In this episode of the Last Diet Podcast, Dr. Jordan Williams and Dr. Dale Williams discuss and debunk some of the most common diet myths that often spread through social media, gyms, and even medical offices. They explain why these myths persist, highlight the role of the food industry in promoting them, and stress the importance of focusing on the quality of food rather than arbitrary rules about timing, meal frequency, or labels like “fat free” or “gluten free.” The doctors emphasize education, intentional eating, and consistency as the keys to sustainable health rather than quick fixes or misleading diet claims.

Follow us on the web: billingslastdiet.com

Follow The Last Diet on socials:
Facebook | Instagram | TikTok

Dr. Jordan 0:00 Hello everyone, welcome back to the Last Diet Podcast. I’m Dr Jordan Williams, along with Dr Dale Williams from Billings Last Diet today, we’re going to be talking about some of the most important and often most misunderstood topics in dieting, specifically the diet myth. There’s a lot of information on social media floating around gyms and doctors offices that might be misleading. So we’re going to talk about some of the most common myths you hear today and shed some light on those myths. So let’s go ahead and get started. Welcome back. Dr Williams.

Dr. Williams 0:41 Good to be here.

Dr. Jordan 0:41 Good to be back. So we’ve talked a lot about different diets. So this is the whole point of our podcast, is to educate on on healthy eating and how people can understand and educate themselves on on food.

Dr. Williams 0:56 Yeah.

Dr. Jordan 0:57 So we make a concerted effort to give the most accurate information as we can obviously, we’re not perfect, so comment below if you disagree with us. Please be kind. But today we’re gonna talk about some of the more common diet myths, and one of my favorites to start out with is, eating after 8pm causes weight gain. So let’s talk a little bit about timing with food and why that might be misleading.

Dr. Williams 1:26 Yeah, I’ve heard this before, don’t, don’t eat before you go to bed, because when you go to bed, you’re not moving, and that just goes straight to your fat. Well, that’s not the way physiology works. And so your your your body processes the food you eat as an energy source over a course of time, and so eating after eight o’clock can have some negative benefits. If you stuff your stomach full and you go lay down, you might have some heartburn or some GERD, that’ll happen. But it’s not necessarily that that food that you ate at after eight o’clock is going to go directly to your fat. Yeah.

Dr. Jordan 2:00 Well, it’s not like, it’s not like you just store it, and if you don’t use it in the next, you know, hour and a half or two hours, you’re it’s useless, really, like you said, our food, it happens over a period of time, generally, 24 hour period of time, yeah, generally within 24 hours. But, but obviously you don’t want to just cram yourself full of some simple carbohydrates and go straight to bed as well. So Right? Not the not the full truth. Saying you can’t eat after eight because you’ll gain weight has a little bit more, to a little bit more complicated than just that. The other myth that you hear often associated with the timing of eat is breakfast is the most important meal of the day. If you don’t eat breakfast, you’re not jump starting your metabolism, and you’re going to be low energy or just going to be craving food all day. So let’s talk about breakfast while we’re talking about timing of breakfast.

Dr. Williams 2:51 Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, is a myth. So just establish that right off the bat. It was developed that that phrase was developed by the food industry, the cereal industry, in particular, in order to promote the utilization of their foods for breakfast. And so breakfast, being the most important meal today, is an absolute myth, and as a marketing tool that has become very, very effective over the over the course of years, the most important meal of the day is the food you eat during the day, not necessarily the timing of whether you eat it at six or seven in the morning or at noon or at five o’clock at night. It’s the food you eat that is most important, not the timing of when you eat your food. Dr. Jordan 3:37 Well and we’ve talked about intermittent fasting often. And really, most intermittent fasting programs, you skip breakfast.

Dr. Williams 3:47 Yes.

Dr. Jordan 3:47 And so it really comes down to what you’re eating, not necessarily when you’re eating it.

Dr. Williams 3:52 Right.

Dr. Jordan 3:53 But planning out those times can be important.

Dr. Williams 3:55 So let me just break down. Break fast. Breakfast is divine, is the term is to end your your period of not eating when you slept during the night. You break your fast by eating, and the food you eat when you break your fast make a huge difference. Cereal wouldn’t be the best choice for breaking your fast. In my view, you need to get a little more protein in there, rather than just cereal.

Dr. Jordan 4:24 So you don’t want to just throw whatever you have next to you on an empty stomach, right?

Dr. Williams 4:28 Or orange juice

Dr. Jordan 4:29 Or orange juice

Dr. Williams 4:30 Another myth.

Dr. Jordan 4:30 I think we’ll get to that in a little bit here. Let’s talk about, well again here, eating six to eight small meals throughout the day is the best way to be healthy.

Dr. Williams 4:44 Yeah, another myth. So it was popular back in the 80s and the 90s, this concept of grazing all day, that we would eat six small meals a day. And for some people, it works great. But it’s not necessarily healthy one way or the other. Again, it’s the foods that you eat. It’s it’s what foods you’re eating, not necessarily the timing of the eating.

Dr. Williams 5:09 Well, and depending on your goal as well, if you’re, if you’re wanting to lose weight, and you’re constantly eating food every time you consume, particularly a carbohydrate, you have a kick of insulin, right? You have those blood sugars rise up, so your insulin gets kicked up, and that insulin will take that blood sugar and start dropping it down. But if you’re constantly giving yourself an insulin shot through what you’re eating, insulin is a fat storage hormone, and so when you eat six to eight times throughout the day, you’re just giving yourself more of that hormone shot throughout the day and storing fat, and that’s that can be hard on your hormonal system, your pancreas, in particular, because it’s working overtime, which can lead to what those insulin spikes repeatedly during the day can need to lead to insulin resistance, where your body says it has to have more insulin to get the same response, because you’re always kicking that pancreas to kick out the insulin.

Dr. Jordan 6:05 And I know we’re gonna have someone say, Well, you know, I eat healthy meats and cheeses in my days, six to eight times a day, and that’s okay. We’re talking about just in general. That can happen. There are ways you can avoid those, those insulin spikes as well. We’re going to talk about fat free is healthy.

Dr. Williams 6:23 Yeah, that’s another good food industry trick. And so this really, the fat free really became an attack on the diet because of the trend toward obesity. And so the American government pretty much said, well, let’s promote a high carb, low fat diet. And that was the old food pyramid that you remember, where there was the carbohydrates, the proteins and the fats. And so when, when we started eating promoting the low fat side, the food industry jumped on board and said, Listen, if we can call a food low fat, we can call it a healthy food. And so I still haven’t pictured in my mind you can go down the candy aisle and see a bag of licorice that says fat free on it. And if you think low fat is healthy now a bag of licorice becomes health food, and that is just absolutely not correct. So just because something is fat free doesn’t mean it is good for you. And a lot of times, what happens when you pull the fat out of a food, it takes the flavor out of the food. And so in order to enhance the flavor, they add a whole bunch of chemicals in there, besides sugar and chemicals to make it to where it tastes good.

Dr. Jordan 7:45 Yeah. So typically, fat free doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but that we just taken fats out of there, and who knows what we’ve added in, right?

Dr. Williams 7:53 Right.

Dr. Jordan 7:53 So let’s talk about, you talked about the food pyramid, having a high calorie intake for, sorry, high carb intake. As far as what the American government kind of proposed in the in the 80s and 90s, let’s talk about calories. All calories are equal. You see nutritional professors online go and do it the Oreo diet, where they just go in a caloric deficit and they they lose weight.

Dr. Williams 8:21 Yeah.

Dr. Jordan 8:21 Right? And so if I just restrict my calories, I should lose weight, yeah. So, and that’s healthy.

Dr. Williams 8:27 Yeah. So the myth that all calories are created equal, it doesn’t matter how what calories you eat, it’s just the number of calories you eat. Well, that’s a half truth, which means the other half is a lie. And so it does matter. The foods that you eat. 100 calories of of cauliflower is very different than 100 calories of candy. So how much, how much fiber is 100 calories of candy have? The answer is exactly zero. How many? How much fiber does 100 calories of cauliflower have a whole lot more? How much nutrition does 100 calories of candy have zero, same amount of fiber? How much nutrition is in 100 calories of cauliflower, it’s very highly, highly nutritious food. And so calories are calories, but they’re not all created equal.

Dr. Jordan 9:25 Right. And you can, you can lose weight if you restrict your calories. That’s called starving to death.

Dr. Williams 9:29 Yes, it works if you only want to lose weight. Dr. Jordan 9:33 Yeah. And so you really want to look at what the goal is. Are we losing weight, or are we trying to be healthy, right? Not all calories are created equal and well, here’s, here’s the next one. You have to starve yourself to lose weight. Yeah, let’s talk about what that looks like. So when you I think this one, this myth, gets thrown around because of that caloric deficit that people say, Well, I-

Dr. Williams 9:56 Four letter word diet.

Dr. Jordan 9:57 Yep, I have to restrict my food in order to lose weight. The reality is, you know, 100 calories of of spinach looks very different than 100 calories of butter.

Dr. Williams 10:11 Yeah.

Dr. Jordan 10:12 And so if you want to be satiated and you want 100 calories of a healthy protein, you might be satiated for some time with that, as opposed to 100 calories of candy, which is going to burn through very quickly, you’re going to absorb that energy, and it’s going to be gone in a short amount of time, and you’re going to be craving more. And so to starve yourself, as I think, is an overstatement, but I think the idea is that caloric deficit they’re talking about.

Dr. Williams 10:38 So with Billings Last Diet’s protocol, one of the most common things we hear people who have been in the diet for three or four weeks is, do I have to eat all this food? I have a hard time getting all this food in. And the reason is because we’re eating high fiber with the vegetables in particular, that’s that’s the the four cups of vegetables. And so you don’t have to be you don’t have to starve. You can be completely full and completely satiated. It’s the types of foods you’re choosing to eat. And so starvation is not, is not necessary in order to lose weight.

Dr. Jordan 11:23 Yeah, well, and and again, you may, you may not lose weight either. If you’re, you know it depends. Again, you could be absolutely, anyway, that’s, that’s a myth all around so let’s move forward. So we’ve talked a little about this in a previous podcast, but you can target fat loss. So if you can, you can choose how and where to lose weight according to what you eat and how you exercise.

Dr. Williams 11:49 Yep, that sounds like a myth to me as well. So yeah, and it’s really good at selling exercise equipment to say, if you’ll do use this exercise equipment. It’ll take the fat off of your bat wings, or it’ll take the fat off of your your thighs. And that is not true. The way the body processes fat is it says I’m going to utilize fat as a primary source of energy, but it’s not going to say I’m going to utilize fat off the back of my arms or off of my rear or off of my thighs or off of my my gut. It’s like saying I can make fat go away by doing abdominal crunches. I can make I can get six pack abs by just doing abdominal crunches, because it’s going to burn all the fat off my abdominals when I do my abdominal crunches. That is not true. That’s not the way the body processes fat.

Dr. Jordan 12:40 Well, and we did when we talked about this in the past, we went back and looked at before and afters of our very successful dieters.

Dr. Williams 12:48 Yeah.

Dr. Jordan 12:48 And you’ll you’ll notice a trend. People have shapes to their body. You have a some people are pear shaped, some people are pencil shaped, and that’s just the way they are. We have pictures of of people who lost over 100 pounds, and they still have a similar shape.

Dr. Williams 13:04 Yeah. It’s just not as big.

Dr. Jordan 13:06 That it’s just not as big, right? It’s a smaller pair, but it’s still the same body type. And so although you can change some of that shape, mostly with muscle mass, it’s not fat loss that changes that shape. And so you had to sell exercise equipment, it says targets, you know, belly fat is a huge misconception. Really. What they’re saying is this exercise equipment focuses on building this muscle, which will make this look different.

Dr. Williams 13:34 Yeah, but it won’t cause the fat go away.

Dr. Jordan 13:36 Yeah, but it’s not targeting that area of fat. And so people have body types. That’s just the reality of it.

Dr. Williams 13:42 And thank your parents.

Dr. Jordan 13:44 And thank your parents and your grandparents.

Dr. Williams 13:46 Generally, genetically based.

Dr. Jordan 13:47 Exactly. Dr. Williams 13:51 Some people do have a tendency. Well, you’ll have a tendency to store fat in a particular area as well, which goes to that body shape. Some people carry their fat lower in their in their body. Some carry it more in the midsection of their, of their body, which is where you get the apple or the pear.

Dr. Jordan 14:09 Let’s, let’s talk about gluten free means healthy.

Dr. Williams 14:14 Yeah, no, that’s not true.

Dr. Jordan 14:17 Walk me through so gluten free. Why do we associate healthy with gluten free? Gluten free with healthy?

Dr. Williams 14:24 So gluten free foods were developed by food industry in order to cater to the nutritional needs of people with celiac disease, which is an inability to process gluten. It’s a digestive genetic disorder. And then, some people also not not have celiac disease, but they’ll have sensitivity to gluten, which will cause an inflammatory response to happen in their body if they get gluten. And so, again, the food industry jumped on the idea that gluten free means healthy and and that’s not really the case, because you can have gluten free chips, you can have gluten free-

Dr. Jordan 15:10 Cake

Dr. Williams 15:11 Cake. Yeah, there’s a lot of things that are that it can be gluten free. Candy is gluten free. Generally it’s gluten free, but it doesn’t mean it’s healthy.

Dr. Jordan 15:22 This one, we hear a lot when we come with Billings Last Diet, because when, when you’re when you’re looking to start a diet, generally speaking, you want to lose weight, that’s, that’s why people find, you know, start searching the word diet online. And so this one is, this one’s tough is, if the scale doesn’t move, I’m not progressing. That means I’m not being successful in my diet, if that scale isn’t changing number.

Dr. Williams 15:47 Yeah.

Dr. Jordan 15:47 So let’s talk about why that might be a again, it’s a misconception. It can be frustrating. I’ll say this, it can be frustrating for people, because you know, if you’re if you’re on a good, a good trend, and you’re losing 1-2-3, pounds per week, and then you have two, three weeks in a row where you didn’t lose pounds. Can be very frustrating, but how can that be misleading?

Dr. Williams 16:11 So if your goal in your diet is to lose fat, and you’re using your scale to tell you if you’re losing fat or not, it’ll be very frustrating, because you can, you can step on your scale, but your scale doesn’t tell you how fat you are. Your scale tells you how much you weigh. It doesn’t tell you if you’re fat or not. And so when you step on your scale one day and it’s down two pounds, it doesn’t necessarily mean you lost two pounds of fat. That you’re two pounds less fat, it means you’re you weigh less, which it might be water, it might be human waste. There’s a lot of factors that are going to factor in, and so usually utilizing the scale to determine how healthy you are, or whether you’re fat or not, is really a tricky deal.

Dr. Jordan 17:07 Well, and we encourage people as you’re looking at your overall health, really the pounds is just a quick, easy way to measure. You really need to focus on your body composition. You need to know how much lean body mass you have. You need to know how much fat you have to begin with, so that when you are losing weight, you’re actually losing healthy weight. We’ve talked about this in past episodes about GLP-1’s, and they help you lose weight, which is a absolute fact, no way around it. The drawback is you don’t know what type of weight you’re typically losing on those GLP-1, and generally you’re starting to lose lean body mass, and that’s a problem.

Dr. Williams 17:47 Especially if you’re not watching what you eat when you’re in on the GLP-1. If you don’t have a protocol to have healthy eating, you will not have healthy weight loss. If you don’t have a healthy eating pattern, you will not have healthy weight loss, because the body is going to utilize muscle first, because it’s easier to break down than fat is the physiological process of turning muscle into energy is easier than turning fat into energy, and so you need to know what you’re losing, which means you need something that does more than tell you how many pounds you lose which that’s the body composition analysis. That’s our in body composition balance analysis that we use at the office. But there are other scales that’ll give you an indication of what percent body fat that’s a better, better indication of overall health, rather than pounds.

Dr. Jordan 18:39 Well, and the other one is we encourage, especially our coaches encourage finding those non scale wins.

Dr. Williams 18:44 Yeah.

Dr. Jordan 18:45 You know, you’re able to fit into a pair of jeans you haven’t worn in years. Or, you know, you measure inches and see what difference there is. There are a number of different ways you can measure non scale wins, because it can be frustrating if you’re only focusing on the the lbs is on that scale.

Dr. Williams 19:02 Yes, right. And water is another big factor that’s going to throw off that scale. You can, you can retain 2-3-4, pounds of water in a day, which is going to throw your scale off.

Dr. Jordan 19:18 Oh, this next one’s great. I again, a problem we often attribute with health is to eat healthy. It’s too expensive to eat healthy. You know? It’s cheaper for me to go to a fast food restaurant and pay $5 for a burger, fries and a soda. If I pay that $5 at a grocery store, I can’t find food that’s healthy.

Dr. Williams 19:39 Yeah. Yeah. So that that myth was probably truer 15 years ago than it is today, because the cost of fast food has gone up significantly, mainly because of the cost of labor to produce that fast food. But that there is some, there was some truth to that years ago, but that is not the case any anymore. You can go to the grocery store and you can buy in your produce depart department, quite a bit of produce for the same amount that you might get for $12 that you would spend at a fast food food place.

Dr. Jordan 20:18 I think what it comes down to is education and planning. If you don’t know how to cook healthy, and you walk into a grocery store, it can be overwhelming, and you’re probably picking foods that are highly processed manufactured, and those do get more costly and aren’t as healthy. If you educate yourself on how to prep healthy foods for a bag of beans and, you know, 18 eggs and some frozen vegetables. Frozen veggies, you can have a fairly healthy, well rounded diet on a very low income.

Dr. Williams 20:55 Yes.

Dr. Jordan 20:55 So when you when you’re concerned about, well, it’s too expensive, I’d encourage you to educate yourself a little bit on how to prepare food and plan and then you can find ways to eat in a in a low on a low budget and still be very healthy.

Dr. Williams 21:09 So one of the challenges, cost wise, is fresh produce. Fresh Produce tends to be more expensive, but you can get frozen produce way discounted compared to the fresh and the reason the fresh produce is so exp so expensive is it has an expiration date that’s relatively quick. Its shelf life is pretty fast, and so they have to get it off the off the shelf and it and they have a lot of loss, so the cost goes up. So frozen, frozen vegetables, frozen produce is a wonderful way to eat more on a on a budget, and it’s healthy.

Dr. Jordan 21:53 Here’s a good one. In order to stay sane on a diet, you got to have a cheat day. You got to have a break from your diet.

Dr. Williams 22:00 Yeah, that’s that’s a partial myth. That’s a partial truth. You don’t have to have a cheat day. The only reason you’re looking for a cheat day is because you’re so restricted that you need a break from what you’ve been restricted on. And so you can’t be overly restricted in order to have sustainable weight loss. Can’t be restricted for long periods of time. You can have short periods of time of restriction, but you can’t go long term. And that’s the purpose of the cheat day, is that gives you a break from it.

Dr. Jordan 22:42 Well, and in those cheat days, man, they can be, they can, they’re detrimental to a diet, because, you know, most of the time when we, if you take a, you know, a typical cheat day, you’re not saying, Oh, I’ll, you know, have a cheat meal. It’s a cheat day, which, if I don’t fall asleep. That means I can keep eating on my cheat day. So now it turns in 3-4-5, meals in a row of of just cheating on and on and on, and that can really break your cycle. So we encourage, you know, for like the holidays, be very intentional on your cheat day. Eat the foods you like having, but make sure it’s a cheat meal, and that it’s a very intentional meal.

Dr. Williams 23:24 And over the course of time, you need to educate your mind and your body that if you’re going to have some M&M’s, you have some M&M’s, a small handful of M&M’s instead of a bag of M&M’s. You know, a small handful isn’t any less satisfying than the whole bag, and the whole bag has a whole lot more calories and negative detrimental health effects than a small handful.

Dr. Jordan 23:51 And the Halloween candy bag of M&M’s is very different than the family style Costco. So you just have to know, again, being intentional on what you’re eating and how you’re consuming it is really if you if you need that quote, unquote, cheat day, make sure to cheat meal and you’re not breaking your diet. Oh, here’s a good one. In order to stay healthy and continue to maintain my weight, I need to continue to have a caloric deficit. The only way to be healthy is to stay in a caloric deficit.

Dr. Williams 24:28 Yeah, if you were always in a caloric deficit, you’d eventually wither away, and you would starve to death, because eventually you’re not going to be able to make up that caloric deficit without food, because you’re going to utilize muscle and fat in order to make up that caloric deficit.

Dr. Jordan 24:48 We know in our in our Phase Three graduation class, Dr Williams does a great job explaining what a caloric deficit looks like. You know, when he talks about being in ketosis, you can sit in ketosis or sit for a long time, and you can stand for a long time, but you can’t stay in a squatted position for a long time. And that’s what kind of that caloric deficit is if you’re not in ketosis.

Dr. Williams 25:11 Yeah, so being non ketotic could be like me sitting in this chair. I can sit here relatively comfortably for long periods of time. I can stand, which is like being in ketosis, in a caloric deficit, in ketosis, and I can stand for relatively long periods of time. What happens when I get kind of into ketosis is like getting halfway out of a chair. And it’s not sustainable long term.

Dr. Jordan 25:36 Yeah, it’s just the body will eventually start to wear down. I mean, that’s what starving to death is. It’s that long sustained caloric deficit. Now, if you have a lot of stored calories, you can probably sustain that a lot longer than than in some.

Dr. Williams 25:49 Some people can go years because they have so much extra calories, which is called fat, in order to utilize rather than the foods they’re eating.

Dr. Jordan 25:58 Ooh, here’s a good one too. If I’m eating clean, I will lose weight.

Dr. Williams 26:03 Yeah.

Dr. Jordan 26:04 And again, you know, a lot of these are half truths, because if you are-

Dr. Williams 26:08 That’s the way most myths are.

Dr. Jordan 26:08 Yeah, that’s and the reason it’s a myth is because if you go from a very unhealthy diet, high inflammatory foods, super processed foods, high preservatives, and then you eat clean, I’m going to say you will, but you will likely you will lose weight, but if you’re eating clean and your calories are way above your metabolic rate, you will not lose weight.

Dr. Williams 26:39 So definition of clean can vary.

Dr. Jordan 26:41 That’s true.

Dr. Williams 26:41 So I have, I have heard, and I’ve talked with dieters who have said, I did that keto thing and I didn’t lose weight. And so when we investigate what they did with their keto diet is they consumed a lot of fat, and when they consumed a lot of fat, there was, there was no way they could get into caloric deficit, so they’re not going to lose weight. And you can gain weight on a keto diet because you’re having a high fat content. So it has to do with that, getting in that caloric deficit.

Dr. Jordan 27:11 And I think a lot of these come down to a lot of these myths. And like you said, a myth is a myth because it’s a half truth.

Dr. Williams 27:19 Yeah.

Dr. Jordan 27:19 And so you have to be you have to understand where the myth comes from and who’s trying to sell you the product.

Dr. Williams 27:27 Right.

Dr. Jordan 27:28 You know, generally speaking, you’re going to get a half-truth from someone who’s trying to give you their opinion or their idea or wants you to do something they want you to do. And so the key for a lot of these is just to educate yourself. One, know what your goal is. Two, educate on why that might work or might not work for you. And three, be consistent and stay curious if something doesn’t work, try something else and continue to educate yourself.

Dr. Williams 27:56 So a saying that we say quite often to our dieters is, if you know how your body works, you can make your body work to your advantage. If you don’t know how your body works, the food industry is going to take advantage of that and make it work to their advantage. And they are not interested in your health. They’re interested in selling you a product, and so they’ll use myths in order to get those products to move.

Dr. Jordan 28:19 Or half-truths. I like that. So thanks for joining us today. Hopefully, we cleared up some of the noise that you find on social media and busted some of these myths that you’ve been curious about. Comment below if there’s a myth that you’ve wondered about or have some thoughts on what we’ve talked about today. Share this with a friend if it’s something that they’re talking about with you, and hopefully, you can educate a friend as well. So again, thanks for joining us. Stay curious, educate yourself, and we’ll see you next time.