By John Fike

Americans will try just about anything to lose weight quickly.

Here are some of the more popular myths that have been invented and believed over the years… some of them may even lead to more weight gain than weight loss.

1. You can lose weight without diet or exercise by using magic weight-loss pills/formulas

Weight loss is the result of burning more calories than you take in through your food. How can you make that happen without changing either your diet or how much you exercise?

There are a few ways to increase your metabolism, but they only do so by a few calories a day. Considering you have to burn 3,500 calories more than you eat in order to lose a pound of fat, you only lose a pound a year if you increase your metabolism by 10 calories a day.

But this works both ways… it just takes 10 extra calories a day to gain a pound of weight per year. Keep doing this year after year for 20 or 30 years and you can see how easily you can end up overweight without even realizing it.

2. You can get rid of fat in certain areas of your body using special exercises

This myth is seen in the idea that doing sit-ups or trunk twists shrinks fat around the midsection, or that doing triceps extensions will get rid of flab under the arms.

Unfortunately, science has found that you can’t choose where the fat will come off.

When you exercise aerobically, or burn more calories than you eat, the bloodstream collects fat from deposits all over the body. There does seem to be some credence to the ‘first on-last off’ theory of weight loss, which states that wherever you first started storing fat, will be the last place from which you lose fat.

3. Eating low-fat foods automatically helps you lose weight

For some people, the types of foods that you eat can make a difference in the results that you get, but for most of us it’s really all about calories.

You must burn more calories than you eat. Low fat foods can have the same number of calories as regular food and some studies suggest that all the garbage put in low-fat foods (referring to packaged and processed foods) is more likely to help you retain fat than lose it.

4. Eating at night makes you store fat

Late night binges can lead to eating more calories than you burn in a day, but it’s not because of the time of day. As long as you are burning more calories than you eat and consume mostly healthy foods, it doesn’t really matter what time of day you eat.

5. Skipping breakfast is a good way to lose weight

Skipping any meal is a bad idea because your blood-sugar levels fluctuate wildly. That can lead to binge eating, which makes skipping a meal pointless. Skipping a meal also leaves your body low on energy. While the energy shortage may prompt metabolism of stored fat, it is a slow process and can leave you feeling lethargic.

The best approach is to have 5-6 moderately-sized meals throughout the day to keep your blood-sugar level steady and become more active throughout the day. Make sure your 5-6 meals contain roughly the same amount of calories and don’t exceed your total target calorie intake.

A study of a large group of people who successfully lost weight and kept it off for at least 5 years reveals that the vast majority eat a healthy breakfast every day.

Another study showed that people who eat a healthy breakfast consisting of foods with a low glycemic index (GI) actually ate less calories throughout the day than those who skipped breakfast or ate foods with a high GI for breakfast. So have a healthy breakfast every day, but skip the muffin or bagel!

6. Crash diets are a good way to lose weight

Your body can only metabolize 1-2 percent of your bodyweight in fat per week. That’s about 2 pounds for most people.

If you’re losing more weight than that, it is mostly water (which comes back quickly) or muscle.

Neither of these is good to lose. Also, it’s been pretty well documented that the faster you lose weight, the faster you will put it back on. Slow and steady wins the race when it comes to fat loss.

7. Overweight people have a slow metabolism

Some people may be overweight due to a true medical condition that causes a slow metabolism, but those people are very rare and the condition needs to be diagnosed by a doctor. Most overweight people actually have a higher metabolism because more energy is required to move around that excess weight.

8. You need to starve yourself to lose weight

Again, losing weight too fast results in dehydration and muscle loss. This leaves you weak, lethargic and sickly looking. We want to lose weight to be healthy, not to reach the grave sooner.

9. Don’t weigh yourself frequently

Studies show that people who weigh themselves regularly (even daily) are able to lose more weight and keep it off.

The feedback from the scale lets them know when they are getting back into old habits and motivates them to return to good habits. However, your weight can vary by as much as 3 pounds within a day. For best results, weigh yourself at the same time every day and under relatively similar circumstances.

Also, write down your weight each day and use the average for the week to determine your weight-loss progress.

10. Lifting weights burns fat

Only aerobic activity burns fat directly. Weightlifting is anaerobic and burns only carbohydrates directly. High-intensity weightlifting can create enough of a calorie deficit that your body will eventually metabolize fat into carbohydrates to fill that deficit, but it takes a lot of exercise.

Increasing the quantity of muscle in your body will increase your metabolism, but only enough to burn a pound every three months or so, and that’s only if you really build a lot of muscle.