A Lot Of People Believe In These 30 Fitness And Health Facts That Are Not Accurate At All
Interview With Expert
Working out is a great way to be healthy and stay in shape. That’s why people love to try different fitness tips and hacks to see which works the best. The problem with that is there’s so much information all around that there’s bound to be misinformation as well.
People don’t really fact-check the health tips they share, which unfortunately means that there are a lot of bogus fitness facts to sift through. Fortunately for you, these posts from a Reddit thread about inaccurate health beliefs will help open your eyes.
More info: Reddit
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All the s**t about vaccines causing autism and being implants.
This needs to be higher. Even IF you were right, and you're not, you are still saying you'd rather have a de ad kid than an autistic kid. But at this point, being an anti vaxxer is no different than claiming the sun goes round the Earth, which is sitting on the back of a giant turtle.
That you can’t lose weight effectively just by walking, and you won’t build muscle just by walking. You can lose a f**k ton of weight just walking an hour every day. A nice brisk pace, go and see the ducks or something. It’s fun and accessible and it will make your butt look nice (because despite what some people may also believe, your leg muscles do actually do work when walking! Shocker!)
Also great for posture and pain and your mental health. Especially if you’re walking outside. Also you get to go see ducks.
TL;DR: ducks.
That you need to "flush your system" with all kinds of BS cleanses to "detox" your body. Honey, you're "detoxing" right now, it's called your normal kidney function.
You’ve probably come across all these health tips at least once in your life. The issue with them is that they’re very easy to believe. The real health facts are often considered boring or require too much effort. That’s why Bored Panda reached out to the author of this post, u/MaxEhrlich, to see if he had any useful fitness tips to share.
To put it very simply, his advice was, “Probably don’t drink stuff beyond water (sodas, alcohol, energy drinks, sports drinks, etc). Play a ton of basketball, and the weight tends to stay off.” Although these tips seem too simple, they’re backed by a whole body of evidence, especially the point about drinks. Science has shown that increased consumption of sugary beverages can increase weight gain and lead to a higher risk of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular problems, and some cancers.
People don't understand that disability is, like many things in nature, a spectrum.
That person in a wheelchair might be able to stand for 30 seconds at a time to reach something but not stand for the entire shopping trip.
The person you saw park in a disability-designated space might be able to stand and walk, but it's excruciating and best limited.
The perfectly healthy-looking person with a service dog might not be perfectly healthy. We mask so others will STFU about it or at least not gawk.
The overweight person who only ever walks on the gym treadmill when they gym each night at 11 pm might’ve never physically recovered from a significant bone break and consequent surgeries a decade ago. They might go to the gym during off hours to be left alone as they focus on walking in a straight path and not ridiculed as “needing to lay off the cake” as they do their best not to limp in and out the door.
“Baby blues” isn't always depression but can involve a myriad of variable psychiatric disorders and symptoms, including psychosis. These symptoms can be disabling and worsen over decades or the rest of someone’s life. Don't be a d**k to struggling new moms or anyone struggling with mental illness.
That you can target certain areas of the body for fat loss. You can't. When you lose fat, it just comes off your total body wherever your body sees fit.
It’s interesting to note that hormones play a big role in exercise and the way we approach fitness. For women, their menstrual cycle and changing hormonal levels can impact the amount and type of exercise they can do. According to Healthline: “given that each life stage may present unique hormonal side effects and challenges, exercise must be adapted appropriately to enhance quality of life and provide a sense of symbiosis with one’s anatomy.”
To dive even deeper into the world of health and fitness, Bored Panda interviewed Vinod Channa, a celebrity trainer and fitness consultant. Vinod had this to share about the effect of hormones on exercise: “Male hormones and female hormones are both different. Women produce estrogen, which is why they have more adipose tissue that stores fat. That’s why they’re soft, so they are prone to injuries. Women must do more strength training to build up their muscles and their joints.”
Rest days are setbacks.
they most certainly are not your body needs to rest every now and then.
No pain = no gain.
If you're in pain, you should stop because chances are you're going to seriously injure yourself.
There are different kinds of pain though, learn to distinguish. Nothing wrong with some musle-ache.
That sweating more = more calories burned. My ex worked out in a hot garage with sweats on in the summer trying to burn off more fat, and it was maddening trying to convince her to stop. DO NOT GIVE YOURSELF HEATSTROKE TRYING TO SWEAT MORE. YOU ARE ONLY LOSING WATER WEIGHT!
Wrestling coaches, looking at you for perpetuating this unhealthy practice.
People also love to complicate the process of working out. But Vinod states that “it depends on a lot of things. If you’re doing weight training, it depends on the body parts, which are the same for males and females. Just the intensity will go lower and higher depending upon the person’s fitness level, lifestyle, age, injuries, and a lot of other things.”
Research has also shown that tracking your diet and exercise can help with weight loss because it leads to positive behavior changes and increases motivation. “The other thing is the person’s target. If somebody’s looking for running, powerlifting, flexibility, according to that, the changes happen in the workout routine, how many calories they eat, and the reaction of the body,” Vinod shared.
That eating fat is bad for you.
As a diabetic I have been advised to consume less carbohydrates and more fats. Seems to be working.
That you can look like most Instagram fitness “models”/Youtubers. The reality is most of these people, especially guys, are on some sort of steroid/gear. TRT being the most common. Also their pictures are not raw and typically taken after getting a “pump” with perfect lighting. I HIGHLY recommend not comparing yourself to these people, it can definitely affect your self-confidence when it comes to your fitness goals.
That you must be overweight or have a poor diet to have high cholesterol/blood pressure. My mother was the healthiest, most active person I knew, she never topped 110 lbs in her entire life, and her cholesterol was always atrocious. Both her parents had that problem and passed it on to her. Genetics 🤷🏻♀️.
My grandmother always eats healthy, rarely drinks, exercises regularly and does not smoke. My grandfather on the other hand drank more, prefered a diet of potatoes and meat, really loved fatty pork of different cuts and smoked. He also hated to exercise. Guess who has high blood pressure and high cholesterol.
Another fitness myth that many people subscribe to is spot training. This is the process of only working out or training one body part to try and lose weight in that particular area. Unfortunately, spot training isn’t really effective. It’s actually important to exercise your whole body instead of just focusing on one part.
According to Vinod Channa, “[people] can create different patterns of workouts, which work on the body parts as a whole. Otherwise, what will happen is you’re doing only arms or upper chest, and the back and legs will get weaker. Before starting, you always have to work on basic mobility and flexibility that will help you to perform better and move faster without any muscle wear and tear, dislocations and injuries.”
People really need to stop going on diets that cut essential nutrients out of your diet. If you can't eat how you're eating for the rest of your life, then losing weight in that way won't be sustainable.
You don't need to cut out anything, just adjust the levels of different types of food.
That that BMI is a legit scale… it’s not. It’s a basic scale that was created in the 50’s and is not an accurate measurement of fat mass and fat free mass.
The country I'm in puts a ridiculous amount of stock in BMI. I have never, ever been a healthy BMI. When I was at my healthiest about 15-20 years ago, eating right, exercising a lot, getting enough sleep, I was still technically overweight according to my BMI. Nothing could have been further from the truth. I was in no way overweight. I'm currently a fat mess, but that's a different story.
It's not all about how much you weigh. If you're working out and getting results, the number on the scale might go up. Muscle weighs more than fat and muscle burns fat. So you might gain weight even though you're getting stronger and thinner. One of my friends stopped working out because she gained a few pounds and wouldn't listen to me telling her that's a good thing because she's obsessed with weighing a certain amount. Don't do that.
Measuring will usually give you better results, but then that can turn into a whole thing. My method is, does my body feel good? Do my clothes fit? Currently, the answer is no, but that's because I have become an inactive lump.
In modern times, people are exercising less and less. The BMJ found that around 1.4 billion people are at risk of developing diseases from not doing enough physical activity. Vinod also shared his own experience with the people he trains, saying: “[exercise] is very important nowadays because everybody is doing 13-14 hours working on their laptop. Their ankle, knee joints, hip joints, shoulders, neck, everything is weak.”
If working in physical therapy has taught me anything, it’s that an alarming amount of people have never worked out in their lives and have no idea that muscular soreness is normal after exercising. Also, soreness and pain are not the same thing.
What I learned from many years of physical therapy is that the PTs who push people into doing many reps and sets of a new exercise most definitely will be causing pain and that pain will tighten more muscles as a reaction and set one back weeks. The best PTs are the ones who inform you correctly to do the exercise or stretch to the edge of pain and discomfort and back off. Easy gentle repetition will eventually warm and stretch the tissue, not brute force and over doing the exercise.
That carbs are bad for you.
That you can turn fat into muscle. It doesn’t work that way, friends.
Dieting being confused with simply living a healthy lifestyle.
But a lot of people turn to these fake fitness hacks because they’re looking to make progress fast or lose weight quickly. Weight loss plateaus are quite common, and it’s nothing to be discouraged by. That’s why Vinod Channa shared a useful tip to combat this dreaded problem. He said, “let’s say you’re a beginner doing 10 repetitions of squats and burning 100 calories on the first day. Because you’re a beginner, the calories are burnt faster, but after a year to three years in that time, you’re not even burning as much.”
“It’s because your body is used to that and you need to keep progressing. That is also very important. If you don't keep progressing, you won’t get results. So you have to [go] back two steps. Whatever you’re doing, do less. Like if you’re doing five days workout, go only three days and let your body put on two to three kilos. After that, you have to add one day extra workout and decrease one meal and see how your body reacts,” he added.
Losing weight = Healthy.
A friend of mine once had a health scare that involved unintended weight loss and someone had the f*****g balls to say to her face they wished they could lose weight without trying.
I lost ten kilos during a depressive episode where I mainly lived on ice cream and junk food. A nurse told me to keep up the good work, I still wonder if she heard a single word I said aside from "lost ten kilos".
That you can’t over work out. Exercise dependencies are so common in the fitness industry. No Karen, I’m not going to reward you for going to the gym 3 times a day, that’s a problem.
That people go on a diet as if it is a temporary thing. What you consume IS your diet.
I learned not long ago - I'm a lifelong obese person - that diet stands for Don't Intend to Eat That. You have to find foods that you can live on/with to help with weight loss. Yo-yo dieting isn't good.
Fitness doesn’t have to be complicated and unachievable. Once you’re able to sift through the popular but useless health hacks, you’ll be able to focus on what actually matters. That is, losing weight in a healthy and sustainable manner. People couldn’t wait to debunk the top fitness “facts” they knew, which is why this post got 5k upvotes and 3.9k comments. Do you have any health tips that you’d like to prove wrong? Share them in the comments and let people know!
The general public who don't know s**t about nutrition, thinks that healthy eating is solely living off salad and vegetables.
Well, at some point, we're basically taught that everything will kill you, none of it is good for you, and no matter what we're eating someone will tell us its wrong. Since the US food supply is basically effed anyway, and no one has the time or will to weigh, lookup nutrition/calories for every single morsel that crosses your lips, feel free to take a long walk off a short dock. That's what the general public thinks is healthy because that is what ends up on the s**t list the least amount of times.
"I can run off this 2000 calorie meal in a one mile jog tomorrow".
I would walk 500 miles, and I would walk 500 mor.......Sorry, I lost consciousness for a minute.
That weightlifting for women will make them look like men.
ETA: juiced up men.
The food pyramid. Not it at all really.
Also, some people don't believe in germs still. Germs.
The US government continued to promote the food pyramid for years after it was proven to be bogus.
Not really a view, per se, but most folks go all in on diets designed for fitness models and weight lifters.
If you're just casually getting into fitness, eating 1.5× your body weight - or more - in protein is a daunting task. So is going to the gym for an hour plus 5 days a week.
Most people would have better success taking smaller bites of the fitness apple before tying to eat the whole thing in one bite.
I was just saying this the other day. If you just work out, there's no need to suddenly start eating four eggs a day or use protein powders.
That diet and exercise will trump genetics on life span. You can improve your chances slightly, but life span is a c**p shoot.
It's not just about when you die, but how you die, and how you spend your last years. Approx. 80% of strokes, for example, are preventable. Chronic kidney disease is most commonly caused by high blood pressure, then diabetes is the second highest cause. Genetics are important, but lifestyle can help your chances with a lot of things.
The amount of water needed is consistent from person to person.
Carrots are good for eye sight.
From what I know, the British made it up to mess with the Germans.
The British used that to mislead the Luftwaffe. They didn't want to reveal their radar capabilities, so, to explain why their interceptors always seemed to zone in on the German bombers, it was because "the lookouts ate lots of carrots to improve their night vision". Rather clever, that.
That all sugar consumption is bad.
I had many health issues when I was in my twenties. One doctor put me on a diet that eliminated processed sugars. I got a little better. The next doctor had me even eliminate fruit. Ultimately I was on a diet of one part animal protein to five parts vegetables. It was called the elimination diet and is what the doctors put one on to try and pinpoint food sensitivities. After two months on that diet I felt like a million bucks. All sugar and all wheat products were the foods that were the cause of my health issues.
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