Diet Myth 1
The Hidden Truth About Cardio
Did you ever stop to think, that your daily gut-busting routine may actually be preventing weight loss and it could even be pushing you closer to death?
In western cultures like Britain, the United States, Australia, Canada and other European nations, what’s the first thing that anybody thinks of or tells you whenever the idea of weight loss is brought up? "You’ve got to hit the treadmill, exercise bike or the streets and burn those calories!"
On the surface of it, this makes sense. If you do a lot of work and are sweating and breathing heavilly, that exertion mjust be doing you good? Surely running a few miles every day must be dissolving that unsightly fat like crazy?
This is actually wrong. Cardio does burn calories, it’s true and yes, some cardio is good for you.
Light cardio promotes a healthy heart and increases your endurance. On the other hand, heavy and strenuous cardio can actually have quite the opposite effect.
Imagine our ancestor: pre-historic man. These men (and women) ran around the Paleolithic world chasing all kinds of wild animals - antelope, red deer, bison and perhaps the occasional wooly mammoth. Most of their diet comes from animal protein and whatever edible plants they coul forage, assuming the animals hadn't got there first!
If cardio was so great for losing weight, they would starve to death while hunting for food. All that cardio exercise would burn through their energy reserves faster than their bodies could replace them. Yet they didn’t starve to death; why do you think that is?
A lot of heavy cardio is hard on your knees and feet and it’s also hard on the heart. Too much cardio can scar the tissue of your heart and make you more vulnerable to a heart attack. It's only in the last few decades, and only after a lot of detailed scientific studies, that we have realised this.
As for losing weight, excessive cardio actually has the reverse effect and here’s why: Our bodies are genetically designed to survive. Our body’s job is to store energy as fuel, both (1) for its immediate use as the metabolism needs energy to carry out various bodily functions and (2) in the form of fat, as a reserve, for those times when food is scarce. In modern times, of course, food isn’t really scarce, so this built in safety feature is rarely needed these days, but our body doesnt really know that as its already genetically pre-programmed to cater for emergencies.
When you deprive your body of the nutrients it requires, either by starving yourself on some crazy diet or by over-taxing your body with lots of cardio, it begins to switch into survival mode.
Additionally, and unfortunately with heavy cardio, your body also becomes anabolic. This means that it begins to burn the most effective source of energy first; that’s not your body's fat deposits, but your muscle.
Take a good look at some of these chronic long distance runners who compete. Many of them are kind of stringy looking and have to pack in the carbs just to maintain their muscle mass. No skinny bony athlete looks attractive; they usually look 'dead-beat' and ready to drop, which is what they usually are. Hurting and aching and in some pain, as their body is literally eating its muscles just to keep going.
You want your body to burn fat, and not your muscle, obviously. It’s not really about calories, as many diets and so-called fitness gurus try to make you believe. Calories are simply a means of measuring energy. It was once used to measure heat energy, calorific value its stioll called in some areas, but has been largely replaced by the joule.
While it's true that, if you want to lose weight, you must take in less calories than you consume, there’s so much more to it than that. The biggest secret to weight loss isn’t running 10 miles every day, starving yourself or even avoiding some of your favorite carbs. In fact, if you’re going to lose weight properly, it’s actually important that you do eat some of your favorite foods!
If you know how to use your body’s natural processes to your advantage, it’s entirely possible to lose 10, 20 or even 30+ pounds in a single month without starvation diets, without any gut-wrenching cardio, with no ridiculous workouts and certainly not be eating anything gross! I
t’s true and science proves it!
Want to know more about dropping some stubborn LB’s right away? Kyle Cooper is the man to explain how and show you the science backed by independent clinical studies to prove it.