Ten more health myths women have been told — from “sweating means you’re burning fat” to “gluten-free is healthier” — are either rooted in outdated science, brilliant marketing, or both. Part 2 of this series covers the beliefs most likely to keep a woman spinning her wheels in the gym and grocery store for years without understanding why nothing’s changing.
Last week’s post on health myths resonated with so many of y’all that I knew we weren’t done. The response made it clear that a lot of women have been carrying around the same handful of beliefs for years, following them faithfully, and wondering why their body isn’t cooperating. So here’s Part 2, and I’ll be honest — some of these ones might sting a little more than last week’s, because they come from the wellness space specifically, the places we’ve been trained to trust most.
Myth #1: Sweating More Means You’re Burning More Fat
Sweat is your body’s cooling system. That’s it. It is not a measure of effort, calorie burn, or fat oxidation, and the amount you sweat during a workout has more to do with the temperature of the room, your genetics, and how well-conditioned you are than with how hard you’re actually working. Fitter people tend to sweat more efficiently, meaning they actually begin sweating sooner and more heavily than less conditioned exercisers — so by the logic of “more sweat equals more results,” the fittest person in the room would always be the sweatiest, which is simply not how it plays out.
Fat loss occurs through a sustained calorie deficit driven by movement, muscle activation, and metabolic demand. It has no biochemical connection to sweat production. That dripping feeling after a hot yoga class or a workout in a sweat vest is water loss, and it comes back the moment you drink anything. If you’re choosing workouts based on how drenched you end up, that’s the metric to let go of — what actually matters is progressive strength, consistent nutrition, and how your body composition changes over weeks, not how wet your shirt gets.
Sweat is proof your body is cooling itself. Fat loss is proof your nutrition strategy is working. They are not the same thing.
Myth #2: You Can Spot-Reduce Fat From Specific Areas
If a thousand crunches could melt belly fat, every trainer in the world would be prescribing them for exactly that purpose. They don’t, because spot reduction — the idea that exercising a specific muscle group burns the fat sitting on top of it — is not how fat metabolism works. Fat mobilization is controlled by systemic hormones, primarily epinephrine and glucagon, that pull from fat stores throughout the entire body based on genetics, overall energy balance, and individual patterns, not from whichever muscle you happened to work that day.
What you can do is build muscle in targeted areas, and over time as overall body fat decreases, that developed muscle underneath becomes visible. The women in my program who finally see their waistline change aren’t doing more core work — they’re eating strategically, strength training their full body, and letting the process unfold systemically. My client Racheal lost 7.5 inches off her waist in six weeks not because she targeted her midsection, but because her entire nutrition strategy shifted. The belly was last in, and it was first to go when the strategy was right.
Myth #3: Low-Fat Foods Are a Healthier Choice
The “low-fat” label on a package is one of the most effective pieces of marketing ever created, and it’s still working on a lot of us decades after the low-fat era officially ended. When food manufacturers remove fat from a product, they have to replace it with something to maintain flavor and texture, and that something is almost always sugar, refined starches, or sodium. The Mayo Clinic Health System notes that many low-fat and fat-free products contain added sugar or sodium to compensate for the flavor removed with the fat, and that fat itself supports satiety — so choosing the fat-free version often leaves you hungrier sooner, eating more overall.
Full-fat yogurt keeps you fuller longer than its low-fat counterpart. The full-fat salad dressing also helps your body absorb the fat-soluble vitamins from the vegetables in that salad. The fat in whole foods isn’t the problem. The “health halo” on the package that makes us eat twice as much of the low-fat version absolutely is.
Myth #4: Gluten-Free Is Automatically Healthier
Unless you have celiac disease or a confirmed non-celiac gluten sensitivity, there is no evidence that avoiding gluten improves your health — and some evidence it may work against you. Many gluten-free packaged foods are higher in added sugar, refined starches, and sodium than their whole-grain counterparts, because manufacturers have to compensate for the texture and flavor that gluten provides. Research from the European Food Information Council shows that people without celiac disease who eat gluten-containing whole grains may actually have lower risk of heart disease and type 2 diabetes than those who avoid them.
The issue with most wheat products isn’t the gluten — it’s that they’re highly processed, low in fiber, and eaten in quantities that spike blood sugar. A slice of sourdough bread and a bag of gluten-free sandwich cookies are not nutritional equivalents just because one has a certification on the package. If you feel genuinely better avoiding gluten, it’s worth working with a doctor to find out if there’s a real diagnosis behind that, rather than spending more money on products that may be less nutritious than what you were eating before.
Myth #5: Natural Sugar Is Fine Because It’s Natural
Honey, maple syrup, coconut sugar, agave — they’re marketed as the virtuous alternatives to white sugar, and a lot of women have swapped one for the other believing they were making a meaningfully healthier choice. The body processes fructose and glucose the same way regardless of the source. A teaspoon of honey and a teaspoon of table sugar have nearly identical effects on blood sugar, because at the biochemical level, sugar is sugar. The Mayo Clinic Health System puts it plainly: unrefined sugars may contain trace amounts of vitamins and minerals, but the advantage is minimal, and they still count toward your daily added sugar limit exactly the same way.
This matters especially for women managing blood sugar regulation in perimenopause, when insulin sensitivity tends to shift and the body becomes more reactive to glucose spikes regardless of their origin. The label “natural” tells you about the source. It does not tell you anything about how your body responds to it.
Myth #6: More Exercise Is Always Better
This one is particularly common in women who have been taught that if something isn’t working, the answer is to do more of it, and that dedication is measured in hours logged. Overtraining — consistently pushing volume and intensity beyond what the body can recover from — raises cortisol, disrupts sleep, increases injury risk, and can stall fat loss entirely. A 2000 study published in Psychosomatic Medicine found that women with chronically elevated cortisol stored significantly more abdominal fat, and overexercising is one of the most reliable ways to keep cortisol elevated.
My client Jenn was already doing progressive overload strength training three times a week with a trainer plus up to 30km of walking per week when she came to the FASTer Way. She didn’t need more exercise. She needed the nutrition strategy to support the movement she was already doing. She lost 19 pounds and 11 inches over four months, and she did it while going through radiation treatments, partly because the right fuel finally let her body do what all that effort had been trying to do for years. More is not always the answer. Sometimes the answer is recovering better from what you’re already doing.
Myth #7: “Natural” or “Herbal” Supplements Are Safe Because They’re Plant-Based
The word “natural” on a supplement label is a marketing term, not a safety certification. Many herbal compounds are biologically active, meaning they can interact with medications, affect hormone levels, or cause harm at certain doses. Some popular herbal supplements for women’s health — including certain adaptogens and hormone-balancing blends — haven’t been tested in long-term clinical trials and have no regulatory requirement to prove efficacy before hitting shelves. The FDA does not evaluate supplements for safety or effectiveness before they’re sold.
This doesn’t mean all supplements are useless — some have meaningful research behind them. But “derived from a plant” is not evidence of safety or effectiveness, and several commonly marketed women’s wellness supplements have studies showing they don’t outperform placebo on the outcomes they claim to support. Before adding anything, it’s worth asking a doctor or pharmacist specifically about interactions with any medications you’re taking, and looking for independent third-party testing certifications rather than relying on the claims on the label.
Myth #8: Poor Sleep Just Makes You Tired
Sleep deprivation doesn’t only affect your energy — it directly affects fat storage, hunger signaling, and body composition, and it does so through mechanisms that no amount of clean eating fully compensates for. When sleep is chronically short or disrupted, cortisol rises, and elevated cortisol signals the body to store fat preferentially in the midsection. Ghrelin, the hormone that drives hunger, increases. Leptin, the hormone that signals fullness, decreases. The result is that you’re hungrier, less satisfied by food, and storing more of what you eat in exactly the place you’re trying to lose it from — and none of that is a willpower issue. It’s physiology.
My client Cindy started the FASTer Way eight weeks after finishing radiation treatments for breast cancer, managing her mother’s hospitalization simultaneously, and operating on disrupted sleep through all of it. She lost 16.4 pounds and 21 inches over 42 weeks, staying the course through what were objectively some of the hardest life circumstances anyone brings to a fitness program. Sleep was a real variable in her journey, and the fact that she still made progress on the days she could control her nutrition and movement, even when sleep wasn’t cooperating, speaks to what consistency across all the levers does over time. But if your sleep is within your control and you’re not prioritizing it, that’s the lever worth pulling before you change anything else.
Myth #9: You Should Feel Sore After Every Workout If It Was Effective
Delayed onset muscle soreness — the ache you feel 24 to 48 hours after a workout — is a sign that your muscles experienced mechanical stress, not a reliable measure of workout quality or effectiveness. Experienced exercisers who have been consistent for months often feel far less soreness than beginners doing the same movements, because their bodies have adapted. That adaptation is the whole point of progressive training. Chasing soreness as a goal leads women to constantly change their programming to keep their muscles “guessing,” which actually prevents the progressive overload needed to build strength and change body composition over time.
The metrics worth tracking are whether you’re lifting more, moving better, recovering faster, and whether your body composition is changing over weeks and months — not whether you can barely sit down the next morning. Some of the most productive workouts leave you feeling challenged but functional. Feeling wrecked is not the benchmark.
Myth #10: If You Were Healthy Before, Your Body Should Respond the Same Way It Always Did
This might be the belief that causes the most quiet grief for women in perimenopause, because it turns what is a normal physiological shift into evidence of personal failure. The workouts that kept you lean at 32 may not produce the same results at 44 — and that is not because your body is broken, or because you stopped trying hard enough, or because you need to cut more. It’s because the hormonal environment those strategies operated in has changed.
Estrogen shifts affect how the body partitions fuel. Progesterone changes affect sleep and cortisol. Muscle mass naturally declines from around age 35 onward at roughly half a pound to a pound per year without active resistance training to counter it, and less muscle means a slower resting metabolic rate, which means the calorie math that once worked no longer adds up the same way. What this calls for isn’t more of the same strategy at higher intensity. It calls for a different strategy — one built around where your body actually is now, not where it was ten years ago.
Your body is not broken. The strategy you were handed is.
Ready to Build a Strategy That Fits Where You Are Now?
The 6-Week New Client Experience is built for exactly this — women who have done everything “right” and need a new framework, not more willpower. If last week’s post and this one resonated with you, that recognition is the starting point.
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