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1. All bottled water is generally the same. T/F

    Answer: False
All bottled water is not the same. Some has been through a process called reverse osmosis which takes out all the minerals. Minerals are important in water to create a gradient between the inside and the outside of the cell. Reverse osmosis water is like a distilled water and I do not recommend using it for drinking water. Some drinking water has minerals added to it either alone or with things such as flavorings and sometimes even sugars. Some very popular water has a very high natural level of fluoride. Fluoride is a poison. Even though it is added to things like tooth paste, mouth wash and municipal drinking water, it is not good for you, and the argument that it strengthens bones is not supported by hip fracture incidents in the areas where fluoride is used in municipal water.

To learn more about water, read the chapter on water in "Fat Loss for Life."

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2. The bathroom scale works just fine for most diets. T/F

    Answer: False
If your body were only made of one substance, like fat, or maybe muscle, or if it were just water, a bathroom scale would be just fine. But because the body is made of several different types of materials, a device which only gives a total weight can be, and is, very misleading. To give you an example, say you were a metal dealer and you were selling scrap metal and you had a box of several types of metals you had for sale in your scrap metal junk yard. Let's say the box had gold, silver, tin and lead. What price would you put on the total box? Would you charge gold or tin prices, or maybe you would try to average it all out? No matter what you did you would never be exact enough. Scale weight is the very same problem. The water inside the cell is the gold along with the muscle. The fat over a specific percentage can be the tin, where the real lead is the extracellular water. Most people are completely unaware of the compartments of their body, never mind which is good and which is bad, and least of all how to evaluate the weight of each.

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3. Initial weight loss on most diets is just water. T/F
    
     Answer: False
If one loses more water than fat when they diet they are most likely on the wrong diet. When the intake of starch, sugar and fat is reduced, the body will burn its stores of fat for fuel. This will lower the total pounds of body fat. One possible way it could happen is when an excessive amount of exercise is added at the same time the total calories are reduced. The water aspect of weight is a little more complicated than most people know.

There is water inside the cell and outside the cell. Each water compartment has specific electrolytes (minerals) which occupy the spaces, and the body has regulatory systems to protect these spaces and to maintain a very critical balance. For example, sodium is outside the cell and is naturally retained by the body selectively by the kidneys. Potassium and chloride, on the other hand, are found inside the cell and the potassium is naturally excreted. When you examine the sodium and potassium content of unrefined and unprocessed foods, you will find a much higher content of potassium than sodium and that is why the body excretes the potassium. The reverse is true of processed and refined foods where the sodium, in the form of table salt, is used to an excess. You will also find the same problem in many restaurants as well. So when most people go on a diet they cut back on junk food and tend to eat at home more frequently. They may also begin to exercise, which causes them to perspire and also lose water. Fat also contains a large amount of water which is released during weight loss.

So why did I say the answer was false? The reason is that one should drink a lot of water when they are losing weight. This supports weight loss and turns over the water stores in the body, exchanging old water for new water. Also, as the body burns its fat stores, there is a great deal of waste material which is released from the burning fat. The water will help remove the debris. It is true, however, that we want the water compartments to balance, and changing the diet from junk food to whole food is a way to help the body naturally increase its energy which happens when the intracellular water increases, and the extracellular water decreases.

Finally, many people are dehydrated inside the cell and have too much water outside the cell. If their weight loss is coming from water, they are usually increasing the intracellular dehydration and doing very little to the extracellular water.

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4. Dieting women should exercise until they have lost their weight. T/F

    Answer: False
Females protect their fat stores when they exercise. What that means is they will not burn the fat. It is best and easiest to burn the fat first with diet, and then exercise to keep the weight balanced. See the research section of this site and you can read several studies which support the fact that women do not burn fat with exercise, whereas men do. When I tell this to most of my female patients they usually respond with, "I could have told you that." Females are all about fat. They need fat for hormones, breast feeding and having babies. It only makes good sense that they would have a fail safe system to protect them in times of famine and/or excessive physical activity.

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5. Fasting is a good way to start a dieting regiment T/F

    Answer: False
Fasting is the best way to mess up your metabolism. It signals every system of the body to conserve. It burns proteins and intoxicates the liver with ketones. Every system of the body depends upon synergistic chemical activities like falling dominoes. Intentional starvation disrupts the balance of these systems. Changing the amount and type of food you consume is the better alternative and helps your body repair itself, not consume itself.

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6. Fat weight is harder to lose than water weight. T/F

    Answer: False
ater weight is by far much more difficult to control and lose. Fat weight is by far the easiest to lose. By reducing the volume and type of food you consume, the fat will immediately become fuel. Put it this way, it's Friday night and you go out for dinner and you overeat all the wrong stuff. You awake to the scale the next day and guess what you gained weight. Well, what did you gain? So you drive to my office and we test you to find the weight gain was all water. Exhausted from the experience you sit down for the next several days when we retest you again and now we find you have gotten fatter since the last test. The moral of the story is that salty food will show up on the scale the next day whereas fat will show up several days later. The reason for this is that the sugar or starch you ate on Friday night stimulated insulin to be secreted and the insulin moved the sugar into the muscles, and if the body did not require the sugar it eventually was stored as fat. The process did not happen overnight, but took several days. The salt, on the other hand, did it immediately and will take a week, with most people, to come back to its pre-salty meal level. The fat, on the other hand, will be cannibalized as soon as the volume of food consumed falls slightly below what your body needs to carry on its daily activity.

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7. Fat is a better thing to eat than carbohydrates to maintain weight loss. T/F

    Answer: True
Carbohydrates stimulate insulin which is a fat storage hormone. When the sugar enters the muscle, if not burnt for energy, it becomes stored fat. Fat, on the other hand, when consumed, is used for energy. If not needed it is excreted. The body behaves much like the rest of us do: when we get all our bills together to pay and we run out of money in the account, the last thing we want to do is to go to our nest egg or savings. We would rather try to get by on the cash flow. The body would rather burn what you consume than what is stored. The last thing, therefore, you want to do is eat the stuff which will be stored. When you burn your fat for fuel, as you will do when burn, you may begin to crave starch and or sugar. When this happens, it is time to start adding back the fat. This is where so many diets fail because when you lose the weight you can't sustain it because you don't add back the fat and the body turns its attention to starch and sugar.

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8. Reverse osmosis water, like that which is filtered under the sink in many kitchens, is a good source of drinking water because it has had the minerals removed.T/F

    Answer: False
All bottled water is not the same. Some has been thru a process called reverse osmosis which takes out all the minerals. Minerals are important in water to create a gradient between the inside and the outside of the cell. Reverse osmosis water is like a distilled water and I do not recommend using it for drinking water. Some drinking water has minerals added to it either alone or with things such as flavorings and some times even sugars. Some very popular water has a very high natural level of fluoride. Fluoride is a poison even though it is added to things like tooth paste, mouth wash and municipal drinking water it is not good for you and the argument that it strengths bones is not supported by hip fracture incidents in the areas where fluoride is used in municipal water.

To learn more about water read the chapter on water in Fat Loss for Life.

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9. It is dangerous to lose fat rapidly, i.e., a pound a day. T/F

    Answer: False
When properly fed, the body will only lose what the body burns as fuel. It takes calories to lose weight. The greatest weight loss I ever experienced any of my patients losing was 27 pounds in one week. The patient's husband was a physician and both he and I were shocked when his wife lost so much weight so rapidly. We just could not believe it! We checked and rechecked the scale and the equipment, but it was true, she had lost it in one week. When I questioned her about what she had done, she said she had done exactly as my materials had recommended, and she said that usually she does not eat but that when she does she eats just junk. She continued to tell me that she goes without eating all day and only gives in to junk food late at night when she finally just has to eat something. What was happening was she was constantly in a state of starvation and storage, and when she was eating and snacking as per the plan, she had the calories to burn the stored fat which finally let her out of the starvation famine she was in all these years.

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10. Gaining more muscle is important for most people wanting to lose fat .T/F

      Answer: False
The truth is that practically everyone I test has too much muscle weight.
The only time I find a patient below the recommended amount of muscle is when they are dehydrated. Most patients develop too much muscle by carrying around too much fat. And often too much water. For every liter of water, the weight equivalent is two pounds. I once shrunk a person who weighed 320 pounds and over half the lost weight was water. Boy, was his heart happy when he was taken off the transplant list. Remember, the heart has to continually move all that fluid, to say nothing of the stress on the kidneys.

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11. Most people needing to lose weight have too much water in their bodies. T/F

      Answer: False
ead the answers to questions #1,#6 and #8. The water issue is a very
interesting and often difficult one for the weight-imbalanced person.
Intracellular water is a good thing and is difficult to gain. Extracellular
water is not as desirable, and is easy to gain. The water inside the cell
increases cellular energy, whereas extra-cellular water seems to reduce
energy. Most patients I see have extra water on the outside of the cell and a reduction on the inside of the cell. As we change the types of food and the type of water the patient drinks, these balances improve. However, dehydration, even if slight, of the space inside the cell, may take years to repair.

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12. Men lose fat faster than women. T/F

      Answer: False
ost women will have a fit when talking about male/female weight loss
competition. Women have more fat to lose overall than men (read the answer to question #4). Over the first several years of the research on this program I tracked the statistics on male/female weight loss differences and found that women lose fat at the rate of 2.59 pounds of fat per week. When figuring these numbers I excluded all the patients who did not fit the trend and lost much more weight than the average. By this I mean I did not include those patients in the averages. On the other hand, I did include those patients who were not doing the program exactly as prescribed. So the overall range went from about one half a pound per week to just under 6 pounds per week. Their overall weight loss was slightly over 3 pounds per week.

Men, on the other hand, seem to have more other materials to lose and less fat over all. This is not to say they are lighter than women. It is that their composition is different. So when they begin to lose, they lose less fat but their overall weight loss is greater than females. Men on the average lose about 1.92 pounds of fat per week, when they have a total weight loss of 3.8 pounds per week.

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13. Men typically have more fat to lose than women . T/F

     Answer: False
By percentage of weight, men do have less fat, as women retain fat for so many female functions. Also, see the answer to question #4.

Most women will have a fit when talking about male/female weight loss
competition. Women have more fat to lose overall than men (read the answer to question #4). Over the first several years of the research on this program I tracked the statistics on male/female weight loss differences and found that women lose fat at the rate of 2.59 pounds of fat per week. When figuring these numbers I excluded all the patients who did not fit the trend and lost way more weight than the average. By this I mean I did not include those patients in the averages. On the other hand I did include those patients who were not doing the program exactly as prescribed. So the overall range went from about one half a pound per week to just under 6 pounds per week. Their overall weight loss was slightly over 3 pounds per week.

Men on the other hand seem to have more other materials to lose and less fat overall. This is not to say they are lighter than women it is that their composition is different. So when they begin to lose they lose less fat but their over all weight loss is greater than females. Men on the average lose about 1.92 pounds of fat per week where they have a total weight loss of 3.8 pounds per week.

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14. All table salt is the same. T/F

     Answer: False
aCl is the chemical abbreviation for salt. It stands for sodium chloride.
The percentages of the chloride and the sodium can vary to some extent and still be sodium chloride. However, not all salt is equal. Some salts have a higher percent of the sodium and less of the chloride. Also important is the heating of the salt and the source of the salt itself. Salt contains minerals and the source may vary widely as to which minerals are contained within that particular source. Some of the minerals and electrolytes in the salt are sensitive to heat and are given off as gases during heating, leaving the salt imbalanced as compared with the way nature created it.

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15. Fat is more fattening than sugar. T/F

      Answer: False
It is true that fat has more fat in it, but sugar will, in the metabolic system of the body, create more fat than fat itself. It is true that when you consume fat your body will not burn stored fat, but worse than that is when you consume sugar, it stimulates insulin to move sugar into the tissues for energy, and if not used it will become fat. (See the answers to questions #5 and #7.)

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16. Pasta has more calories per gram than does alcohol. T/F

      Answer: False
Starch/sugar has four calories per gram, whereas fat has nine calories per gram. Proteins have four calories per gram, and finally, unknown to many people, alcohol has nearly as much as fat at eight calories per gram.

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17. Sweet rolls have more calories per gram than olive oil. T/F

     Answer: False
Not too difficult. See the answer in question #16 above.

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18. Unsalted nuts are more fattening than bread. T/F

      Answer: False
It is true that nuts have more fat per gram than bread but don't be fooled. It is the sugar in the bread and the starch that metabolically makes it more fattening to consume than the nuts. (Read answers to questions #7, #15, and 16,)

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19. When I have lost all of the weight I need to lose, it is good to follow a diet containing the smallest amount of fat possible. T/F

      Answer: False
Read the answers to questions #7, #15, and #17.

If you are not consuming enough calories, your body will want the fast track to brain sugar and that is sugar and starch. So it is best to eat ample amounts of good fat so your brain and body have the fuel they need to stay out of the sugar craving curve.

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20. When I diet if I could just exercise everyday I could lose weight faster. T/F

     Answer: False & True
How can this question be both true and false? This issue of exercise is tricky. When going on a diet, people cut their calorie intake and try to expend more physical energy. In concept, it is a good idea, but at the root of it is the reason so many people get frustrated with the combination of diet and exercise. The tightrope is that too little food and too much exercise puts the body into starvation retention. That means the body is going to do its best to retain more of what it consumes. The other difficulty is that males and females are wired differently. Females will protect their fat at every cost. Males will not, and therefore there is a direct relationship between physical activity and weight loss with males but not females. The final note on the subject is, in my opinion, it is always healthier to shrink first with a good portion control eating plan with plenty of water, and exercise a trimmer, healthier body once you are in better health.

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