The 7 Biggest Health Myths Holding You Back

Sarah Turner

Expert Copywriter & Copywriting Mentor

Published Dec 18, 2017

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These are the 7 biggest health myths that are holding people back from being their happiest, healthiest self.

1. Fat makes you fat.

Also, under this category – fat is bad.

If only one new woman heard this and came to believe it, well, I would feel that my all my writing was worth it because this is a mindset worth changing. I say women because they’re typically more likely to avoid fats for weight loss and they are more impacted by low fat diets because of their body chemistry – namely hormones. That being said, men need to hear this too.

You need healthy fat to make hormones and for optimal brain function.

In fact, a huge study was recently released that followed 135,000 people in 18 countries for an average of seven years found that low fat diets were associated with a higher risk of death overall.

Not all fats are created equal though – you want more good fat in your diet and zero transfats.

But back to the main health myth – fat doesn’t make you fat. If you haven’t heard of the ketogenic diet yet, it might be worth looking into – especially, if you’re interested in losing weight. The ketogenic (keto) diet is making headlines because it’s very effective at helping with weight loss and combating disease.

The keto diet is a high fat, low carbohydrate diet that pushes your body into a metabolic state called ketosis. When you’re in ketosis, your body becomes incredibly efficient at burning fat for energy.

When you periodically go in and out of ketosis, your body becomes fat-adapted. When you’re fat-adapted, your body burns through fat efficiently, you become more insulin sensitive (a good thing), you crave less sugar and carbs, and you won’t have sugar crashes or get ‘hangry.’

You don’t have to go on a strict ketogenic diet to become fat adapted but you do need to stop thinking fat makes you fat.

BTW – The science behind the keto diet is absolutely fascinating – it’s proving to be effective against seizures in children, epilepsy, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, brain cancer, and more.

If you want to read more about becoming fat adapted, I recommend Mark Sisson’s blog Mark’s Daily Apple.

2. Your mental health is a chemical imbalance of the brain.

I’ve had my fair share of mental health struggles. At different points in my life, depression and anxiety have been crippling for me. When I was struggling with each of these, I did what I do best – I researched the hell out of them. And what I’ve found is that – so many more solutions to mental health lie in the gut than we are led to believe.

Did you know, 95 percent of your serotonin is in your gut? Actually, the gut and brain communicate via what’s known as the gut-brain axis. You might think that the brain does most the talking but research is finding the gut has a lot to say. This is how the gut has come to earn the nickname – The Second Brain.

Unfortunately, we’ve been taught that many mental health conditions are chemical imbalances of the brain and some people are stuck with the cards they’ve been dealt. On top of this, we are finding that many traditional antidepressants are seriously harmful to the gut.

In my personal experience, and in the research I’ve done on the gut-brain axis, you have extraordinary power over your mental health.

Skeptical? There’s mountains of information on this, here are a few starting points:

On the Myth of Chemical Imbalance – Psychology Today
The Gut-Brain Connection, Mental Health, and Disease – Psychology Today
Mental Health May Depend on Gut Creatures – Scientific American
Think Twice: How the Gut’s “Second Brain” Influences Mood and Well Being – Scientific American

What does this mean for you?

If you struggle with mental health issues, consider your diet and gut health. They could have more of an impact than you realize. For me personally, alleviating my depression and anxiety was directly related to what I was eating and drinking (and I added supplements to help). I had to change those to see a real difference in my day to day life.

3. You have to workout a ton to be in shape (or starve yourself).

We’ve been taught a calorie in – calorie out equation that is just dead wrong. I believe this obnoxious health myth is keeping so many people from even trying to get healthy.

If being healthy means you have to eat like a bird and workout all the time, what kind of life is that anyway?

Why bother, right?

Well, I’m here to tell you getting a better looking body and improving your health is possible without working out all the time – and you definitely don’t need to starve yourself.

This is because your metabolism adapts.

Your metabolism adapts to your activity levels and within a certain range of working out (or not working out) it will plateau. The good news is you can focus your energy (which turns out to be pretty minimal) on manipulating your metabolism to run efficiently.

There are a couple of ways you can make your metabolism run more efficiently, here’s a quick overview:

Becoming fat-adapted so your body burns fat efficiently. This involved reducing carbs and sugar while eating more healthy fats (yum!).
Periodically putting your body into ketosis. You can do this through a low sugar, low carb diet, eating more healthy fats, intermittent fasting, and adding MCT oil to your diet (If you’ve heard of Bulletproof coffee, this is the concept behind that).
Intermittent fasting. This means fasting for 12 – 16+ hours per day. This is MUCH easier than it sounds. If you stop eating at 9pm and don’t have breakfast until 9am, there ya go. This is even easier if you’re fat-adapted because you won’t have sugar crashes. The king of intermittent fasting is Martin Berkhan. On top of being hilariously snarky in his health advice (and having a website that looks like pure spam), he regularly shows how you can hack your body’s metabolism, get fit, and not be thrown off by eating entire cheesecakes and more.

Working out too much without plenty of recovery just isn’t good for you, especially for women. Women who are doing long, high intensity workouts and have low fat diets are actually putting themselves in danger and I wish more people knew this (as someone who formerly did it to myself).

Two awesome articles that really dig deep into why everything above is true are:

Don’t mistake my advice for suggesting you shouldn’t workout at all. That is not what I’m saying. There’s just a ton of misconceptions about what needs to be done to have a fit body and better health and so many of them are bogus.

4. You can just burn off junk with exercise.

Exercising will not correct the damage done on a cellular level. Diet is more important than exercise when it comes to being healthy. I feel as though many people are afraid to say that, but it’s true. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t exercise though. This goes back to the calorie in, calorie out crap.

There’s actually a study that perfectly examined this idea. This study that compared two groups of relatively healthy people and had them snack for two weeks. One group snacked on peanuts (fat and protein) and the other snacked on candy (sugar).

In only two weeks, the candy group experienced:

Increased body weight
Increased weight circumference
Increased LDL (bad) cholesterol
Increased ApoB/ApoA-1-ratio (an indicator of heart disease)

Fact: Sugar is the bad guy when it comes to your health.

If you make only one change right now for better health, I would recommend eliminating sugar. If that sounds devastating to you, then there’s a good chance your gut microbiome and palette have been shifted by your sugar consumption. Meaning, your body is addicted to sugar.

Sugar addiction is the real deal. It comes with all the telltale signs of addiction – binging, withdrawals, and cravings.

If you remove sugar from your life, it will significantly improve your health and eventually your palette and gut microbiome will return to normal. Just how bad sugar is really deserves a whole article on it’s own. Here’s some extra reading on that:

Mark Sisson’s – The Definitive Guide to Sugar

What you eat matters, and to correct your body’s metabolism and other functions, start by eliminating sugar (and alternative sweeteners! – which exacerbates all these issues).

If you need to reboot your health, start with your diet and eliminate the calorie in, calorie out health myth from your repertoire.

*Side rant: Stories are breaking that the sugar industry paid scientists to manipulate around 60 years of food and beverage science. This means just how bad sugar is for us (and how addictive) is probably not fully realized. More on that:

5. Snoring isn’t a big deal. (This is huge!)

This may seem random to you, but to me it’s another fact I want to shout from the rooftops! Sleep-disordered breathing hasn’t made the mainstream yet, but I assure you it will.

Sleep-disordered breathing as silent epidemic and I’m not being dramatic when I say that. As a generation, our airways are smaller because of our diet, bottle use, less breastfeeding, and mushy baby food.

This is the same reason so many of us need our wisdom teeth out.

Our jaws don’t develop down and out like they used to and the result is sleep-disordered breathing (this includes but is not limited to snoring).

It’s estimated that over half of Americans suffer from sleep-disordered breathing AND up to 90 percent will go undiagnosed.

At this point you might be wondering, why does it matter if you suffer from sleep-disordered breathing?

Sleep-disordered breathing is a serious problem because it prevents your brain’s detoxifying system from doing its job – called the glymphatic system.

Your glymphatic system runs during your deepest stages of sleep and cleans out important neurotoxic waste. In fact, your brain shrinks by 60 percent during this process, as it cleans out waste. When this system doesn’t run, you’re at an increased risk for Alzheimer’s disease, depression, anxiety, and more.

The glymphatic system is a relatively new discovery – it was only named in 2013. In this short time, what we’ve learned about the glymphatic system is already significant and has a huge implications on our health – imagine what will come out over the next few years….

How serious do I think sleep-disordered breathing is?

I wrote an article about sleep-disordered breathing where I discussed how one of the telltale signs was a scalloped tongue (where your tongue appears ‘scalloped’ because it’s being pushed against your teeth). My husband reading the article, casually said to me, “I have a scalloped tongue.”

When we started thinking about it, he had other telltale signs of sleep-disordered breathing:

Waking up not feeling rested
A daily afternoon energy slump with brain fog
Days where he had difficulty concentrating

He made an appointment with an airway focused dentist, she took one look into his mouth and was certain he suffered from sleep-disordered breathing. Knowing how this issue compounds over your life and leads to so many health problems, my husband is now in the process of having an at home sleep test, having his wisdom teeth out, and tonsils removed to help open his airway.

Sleep-disordered breathing is no joke.

Don't let these health myths hold you back. 🥑 Fat makes you fat 🧠 Mental health struggles are a chemical imbalance of the brain 🏋️‍♂️ You have to work out a ton to be in shape 🏃‍♀️You can burn off junk with exercise 😴 Snoring isn't a big deal 🔬 Your genetics are set in stone 🤔 Your thoughts don't matter.... I've got news for you - you're body is incredibly dynamic and powerful. It's time to take charge of your health!

6. “It’s my genetics.”

If you’ve ever said something like, “I can’t help it, I get it from my mom” or anything that blames your genes for how you are – you’re holding yourself back. We are finding out more and more – through epigenetics – that your DNA isn’t some blueprint of who you are as a person.

You and your genes are much more dynamic.

Your genes have the ability to be turned on, off, up, and down – and you have a ton of say in this. When you blame your genes for factors in your life you create a victim mindset, which can hold powerful sway over you.

What are some of the factors in your life that control your genetic expression?

Medications
Nutrients
Stress levels
Food choice
Economic factors
If you felt loved growing up*
Exercise
Your gut microbiome
Your thoughts!

All of these factors and more have the ability to influence your genetic expression.

Our brains and bodies are incredibly dynamic.

*The research behind feeling loved while you were growing up is fascinating because it has immense power over how a person develops. However, just as certain experiences have the power to influence genetic expression, we have serious control in working to undo much of those influences. Knowing is half the battle.

You can read more about this in my article: Don’t Be A Victim Of Your Genes – You Have More Control Than You Realize

7. Your thoughts don’t matter.

Ok, so maybe this isn’t a widespread health myth but what I’m about to say is certainly not a widespread truth – and it should be.

Your thoughts matter.

You might think your thoughts are just a personal inner monologue and no one’s listening…

…but your body and brain are listening.

What you think matters very much to your overall health. The power of your brain over your life is awe-inspiring.

Studies have shown that positive thoughts aren’t fleeting, they have the ability to broaden cognition, ward off depression, increase life satisfaction, and place you on a trajectory of growth.

This is more than feel good science, people!

You brain actually has a hard time differentiating between your thoughts and real life – your imagination changes your perception of reality.

On the other hand, it’s very possible to make yourself sick with negative thoughts. A study that followed over 7,000 people for 12 years found that those with anxiety were 73 percent more likely to develop heart disease. It makes sense, stress causes cortisol and inflammation to course throughout your body. The effects of stress on your body are widespread and damaging.

You’ve heard of the placebo effect, but you might not have considered how it can work in a day-to-day capacity. AND you can manipulate it to work in your favor.

When times are tough:

There have been darker periods in my life where I straight-up used a mantra to change my outlook (actually, I still use a couple today but not as regularly). If someone listened to my brain during these times I would have sounded weird, for sure. I would replay phrases in my mind like – “I have the courage to… XYZ.”

Over the years I’ve found that focusing on the emotion you want (as opposed to what you’re experiencing) and incorporating gratitude work best for me.

By the way, the whole gratitude movement isn’t just a bunch of hippies prancing around telling you, “you should be grateful, la dee da!” – there’s growing research that’s proving gratitude has immense physical and psychological benefits. Gratitude is powerful shit.

These are 7 of the biggest health myths that are holding so many people back. If you’re reading this and now aware of each of these, you’re already taking a massive step in the right direction.

What’s next is how we can take each of these and apply them to your life so you can feel better, live healthier, and unleash your full potential.

Resources:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/08/170829091027.htm

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11581442

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2367001/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2633336/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1819381/

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-second-brain/

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/06/gut-bacteria-on-the-brain/395918/

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mental-illness-metaphor/201709/the-myth-the-chemical-imbalance

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolutionary-psychiatry/201404/the-gut-brain-connection-mental-illness-and-disease

http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(15)01577-8