1. Eating at night makes you fat
Decades ago, it was thought that the digestive system ceased functioning during sleep and that as a result, food ingested shortly before bedtime would be more likely to be stored as fat. Despite the fact that more modern medical research has demonstrated conclusively that this is not true, the belief persists, even among otherwise knowledgeable fitness enthusiasts. It is now known that the digestive system merely slows down during sleep, but no more so than it does periodically during waking hours. Essentially, anything that produces an adrenaline rush (such as an urgent phone call after lunch) slows down your digestion about the same as sleeping, but your stomach still manages to digest 90% or more of your meal regardless of what time you eat. The only reason to avoid eating at night is if it causes you gastrointestinal problems, discomfort, or interferes with your sleeping (or with falling asleep). Unless you experience such physical symptoms, there is absolutely no reason to avoid eating after any particular time of day or night.
2. The right exercises can make parts of your body smaller
The only way that exercise can help make you thinner is by burning calories. But your body has absolutely no way of "knowing" whether you burned excess calories through exercise or simply consumed fewer that particular day. All your body "knows" is that you ate more than you burned (in which case it stores the excess as fat), or burned more calories than you ate (in which case it makes up the difference by burning stored fat reserves). Muscles is the only tissue that responds to exercise in any way that affects your physical appearance, and there are only two things that muscles can do: They can either grow and become harder in response to being exposed to resistance training ("hypertrophy"), or they can shrink and become less toned "(atrophy"). All things being equal, well-toned muscles look more attractive and healthy than soft flabby muscles, but resistance training can not reduce the size of a particular body part. A sensible nutritional program can help you reduce your body fat uniformly, aerobic exercise can help you burn calories and speed up your metabolism for a few hours after, but no specific exercise will allow you to "spot reduce" any particular part of your body.
3. Fat can turn into mucle trough exercise, and muscle can turn to fat
Muscle and fat are two completely different tissues and one can never "turn into" the other at all. It is entirely possible to lose muscle if you stop exercising, but as long as you adjust your diet to reflect the decrease in your activity level, you will simply maintain your normal amount of body fat, even if you lose muscle size and tone. If you stop exercising AND fail to adjust your diet accordingly, it is also possible to add body fat at the same time that your muscles atrophy, but the two processes have nothing to do with each other.
4. Carbohydrates like rice and pasta make you fat
Rice and pasta (especially brown rice and dark, or spinach pasta), Whole Wheat Bread, and Sweet Potatoes, are all relatively complex carbohydrates. "Complex Carbohydrates" are not readily stored as body fat--they are broken down during digestion, and processed by your liver into "Glycogen" which is stored in your muscles for energy. "Simple Carbohydrates" such as Sugar (refined white OR natural brown), Honey, and White or Bleached Flours are much more readily stored as fat during digestion. As long as you don't load them up with sauces and condiments full of fats and oils, complex carbs should actually constitute approximately 70% of the calories in your diet, with most of the remaining 30% coming from low-fat proteins like fish and poultry.
5. Fat free foods are fat free
According to the FDA, food products can be labeled "Fat Free" as long as they contain "less than" one gram of fat per "serving size". In order to market their products as "Fat Free", some manufacturers simply reduce the suggested serving size to meet this requirement. Always check the nutritional information on the outside of a product to see how many servings are in the package and use that number to determine how many grams of fat are in the entire package. Easy tip-offs in this regard are packages that LOOK like they should be one or two servings whose labels say "8 servings" per container. You may consider these foods to be "Fat Free" provided you adhere to the serving size, but chances are a "Fat Free" cake labeled "16 Servings" probably contains about 16 grams of fat.
6. It's all genetics so why bother trying to fight it?
Like every other area of life where individuals differ, there is a component of physical fitness and body-fat retention that is determined by your genetics. On the other hand, unless you suffer from a bona fide medical condition such as hyperthyroidism or diabetes, your diet and exercise level will determine the amount of body-fat you store. Genetically speaking, individuals with a high percentage of body-fat simply have fat cells that are "inflated", while people with relatively little body-fat either have fewer fat cells, or those that they do have are "deflated".
Your genetics is partly responsible for how many fat-cells you have, but they do not increase in number even when you gain weight. According to researchers, most of your fat cells are initially deposited in-utero, with their number determined both by your mother's diet during the last stage of her pregnancy and by your genetic heritage. The rest of your fat cells are deposited during the first two years of life and during pre-adolescence, and again, are mostly related to the amount of fat in your diet at those stages of life.
Thereafter, the number of fat cells in your body never changes, regardless of how you eat or exercise. A person with many fat cells can be thinner than someone with fewer, but will always have to be more careful in selecting foods in order to keep those cells in their "deflated" condition. Very few overweight individuals suffer from a medical condition that is responsible for their level of body-fat, and almost nobody has so few fat cells that he or she can eat a high-fat diet without gaining weight. Almost everybody lies somewhere in between and can learn through trial and error how to maintain an acceptable level of body-fat through sensible dietary habits.
