As you may have guessed by now, our purpose in creating this blog is to give you straight talk about not just Podfitness, but about succeeding in your weight loss and fitness plan.

A lot of people believe the diet industry is conspiring to keep us fat, so that we keep buying weight loss products. This is a load of rubbish, but it’s easy to see why this notion keeps popping up.

We’re continuously sold a string of short-term fixes (lose 10 pounds in 10 days!), and when they don’t work long-term, we go out in search of another one.  

There are 127 million overweight adults in the US, spending $43 billion on weight loss. That means the average overweight person is spending almost 350 bucks a year on their weight loss plan, yet the number of overweight adults is increasing, rather than decreasing.

So it’s quite refreshing to hear advice that is designed to work long-term, easy to apply, and isn’t full of marketing-speak. They asked 6 diet experts about fad diets, and got some surprising answers.

We definitely recommend reading the entire article over at MSNBC; we think there’s more real-world truth in it than in a lot of the diet books we’ve read.

Don’t you enter a fat-burning zone when you exercise at lower intensities? The idea of a fat-burning zone is b.s. In order to burn only fat, you would have to go at such a slow pace that you’d burn only two to three calories per minute. You’d have to walk 50 miles to get a decent workout. It’s better to exercise at a moderate pace, so you’ll burn some fat and some carbs. Doing that regularly can definitely help you control your weight.

Our resident weight loss and fitness expert, Bryan Haycock does take one issue with the article: it places a lot of emphasis on diet.

While it’s true that diet overshadows exercise in strictly losing pounds, the article doesn’t take into account the fact that exercise is like a medicine for a host of problems and diseases that diet can’t touch, and absolutely essential to living a longer, higher-quality life.

We’d be curious to know if you’ve tried losing weight with just exercise or diet alone, or with both. Has it worked short term? Long term?