of the others, and more research may make the picture clearer. For now, though, you should not consider smaller, more frequent meals for weight loss as providing an advantage.

9. Weight Training is Superior to Cardio for Weight Loss

Generalizations such as these mean very little unless you measure the energy expenditure related to each activity. High-intensity activity will burn more energy than low-intensity activity during and also after exercise — the afterburn effect. High-intensity cardio would burn more calories than low- or moderate-intensity weight training. Actually, cardio generally burns more calories per unit of time, because the activity is constant, whereas weight training is intermittent, even though usually of higher intensity for short periods of time.

The best strategy is to do both cardio and weight training.

10. You Can Burn More Fat Exercising on an Empty Stomach

You probably can burn a lot of fat this way because fat is a preferred fuel when blood glucose is low after you have not eaten for a while. You will then go home, though, and eat a large meal to refuel, and you will burn less fat, because glucose will be replenished in the blood and liver. Over the course of 24 hours, you will have periods of preferential fat and glucose burning for energy, in different proportions. It balances out.

Blood glucose is low on an empty stomach when fasting -- first thing in the morning for example -- but you still need some glucose when you exercise. If you don’t eat before a workout session, you risk muscle protein being converted to glucose to maintain a critical level of blood glucose. It’s best not to do hard training on an empty stomach. A piece of toast or energy bar or fruit juice or sports drink is probably enough to give your blood glucose a little boost before you work out, which should prevent you using muscle for energy and still allow good workout energy expenditure.

Should I work in my fat burning zone to lose more weight?

Paige Waehner

Question: Should I work in my fat burning zone to lose more weight?

Answer: The idea that you burn more fat in your 'fat burning zone' (or at the lower end of your target heart rate zone, about 60% to 70% of your maximum heart rate) has been around for years and it comes from the idea that, at lower intensities, your body relies more on fat stores for energy. On the surface, this seems like it would lead to more fat loss but the opposite is actually true.

In reality, you do burn a higher proportion of calories from fat during low-intensity exercise...but, you burn more total calories during high-intensity exercise and it's the total calories that matter when it comes to weight loss, not the percentage of fat or carbs used.

Does that mean you shouldn't do low-intensity exercise? Not at all. You can still burn calories, although you may need to workout longer to burn the same number of calories as high intensity exercise. Both high and low intensity exercises have a purpose and having a variety of workouts with different levels of intensity is a great way to challenge different energy systems in your body and train different aspects of your health and fitness.

And, remember, losing weight is also a function of what you're eating so tracking your calories and making sure you're eating less than your burning is another way to ensure you're losing fat.

Questions and Answers about Fat Loss and Exercise

Facts and Fallacies of Fat Loss

By Paul Rogers.

1. High Intensity Exercise Burns More Fat

Yes, but only if you do enough. When someone tells you in a few words that 20 minutes of high-intensity interval training on a stationary bike or an interval circuit burns more fat than 40 minutes jogging on a treadmill, then they’re not telling you the complete story. This type of training is hard work and you need to do sufficient to see results. Not everyone is up for high-intensity interval type exercise on a regular basis.

So don’t believe the hype about '10 minutes-a-day to a great body'. That person’s trying to sell you something!

2. Low Intensity Cardio Burns More Fat

Yes, but read on. This is the mirror image of the the first item. Generally speaking, low intensity exercise in the zone where you can talk comfortably while exercising is where fat gets burned preferentially as fuel for the body. Higher intensity exercise such as weight training and interval training uses more glucose fuel from carbohydrate. Nevertheless, some fat gets burned at higher intensities so you can probably see that if you exercise hard enough for long enough, you could conceivably burn more, or a similar amount of fat at higher intensity than equal or less work at lower intensity. The post-exercise afterburn also ads to an increase in metabolism after high intensity workouts. Ultimately, the body doesn’t care what fuel you burn, the result is the same : what you consume in excess of what you expend gets stored as fat even accounting for a few metabolic differences between fat, carbohydrate and protein. See the next question.

3. You Need to Burn Fat to Lose Weight

True, but you don’t need to directly target fat burning. Consider how the body processes its energy stores. Fat is not a permanent fixture in cells – it comes and goes according to your fuel requirements. When blood glucose is low, say first thing in the morning, fat will be the main fuel. After the first few pieces of toast or muesli, blood glucose will rise and insulin will start storing glucose and fat in cells and you will start burning some blood glucose. Glucose is stored in liver and muscle, and fat in fat cells as triglycerides. When your blood glucose gets low again, or when you do moderate intensity exercise, this fat can be retrieved from fat cells when hormones called lipases break down the fat molecule and send the free fatty acids to the bloodstream to be used as fuel. This is what we call ‘fat burning’. It's a dynamic process.

The key to understanding this is the 'sliding scale' between fat and glucose (carbohydrate). After you burn a lot of glucose, fat gets its turn because blood glucose is low. What happens if you always have glucose to burn? Doesn’t fat just stay stored away and you stay fat? No, because if your food intake and activity output is balanced you always have fat to burn – in the early hours of the morning before breakfast, while doing everyday things like housework, before meals, when you're active – it just balances out because glucose gets sucked up to replenish muscle and liver stores -- and then fat becomes an important fuel. So in a sense you don’t have to worry about fat burning, only food fuel burning and energy balance.

4. Weight Training Burns More Fat

Same answer as number one – only if you do enough of it. You can’t just do a few heavy lifts with a few minutes rest in between and expect to use a lot of energy and burn a lot of fat. Even a full session of very vigorous weight lifting with only minimal breaks between exercises and sets will only burn about 600 calories. An hour of vigorous walking will burn about 300 calories. An hour of strolling around in the weights room having a chat, a drink and completing 10 exercises at moderate intensity won’t burn much more than 300 calories.

5. Exercising before Breakfast Burns More Fat

Yes, but see items 3 and 4. Also, a recent study suggests that if you want to lose weight this may not be the best strategy because exercising on an empty stomach may encourage overeating after exercising. An hour of weights may burn 400 calories and a large bagel may cost you 350. That’s not all bad because you do have to replace some of that energy lost. Yet a Big Mac with large fries and Coke will put you over the top. You have to watch the post-exercise meal if you want to lose weight.

Exercising on an empty stomach will reduce blood and muscle glucose substantially. Two things will happen: 1) you will burn more fat; and 2) your brain will start sending signals that you need to eat. The brain is the ultimate survival controller. When blood glucose gets down around 70 mg/dL (4 mmol/L), it gives you the ‘hurry up’ because at less than 55 mg/dL (3 mmol/L) you can pass out.

One more thing will happen. If the brain can’t get glucose from food, the hormone cortisol will start to break down muscle for glucose. If you want to lose fat and gain muscle, this is certainly not the way to do it – which is what happens on very low-calorie and starvation diets.

6. You can Lose Weight from the Abs by Exercising Them

Not directly. The body tends to lose fat in a genetically determined way from all over the body. However, some people maintain belly fat until the end. The abs muscles may be the last to show for these individuals.

7. Your Genes Can Make You Fat

Controversial but probably true. It seems that certain genes may influence the risk of you being obese or unable to lose weight because of the way your body processes food or reacts to exercise. Much of this may turn out to be a predisposition, which means that the tendency to be overweight is programmed in genes, but that an environmental factor such as overeating and under-exercising may have more effect for you than someone without such genes. Direct genetic obesity may turn out to be quite rare.

Burn More Fat - Secrets of Exercise Physiology

By Paul Rogers

We all want to burn more fat for weight loss, body shaping, health and well being or for sporting purposes. Trim that butt, waste that cellulite, smooth those love handles, bust that belly; it’s all part of the trim and slim exercise and diet activity many of us indulge in.

In this article you will see exactly how fat burning works and how to get the best out of your exercise program. Also, I'll outline a new weights circuit program I am developing to take advantage of new research on weight loss and exercise from Australian researchers at the University of New South Wales, which suggests interval training, alternating sprints and rest, is a breakthrough method of burning fat and slimming down.

The Basics of Fat Burning

Energy in, energy out. The body normally burns a mix of carbohydrate, as glucose, and fat for fuel. How much of either depends on your physical activity and if, or what you have eaten recently. When you use more energy than you take in from food and drink, the body burns stored fat and carbohydrates, and then even protein, to fuel your everyday activities even if you are not exercising

That’s what happens when people starve of course; the body starts to eat itself. Depending on your family history -- your genetics -- and the way you eat and exercise to create this energy deficit, your body may decide to get conservative and drop your metabolic rate to try to hold onto body weight. Some of us seem to have inherited this tendency more than others, the origins of which may be in the early periods of human evolution where 'feast or famine' was more or less the norm.

Glucose, fat and protein. Even so, starvation always works eventually and the body starts to break down its own tissue for fuel. Stored carbohydrate called glycogen is quickly used up, then goes the fat stored under the skin and around the internal organs. Protein in muscle is then broken down to create glucose to keep the brain working and you conscious.

Fat and glucose are the body’s two main energy sources. Fat you know well, glucose comes mainly from carbohydrate foods like rice and bread and potatoes and protein is supplied mainly by meat and beans and dairy products. The amino acid building blocks of protein foods can be converted to glucose in emergencies. Your body always burns a mix of fat and glucose except at very high intensities, and the ratio of the fat and glucose in 'the burn' varies with intensity and time of exercise.

Fat burning zone. You may have noticed that some bikes and treadmills at the gym have a setting that says “fat burning zone”, which implies a setting for intensity or speed. The reason for this is that the body burns a greater percentage of fat at a slow pace (or after about 90 minutes of exercise). The fat burning zone, a low intensity speed zone is mainly a gimmick, and here is the reason.

Even though you burn more fat going slowly, you still burn a percentage of fat at much faster speeds or intensity. It all boils down to how much energy you expend in totality. For example, if you compare exercising at a slow rate that burns 60 percent fat and 40 percent glucose and a higher intensity or duration that burns only 30 percent fat and 70 percent glucose, you may still burn more fat at the higher intensity.

A typical example. Exercise (1) is the slower 60/40 mix and exercise (2) is the faster, 30/70 mix of fat and glucose fuel.

1. Walking on a treadmill for 30 minutes -- 180 calories used -- 108 calories of fat burned
2. Running on a treadmill for 30 minutes -- 400 calories used -- 120 calories of fat burned

You can see from this example that the bottom line really is how much energy you expend -- and that is the ultimate fat burning measure. The theoretical fat burning zone is mostly a convenient myth.

Weight Training Does it Better -- Or Does It?

Muscle burns more fat. Weight training is increasingly recommended as a fat-busting tool because some experts say extra muscle burns more energy than body fat at rest, so if you develop more muscle and have a higher muscle to fat ratio than before, you must burn extra energy and more stored fat as a result. This is true and has been shown in metabolic studies. However, the differences are not that dramatic; perhaps less than a few tens of calories per day for each pound of muscle increased, for most people.

Does that mean you shouldn’t worry about weight training? Certainly not, because weight training has many other benefits for health and performance, not the least of which is extra muscle. It’s just that this advantage has been somewhat overstated and we need to get this fat burning thing right in order to develop the best weight loss and performance programs.

Getting the afterburn. Okay, so extra muscle does not provide that much advantage, but what about the afterburn? The 'afterburn', or the amount of energy you use after you stop exercising, has been promoted as an important slimming idea. If you can get afterburn, which is really another way of saying your metabolism increases for several hours or longer after a particular exercise, then that’s a bonus because you burn fat during the exercise and after you cease as well. Will the fun ever stop!

However, this idea has recently been reconsidered as well. An article in the Journal of Sports Science in December last year reported that despite some promising early studies of this effect, the idea has not proven to be as useful as first thought.

Exercise scientists call this afterburn effect EPOC, which stands for Excess Post-exercise Oxygen Consumption. The authors of that study say that the high intensities required -- greater than about 75 percent of maximum heart rate -- are probably beyond what most people wanting to lose weight can cope with in sustained exercise. So the afterburn advantage from lifting weights or running fast is there, but you need to be able to sustain that intensity, which means a lot of hard work. No secrets there, I'm sure.

Strength training has so many great things going for it that I'm a big fan -- increased strength, more muscle and body shape, better balance and bone density and improved functionality across all facets of human movement. But let’s be honest, we all need aerobic or cardio training as well. It has its own set of important functional benefits including general fitness, elastic arteries, increased heart and lung function and lower blood pressure to name a few benefits.

Lifting weights can easily move us into the high intensity exercise zone above the 75 percent effort required to get some afterburn, but it's only for short bursts. This is not consistent, steady-state effort and does not generally burn as much energy as a good run on the treadmill, cycle or row machine at moderate pace. For example, here are the energy expenditure calculations for weights versus cardio for one hour of exercise from the NAT Nutritional Analysis Tools web site. I've based this on a 150 pound person (just under 70 kilograms).

1. Running at 8 minutes a mile pace (5 min/km) -- burn 852 calories (kilocalories)
2. Weight lifting, vigorous, free weights or machines -- burn 409 calories (kilocalories)

I’ve tried to line these activities up for effort so that the comparison is worthwhile. Whenever I check these numbers it astounds me because I run and I lift weights, and sometimes I feel much fresher after a run than going for it in the gym with sub-10 RM (repetition maximum) and three sets of ten exercises. Nevertheless, the numbers always come out the same with any reputable energy calculator. Sustained aerobics always spends about twice the energy of weight training in a comparable comparison. You can see from this why cardio sessions are important for fat loss.

Should I Exercise Before Breakfast to Burn More Fat?

The answer is 'not necessarily', because even though you will burn more fat on an empty stomach, ultimately this will probably make little difference because your energy intake and expenditure and metabolism balances out, more or less, over the 24-hour period. What really matters is your total energy intake and expenditure, that is, how much you eat and how much you exercise and move in general.

However, stay tuned on this because until this is examined further scientifically, how much meal timing manipulation could help with fat loss is not certain. One thing that seems clear is that people who eat breakfast maintain weight better and lose fat quicker, so don’t skip breakfast.

The Best Strategy for Fat Loss

So where are we at with our fat burning project? Here is a summary.

Increase muscle with weight training. Extra muscle helps to burn more energy at rest, even if only a little. This is called the resting metabolic rate of muscle or RMR. Extra muscle will also burn more fat in active phase, the active metabolic rate if you like, or the AMR, so having more muscle will definitely help burn more energy and fat.

Lift heavier weights. What I suggest is that the weights workout should be vigorous, with the number of repetitions kept at the low to medium end of the scale between 8 and 12 RM. To remind you, the RM is the repetition maximum, which means the most weight you can lift for this number of reps before fatigue. The 8-12 is within a range that should provide strength and bigger muscle growth, which is called hypertrophy.

If you go higher than this, say 15 to 20 repetitions to a set, or more, you are getting into the range where you would probably be better off doing cardio because the return on effort, the energy burn, is better spent jogging, cycling, stepping or rowing. At that number of repetitions you won’t build much muscle either, so very high-repetition training with weights has minimum value in my view.

Do aerobic exercise. Considering how much energy you would use in an hour of either type of exercise, weights or cardio, you must do some consistent aerobic or cardio work to burn fat.

Try high-intensity cardio. Remember the study from the University of New South Wales that we started with? High-intensity exercise, even if only in short bursts, may rev up the metabolism and get that fat mobilized. Do some high intensity as well, but don’t overdo it, because burning the fat is a long-term project and you don’t want to get ‘burned out’. A group exercise program such as a solid cycle spin class might match this requirement. In fact, I highly recommend group cycle spin classes where you are encouraged to go fast, yet with the option to slow down if you need to.

The Weights and Cardio Circuit Training Program.
Combining weights and cardio in a circuit interval session may be the best approach of all. The weights circuit I propose is based on the idea of mixing high and low-intensity weights and cardio in a circuit. This idea is not new, but what I've designed uses simple equipment: one set of dumbbells, an exercise step platform and five carefully chosen basic exercises.

Check it out and let me know if it works for you.

The Law Of Attraction And Weight Loss: Can You Think Yourself Thin?

By Tom Venuto, NSCA-CPT, CSCS

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Metaphysics & Brain science merge and prove that positive thinking and goal setting literally create your body and your entire life experience
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On recently broadcast special edition of CNN's Larry King Live, Mr. King interviewed a panel of "mind experts" about how the thoughts you think literally turn into the events you experience, the material things you possess... AND even the health of your body.

For years, "positive thinking" and goal-setting were often criticized as "pollyanna" and "the law of attraction" was relegated into the category of "new age" fluff.

On the recent Larry King show, panel experts Bob Proctor, John Assaraf and others who were featured in the movie 'The Secret' explained that recent breakthroughs in neuroscience along with understanding mental laws, reveal why goal setting, the "law of attraction" and "positive thinking" all work, regardless of whether you look at them from a metaphysical or a scientific perspective.

Scientists have even identified specific parts of the brain, such as the reticular activating system (RAS), which works with the visual parts of our brain to call our conscious attention to things that are important to reaching our goals and to filter out those things that are unimportant.

The RAS is activated by "programming" goals into our sub-conscious minds. Our sub concscious mind is the "power center" and THIS is the mechanism that explains why goal setting and positive thinking are now being accepted as scientific methods for change.

We are discovering that our brain is cybernetic in nature, which means that it is literally like a computer, waiting for a program to be installed.

Here's the kicker - the subconcsious is completely neutral and impartial - it will carry out any instructions you give it.

Unfortunately, many of us are still running negative programs we picked up from others as children when our non-conscious minds were totally open and impressionable, or which we developed over the years as a result of repetition of our own negative thinking.

As it turns out, our own thoughts, repeated daily, are one of the primary ways that our "mental computer" is programmed on a sub-conscious level, which is the level of beliefs, habits and automatic behavior.

To change your results, you must overwrite old negative programming and install positive new programming into your subconscious.

This can be achived through such techniques as written goal setting, positive self-talk (affirmations), and mental imagery (visualization).

In the 1970's, the Soviets and East Germans were the first to formally use structured mental rehearsal, and at that time, they dominated in several olympic sports. This was reported in great detail in Charles Garfield's landmark book, "Peak Performance." Today, virtually all elite athletes use visualization extensively, as we now know that the brain cannot differentiate between real practice and practice that is vividly imagined.

If you are getting more of the same negative results in your life - such as the same health problems, or the same body fat continues to return even after you lose it, then you have probably been un-consciously running old negative programs and re-inforcing them with negative thought patterns.

You can begin the positive mental reprogramming process by writing down your goals, changing your internal dialogue and taking a few minutes to relax, quiet your mind and perform a session of visualization or mental rehearsal every day (seeing yourself in your "mind's eye" not as you currently are, but as you ideally would like to be).

These methods, repeated often enough, will begin to program the non- conscious portion of the mind, which is the same part of the mind that controls your heart beat, digestion and new cell production, all on "automatic pilot."

In the last decade, neuroscientists discovered that you have the capacity to create an almost infinite number of new neural connections in your brain when you run new thought patterns.

The Old neural pathways are like grooves in a record, and if you are struggling with your health related behaviors or behaviors in any other area of your life, you have been playing the "old records" over and over again.

If you were to carve a new groove into that record, it would never play the same way again. the old pattern would weaken and the new one would take over. Brand new, positive thoughts, feelings and images begin to create new neural patterns.

Psychologists estimate that it takes 21 to 30 days to establish a new pattern in your brain. During this time, the focus on sticking with your practice and repeating your new thought patterns is critical.

Is this easy? For most people, no it's not. In fact, controlling your thinking and keeping it constructive may be one of the most difficult challenges you have ever faced. Fortunately, writing goals and reading affirmations can help get you started.

You can take some of the pressure off yourself by simply accepting that negative thoughts and self criticisms will pop up from time to time. Just observe them, without mulling over them or adding to them, and change the polarity of the thought by quickly repeating one of your positive affirmations or by changing your mental pictures.

So is there something to this whole "positive thinking" thing?

The philosophers and theologians have been saying yes for the entire span of recorded history: "As you think, so shall you be." Variations on this proverb can be found in every spiritual and philosophical tradition.

But... if you are the left-brained, "prove-it-to-me" type, you dont have to go on faith anymore. Scientists are beginning to prove more and more convincingly that thoughts are powerful things. Even Larry King seemed impressed with what his panel of "mind mentors" had to say.

So how soon are you going to begin your mental training right alongside your physical training? When are you going to learn how to harness this power locked up inside your mind?

Guess what? You're already using this force every day because you cannot turn it off. Whatever you are thinking and picturing in your mind repeatedly on a daily basis is already on it's way to you, so it's simply a matter of HOW you are using it, not IF you are using it.

What do you say to yourself every day? Do you say, "I am becoming leaner, healthier and more muscular every day?"... or do you say "I am a fat person - Ive tried everything, nothing ever works?"

The fact is - you can think yourself thin and healthy or you can think yourself obese and ill. Maybe not in the literal sense...but most certainly as the critical part in the chain of causation...

You see, there's a lot of talk these days in the personal improvement world about law of attraction, manifesting, intention, visualization, affirmations and of course, positive thinking.

Without understanding that there is an orderly, scientific basis underneath all of these things, many people will simply remain skeptics, while on the opposite extreme, others may get the idea that you can sit around meditating and visualizing, then expect a mystical "law of attraction" to kick in and then "poof!" a great body materializes out of thin air... along with the perfect relationship, a nice bank account and fantastic career success.

What really happens is "Positive thinking" and related methods quite literally re-program your brain, which in turn creates new behaviors that move you physically toward whatever you have been thinking about and focusing on.

So success is achieved through positive thinking + positive doing.... attraction + action. There are two sides to the coin. Without paying attention to both, you may continue to struggle... often against nothing but yourself.

If you want to transform your body or any other aspect of your life, then you have to change on the inside (the mind) first and then everything else will follow.

This process of *scientific* goal setting and mental reconditioning through emotionally charged mental imagery (visualization) and internal mental dialogue (affirmations) is the very first thing I have always taught my clients and the first thing I wrote about in my book, Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle You can learn all of these techniques in detail in chapter 1. Learn more about the psychology of body transormation inside the Burn The Fat ebook:

About the Author:

Tom Venuto is a natural bodybuilder and author of the #1 best selling e-book, "Burn the Fat, Feed The Muscle,” which teaches you how to burn fat without drugs or supplements using the little-known secrets of the world's best bodybuilders and fitness models. Learn how to get rid of stubborn fat and turbo-charge your metabolism by visiting: