Jump-Start Your 2016 Weight-Loss With 'Fat-Burning Machine’ Diet Tips

— -- With the New Year just days away, it may be time to jump-start your 2016 with the number one New Year's resolution: losing weight.

Mike Berland, who authored "Become a Fat-Burning Machine: The 12-Week Diet: Lose the Belly, End Sugar Cravings, Gain Energy, Overcome Metabolic Syndrome" along with Gale Bernhardt, appeared on "Good Morning America" and shared his tips and recipes to help those who want to change their habits in 2016.

Read on for an excerpt from "Become a Fat-Burning Machine" below with 10 health myths that may be sabotaging your success.

Click here to get Berland's recipes for his Omelet Burrito, Hearty Meatloaf and No-Noodle Lasagna.

THE EXCERPT

LET’S HIT RESET

These 10 Myths Are Sabotaging Your Success

It’s time to hit the reset button, and that starts with purging your mind of a few misconceptions. We all have them. When I started my journey to become a Fat-Burning Machine, I realized that over a lifetime I had adopted some “truths” about food, exercise, and dieting that I believed absolutely. I have no idea of their origin or where I picked up the information, but after a lifetime of carrying them around in my head, they had become elevated to the level of irrefutable fact. But guess what? They were completely false.

As I look back, it surprises me that I could be so off. Nearly every notion that I had was wrong. And yet, each of them was rooted in some sort of fact. I didn’t make it up, but my interpretation or application was wrong.

Here are the top ten myths that are sabotaging your success.

1. DIETS WORK. I’M THE PROBLEM.On most diets I tried, I initially lost some weight, but none of them worked on a long-term basis. I always thought it was my fault that I was overweight. I just couldn’t control my eating. The formula was straightforward: I needed to go on a diet (any diet) and stick with it. Then my weight problem would be solved. In my mind, the diets were all good. I was the bad one. I was the problem, not the diet. I had no willpower.

As I look back, there was no way that those diets were going to work beyond the start. I was a fat-storing machine. It wasn’t willpower. It was my body makeup. My body chemistry was set up in such a way that each diet was just making me fatter by making me more insulin resistant. If I was losing weight, it was because I was eating less in the beginning. But in reality, many of these diets were subversively teaching my body to optimize fat storing, rather than fat burning.Sure, I lost weight initially, but as soon as I went back to my normal eating, I ended up heavier than when I began.

THE RESET: I needed to treat the underlying syndrome, not just the isolated symptoms. Sure, I could have gone one by one, addressing my high cholesterol, my high blood sugar, my ever-expanding waist—but they were part of a package. The underlying dynamics that caused mysymptoms had to be understood and addressed head-on, with changes to my nutrition and fitness that could be sustained.