Losing weight requires dedication and commitment. Weight loss myths, unfortunately, can end up convincing the ambitious to dedicate themselves to the wrong strategy, wasting weeks, or even years of progress – or worse, the will to lose weight at all.

Here are the 6 biggest fat loss myths you need to avoid.

The “Fat-Burning” Zone

One not-so-bad piece of advice is to hit the treadmill/stepper/other cardio equipment of choice. On said piece of cardio equipment is almost certainly a heart rate zone chart distinguishing how different speeds will affect fat loss.

Somewhere around 60% of max heart rate is where users will notice they are “burning the most fat.” However, this simply isn’t the case. The rate of fat burning will increase proportionally to speed, so the faster you go, the more body fat you will burn up.

The “trick” in play here is the ratio of energy nutrients (fats and carbs) being burned. At ~60% of max heart rate, the ratio is still tipped in favor of fats. At 80%, however, relatively more carbs are being used, but the total amount of body fat that will be utilized is going to increase as well because more total calories are going to be burned during more difficult exercise.

You Have to do a Lot of Cardio

While exercising is certainly good for losing weight, it can be overdone. The exact amount of cardio that is right for you will depend on your training history and your diet. The goal for successful weight loss is to create a calorie deficit.

A calorie deficit means that, between diet and exercise, you consume fewer calories than you burn. Therefore, technically, you don’t have to do any cardio at all, and diet alone can be all the change required. Although, a combination of the two is usually best.

While it may still sound like “more is better,” going overboard can begin to slow metabolism during rest to compensate for expected physical activity. Eventually, this can lead to needing to do “normal” amounts of cardio just to maintain, and needing great durations of cardio to lose more weight.

Weight Training

One of the biggest weight loss mistakes is skipping the weight training. Most think that weight training will make them too large or not help with losing fat, but that is not the case.

First of all, adding muscle is a long, slow process. For anyone that was starting to add muscle to their body, once they start noticing, they could simply stop lifting as much or as often to start maintaining, rather than building new muscle.

For fat loss, muscle is essential for maintaining a fast metabolism. Doing nothing but cardio doesn’t help to add muscle, and may even cause muscle loss. While being trim is desirable, being “skin and bones” is not often viewed as an aesthetic physique.

Fasted Cardio is Better than Fed Cardio

Fasted cardio has surged in popularity lately. However, it simply doesn’t offer any advantages to fat loss. If anything, it promotes more muscle loss than anything else, and with the knowledge from the previous point, we know that’s no good!

Body weight is based on total energy balance. Body composition – whether that weight is stored as muscle or fat – is determined by our nutrition and exercise routine.

When training in the fasted state, we’re likely to break down both fat and muscle tissue to fuel exercise. Over the course of the rest of the day, those calories that were stored in fat or muscle that were burned are more easily replaced as fat than as muscle.

Crunches Give You Abs

For those that avoid weight training but do crunches or other abdominal work, let it be known that crunches are weight training – body weight training. Performing abdominal exercises can help add muscle to the belly area, but they will be kept underneath the fat layer.

“Abs are made in the kitchen.” This is not 100% true either, but in order to see the abdominal muscles, one must lose the fat that is covering them up. No reasonable amount of crunches, sit ups, leg raises, or other abdominal exercises are going to create the calorie deficit required to get the abs showing.

Fat Burners Don’t Work

Fat burning supplements get a bad rap. It is absolutely not true that fat burners do not work. However, it is true that fat burners will not do the work for you!

Still, many of those who purchase weight loss pills are expecting to just start taking the product and have the weight magically fall off. Now, this may actually work to some extent as long as everything else is held constant, but progress would still be slow – and it is slow enough already.

Fat burners – if they are well-formulated – will assist in weight loss efforts alongside diet and exercise. Lucky for you, there is PhentaBurnXT – a clinically formulated fat loss aid.

PhentaBurnXT Fat Burner

PhentaBurnXT contains Ephedra, the most potent herbal ever discovered for weight loss, and we have combined Ephedra with a host of other potent fat burning ingredients in a formula sure to boost metabolism, lipolysis, and body fat oxidation.

PhentaBurnXT will increase metabolic rate (the amount of calories burned per day) by as much as 400 calories, making dieting more impactful and easier to maintain, help release body fat from storage sites (aka, body fat), and increase the body’s reliance on fat as fuel to more heavily favor fat loss over general weight loss.