ppert said.
Grazing will boost metabolism and help you lose weight.
While going too long without eating can set you up for diet catastrophes, "grazing can also rack up calories," Lippert said. Handful after handful of almonds, or continuous sips of banana-soy smoothies, will eventually appear on your waistline, she said.
A grazing habit degrades a person's internal guidance about when to eat, making it nearly impossible to tap into hunger and satiety cues, Lippert said. "If you can't remember the last time you were really hungry, that is not a good thing," she said.
When we eat freely and continuously, in any place at anytime, we begin eating more for stimulation and reward, rather than responding to our bodies' needs, said Dr. David Kessler, former FDA commissioner and author of "The End of Overeating; Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite" (Rodale Books, 2009).
Such behavior is not good for anyone's diet.
Saturated fat causes cellulite, and it's bad for you anyway.
Cellulite is no different than other body fat; some fat just gets stored as cellulite in some parts of the body. And any excess body fat is caused by excess calories, no matter whether those calories come from bacon, donuts or carrot sticks.
Past studies lumped saturated fat in with trans fat, giving the former a bad rap by association. But while trans fat is truly evil, saturated fat found mostly in animal products performs many critical functions, such as helping the body use calcium and omega 3s, boosting the immune system and protecting major organs from disease.
And, in small quantities, it can even help your diet. "You can blow through half a block of low-fat cheese, because it doesn't taste like anything," Lippert said. "But have a little full-fat cheese, and magically you are satisfied."
Rather than shunning saturated fat, scientists suggest the best eaters limit it to about 20 grams a day, a third of the recommended total fat intake. A small burger (3.5 ounces, 75 percent lean meat) has about seven grams of saturated fat, as does a pat of butter.
You can eat whatever you want, as long as you exercise.
Exercise is not a very effective way to lose weight, researchers say. The amount of exercise needed to lose even a single pound — if diet is not rethought — is more than most people can do, Apovian said.
If you are just exercising, the scale is unlikely to budge, agreed obesity researcher Susan Carnell of Columbia University. "You can make a better impact by controlling what you eat."
But don't give up your exercise routine. In addition to a host of general health benefits, including protecting your brain, heart and bones, exercise is great for maintaining weight and regulating appetite, Carnell said. In fact, a daily habit of intensive exercise is the shared trait among once-overweight people who successfully stay slim, Apovian said.
Beer gives you a belly.
Alcohol, however, may be in a separate class, as far as liquid calories go.
At 7 calories per gram, alcohol is what scientists call a "non-trivial" calorie source. (A gram of fat has 9 calories, while protein and carbs, including simple sugars, have 4 calories per gram.) So imagine their surprise when, in a 13-year study of 19,220 U.S. women, teetotalers were more likely to become overweight than women who regularly imbibed beer, wine or liquor.
The link remained even after accounting for a slew of lifestyle factors, including exercise habits, nutritional intake and smoking status. "We are quite confident that the association we observed is due to the biological effect of alcohol," lead researcher Dr. Lu Wang of Harvard Medical School told LiveScience.
She cautions, however, that the study followed women who were initially a healthy weight, and does not promote alcohol as a weight-loss tool. The study was published in the March 2010 issue of the journal Archives of Internal Medicine.
Juice detoxes, smoothies and diet sodas are effective weight-loss tools.
In our hunter-gatherer days, "we didn't have a lot of liquids with calories, explains Dr. Caroline Apovian, an obesity researcher at