There's so much misinformation around concerning weight loss and fat loss that it's becoming difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction.

This article will reveal two of the main weight loss myths and give you the facts.

The first one concerns the eating of breakfast. Breakfast, so this myth goes, should be dispensed with as a way of reducing calorie intake and thereby losing weight.

If that were really true, then why not go the whole way and dispense with all meals and food intake indefinitely until you're down to your target weight? Of course to say that is nonsense because your body, whether overweight or not, needs sustenance - calories, sugar, starch, fat, protein - in order to function. If you starve your body of food, even if you need to lose weight, then you can do yourself serious harm.

Your body needs a regular food intake that is not excessive, but is nevertheless sufficient to provide the proteins, sugar and fatty acids that it needs to repair and maintain all the physical parts of the body (bone, blood, muscle, ligaments, tissue, organs, and so on). It also needs sufficient food to convert to energy to provide the fuel that keeps it going.

At breakfast time it has just been through several hours when no food has been consumed, so the stomach is empty and blood sugar levels are very low. To starve the body of sustenance at this stage, therefore, will cause it to lose efficiency and perform in a sluggish manner, owing to lack of energy. You will feel tired and inert, and your body will not be burning sugar and protein in the way an efficient and sufficiently fed body does.

For this reason, skipping breakfast will not assist you in losing excess weight. It will only make you feel tired and lacklustre, and hinder your body in burning off excess fat.

Another point is this. Eating the right kind of breakfast can actually help your body lose weight. If you eat cereal for breakfast, this contains plenty of roughage, which has few calories. In fact the body uses more calories to digest and excrete this roughage than the cereal contains in the first place.

So eating a breakfast cereal, especially one with few, if any, fatty substances in it, actually helps your body lose weight.

The second weight loss myth relates to how the body deals with saturated fats and other junk food. It's widely thought that this food can by used by the body to provide energy, and thus be burnt up, and that only if insufficient calories are used is the surplus somehow deposited as additional fat.

We have Dr. Suzanne Gudakunst to thank for pointing out in her book, "Top Secret Fat Loss Secret" , that in fact much of this junk food goes to feed, not your body, but the various bugs and parasites that infest the livers and stomachs of people who are overweight through their consumption of such junk.

Only by turning your back on junk food and starting afresh with healthy food - vegetables, fruits and fibres, lean meats and moderate dairy products - can you starve these parasites out and get the healthy body you want.

Now - are you going to put this knowledge to good use for yourself?

As to which weight loss program is right for you, check out our home page for an independent review of three leading weight loss programs.

Copyright © 2009 Philip Gegan