By HANS DUVEFELT

1) EXERCISE MORE

I talk to people almost every day who think they can lose weight by exercising. I tell them that is impossible. I explain that it takes almost an hour of brisk walking to burn 100 calories, which equals one apple or a ten second binge on junk food. To lose a pound a week, you need to reduce your calorie intake by about 500 per day – that would be the equivalent of five hours of moderate exercise every day. We’d have to quit our jobs to do that.

2) EAT MORE FRUITS AND VEGETABLES

The other fallacy I hear all the time is that, somehow, adding “healthy” fruits and vegetables can make a person lose weight. I tell them that adding anything to their daily calorie intake will have the opposite effect. I more or less patiently explain that our job is to figure out what to take away instead of what to add. Maybe substituting a fruit for a Whoopie pie is healthy in other ways, but it has almost nothing to do with weight loss.

3) EAT BREAKFAST

A third fallacy is that eating a healthy breakfast will ensure weight loss. To explore this one, I ask: “Are you often hungry?”

So many of my overweight patients deny ever feeling hungry – that gnawing feeling in the pit of your stomach and the low blood sugar onfusion and weakness I feel by 9 or 10 am after doing barn chores on an empty stomach (only coffee).

When I hear “I never feel hungry”, I don’t recommend starting a good breakfast habit because that would likely increase a person’s daily calorie intake. But when I hear that a breakfast skipper goes for the doughnuts mid morning due to hunger, I certainly recommend eating breakfast. When I do, I always point out that the typical American cereal and banana breakfast, along with soft drinks, is actually the major reason for our obesity and diabetes epidemics.

4) EAT 3-4 MEALS A DAY

The fourth myth is that you somehow have to eat a certain number of meals. That depends on how you feel. If you’re in the habit of eating, say breakfast and supper and have no symptoms if you were to skip lunch, then why eat it, unless you’re trying to put on weight? The problem, again, is when a meal-skipper gets the munchies. We need to avoid that trap.

5) DIABETICS NEED CARBS (AND SEVERAL MEALS PER DAY)

Number five is all the overweight diabetics who have been told by dieticians and diabetic educators that they must eat a certain amount of calories or carbs or number of meals just because they are diabetics. That is sometimes the case, because some diabetic medications can cause low blood sugar if you skip meals, but it is by no means a universal truth. If you want to lose weight and feel just fine not eating all the meals and snacks those people tell you to consume, why force yourself to do it? Why not listen to your body (instead of your desires or prior indoctrination)?

It is a sad state of affairs that almost everybody knows complicated things like operating their smartphone but are so lost when it comes to knowing what to eat. (We can thank the food/snack industry for that.)

Hans Duvefelt is a Swedish-born rural Family Physician in Maine. This post originally appeared on his blog, A Country Doctor Writes, here.