Lose Weight by Eating Fewer Calories Or Exercise More

Myth number 1: You can lose weight only by eating fewer calories or exercising more.

Yes, it is true that you'll lose weight if you eat fewer calories and exercise more. But the real picture is a lot more complex than this.

Take fat. Since fat has 9 calories per gram, compared with approximately 4 per gram for protein and carbohydrate, the most successful original low-calorie diets were low-fat diets. Then the world woke up to the fact that some fats, such as the omega-3 essential fatty acids, are necessary for health. So we realized it wasn't so smart to cut out all the fats from our diets.

Meanwhile, the facts reveal something very puzzling about our calorie consumption.

People are eating less. Calorie consumption has gone down, and fat intake has gone down even more. Yet there's an obesity epidemic. That's a real paradox. At the same time, our consumption of sugar, refined carbohydrates and stimulants such as caffeine has risen. Could that be only down to coincidence?

This clearly shows that we're eating fewer calories, not more, while obesity rates have trebled! And this trend runs like a thread throughout the Western world, from America to Australia. Something doesn't quite add up.

In fact, if you look globally, you won't find that calorie intake predicts obesity. For example, in the US — where obesity is epidemic — the average calorie intake is 2,360 kcals. Yet in China, where obesity is exceedingly rare, the average calorie intake is 2,630 kcals!

One possible explanation is exercise. The Chinese lead less sedentary lives than we do. But exercise alone, or lack of it, simply cannot explain why 1,000 people a day are becoming obese in the UK alone.