Three of
the most frequent
Diet MYTHS are:

First, the idea that we need to detoxify or cleanse our bodies;

Second, the idea that we need a plethora of dietary supplements to stay healthy; and

Third, the idea that eating specific foods or products will increase metabolism and make us lose weight.

Notice how often these three Myths are associated with the marketing of unfounded ... (and even potentially harmful) ... diet products.

Bistro Shrimp Pasta (The Cheesecake Factory)
This dish might seem like a healthy choice because of the shrimp, mushrooms and arugula. However, at 3,120 calories it's the most caloric thing on the menu—yes, even more than the cheesecakes.

Crispy Chicken Costoletta (The Cheesecake Factory)
The meal sounds harmless with its "lightly breaded" chicken breasts, mashed potatoes and fresh asparagus, but the meal packs 2,610 calories. The dish has more calories than any steak, chop or burger meal on The Cheesecake Factory's menu

18-ounce Veal Porterhouse (Maggiano’s Little Italy)
Is it really necessary to eat six times the amount of a normal serving of veal in one sitting? Maggiano's thinks so: This colossally large portion of meat weighs in at 1,900 calories. And that's without any sides!

Little Italy Chocolate Zuccotto Cake (Maggiano's)
There's nothing like a little dessert to end a meal. But there's nothing ''little'' about this cake: It provides 1,820 calories.

Country Fried Steak & Eggs (IHOP)
This herculean meal includes 8 ounces of fried steak with country gravy, but it doesn't stop there! You also get to pile on two eggs, hash browns and two buttermilk pancakes. That filling feast comes with a nutritional cost of 1,760 calories.

Baby Back Ribs (Full Rack) with Shiner Bock BBQ Sauce (Chili's)
Eating this rack of ribs would supply you with the nutritional equivalent of two Chili's Classic Sirloin Steak dinners with mashed potatoes—plus another 10-ounce Classic Sirloin Steak on the side. This meal tips the scales at 1,660 calories. If you order the Homestyle Fries and Cinnamon Apples to complete your meal, you increase the damage to over 2,300 calories

 
Johnny Rockets' Bacon Cheddar Double
Johnny Rockets' Bacon Cheddar Double burger is served along with its Sweet Potato Fries and Big Apple Shake, which actually contains a slice of apple pie. That meal delivers a total of 3,500 calories.

Smoothie King's
Peanut Power Plus Grape Smoothie
Smoothie King combines peanut butter, banana, sugar, and grape juice in its Peanut Power Plus Grape Smoothie. A 40-oz. order of the smoothie contains 1,460 calories

Uno Chicago Grill's Deep Dish Macaroni & 3-Cheese
Uno's Deep Dish Macaroni is made up of four cups of pasta, cheddar, Parmesan and Romano cheeses along with Alfredo sauce and a Ritz Cracker topping. The meal contains 1,980 calories.

 
Before my Weight Loss Surgery 20 years ago, I spent about 20 years in Therapy trying to resolve any emotional issues that might be causing my problems with food and weight. I gained lots of information about overeating behaviors, and insight into my own personal life. Therapy helped me learn to like and accept myself even though I was morbidly obese, but it didn’t take away my desire to be a normal weight. It also didn’t result in my becoming any thinner.

In my opinion, too much emphasis on the emotional aspects of overeating simply adds another narrative to “pathologizing” people with excess weight.

Most obese people are not gluttonous sloths without will power, nor are they emotionally-wounded wrecks. You can chose which of these you think is worse.

After a mentally-healthy-person becomes obese in this anti-fat biased culture, sometimes this will adversely affect all dimensions of their physical, emotional and functional health, which brings them close to a pathological state.

However, there are countless people with excess weight, who eat as much - or as little - as skinny folks. Throughout history, overweight and obese individuals have expressed incredible feats of determination and will power, and psychiatric wards are full of skinny people with mental illness.

If there even really IS an obesity epidemic…yes, I’ve read some excellent material disputing that fact … It is probably the natural response to living in an unnatural environment - or perhaps even the natural response to merely living with plenty of food at ready access.

For most people with excess weight, there is probably no real underlying “pathological” driver apart from being human. After all, what do most naturally thin people do to stay thin? The correct answer is often, “not much” … especially when compared to the lifetime efforts put forth by most of the people who have a natural tendency toward fatness.

Effort Shock is discovering that what you want
costs a whole lot more effort than you thought it would.

 Weight-Loss and Weight-Loss Maintenance is a good example of this.
See more about Effort Shock in the excellent article below - written by David Wong of Cracked.

“I think The Karate Kid ruined the modern world.

Not just that movie, but all of the movies like it (you certainly can't let the Rocky sequels escape blame). Basically any movie with a training montage.

You know what I'm talking about; the main character is very bad at something, then there is a sequence in the middle of the film set to upbeat music that shows him practicing. When it's done, he's an expert.

It seems so obvious that it actually feels insulting to point it out. But it's not obvious. Every adult I know--or at least the ones who are depressed--continually suffers from something like sticker shock (that is, when you go shopping for something for the first time and are shocked to find it costs way, way more than you thought). Only it costs effort. It's Effort Shock.

We have a vague idea in our head of the "price" of certain accomplishments, how difficult it should be to get a degree, or succeed at a job, or stay in shape, or raise a kid, or build a house. And that vague idea is almost always catastrophically wrong.

Accomplishing worthwhile things isn't just a little harder than people think; it's 10 or 20 times harder. Like losing weight. You make yourself miserable for six months and find yourself down a whopping four pounds. Let yourself go at a single all-you-can-eat buffet and you've gained it all back.

So, people bail on diets. Not just because they're harder than they expected, but because they're so much harder it seems unfair, almost criminally unjust. You can't shake the bitter thought that, "This amount of effort should result in me looking like a panty model."

It applies to everything. America is full of frustrated, broken, baffled people because so many of us think, "If I work this hard, this many hours a week, I should have (a great job, a nice house, a nice car, etc). I don't have that thing, therefore something has corrupted the system and kept me from getting what I deserve, and that something must be (the government, illegal immigrants, my wife, my boss, my bad luck, etc)."

I really think Effort Shock has been one of the major drivers of world events. Think about the whole economic collapse and the bad credit bubble. You can imagine millions of working types saying, "All right, I have NO free time. I work every day, all day. I come home and take care of the kids. We live in a tiny house, with two shitty cars. And we are still deeper in debt every single month." So they borrow and buy on credit because they have this unspoken assumption that, dammit, the universe will surely right itself at some point and the amount of money we should have been making all along (according to our level of effort) will come raining down.

All of it comes back to having those massively skewed expectations of the world. Even the people you think of as pessimists, they got their pessimism by continually seeing the world fail to live up to their expectations, which only happened because their expectations were grossly inaccurate in the first place.

You know that TV show where Gordon Ramsay tours various failing restaurants and swears at the owners until everything is fine again? Every episode is a great example. They all involve some haggard restaurant owner, a half a million dollars in debt, looking exhausted into the camera and saying, "How can we be losing money? I work 90 hours a week!"

The world demands more. So, so much more. How have we gotten to adulthood and failed to realize this? Why would our expectations of the world be so off? I blame the montages. Five breezy minutes, from sucking at karate to being great at karate, from morbid obesity to trim, from geeky girl to prom queen, from terrible garage band to awesome rock band.

In the real world, the winners of the All Valley Karate Championship in The Karate Kid would be the kids who had been at it since they were in elementary school. The kids who act like douchebags because their parents made them skip video games and days out with their friends and birthday parties so they could practice, practice, practice. And that's just what it takes to get "pretty good" at it. Want to know how long it takes to become an expert at something? About 10,000 hours, according to research.

That's practicing two hours a day, every day, for almost 14 years.

Nobody told me how hard this was going to be.

See "Rocky" Training Montage below: