If “everyone knows” it, it’s wrong.
The vast majority of people don’t receive any training about fitness, or have any personal experience of it. If you average out the opinions of thousands of people with no knowledge of something, you should expect to arrive at the wrong answer.
“Everyone knows” running is the best way to lose fat - whereas in actuality most people who want to lose fat are not fit enough to burn any appreciable number of calories from exercise yet. They'd get results much faster by reducing their average weekly caloric intake.
“Everyone knows” abdominal exercises give you a flat stomach - which is completely wrong. The reason most people don’t have a flat stomach is due to the presence of too much fat. The fat just below their skin obscures the definition of their abdominal muscles from view, and the fat inside their abdominal cavity pushes everything out and creates the round appearance they don’t like. Fat in both of these locations will go away with a sustained caloric deficit, and doing abdominal exercises will not contribute to this in any serious way.
“Everyone knows” that bad foods make you fat and good foods burn fat - but really foods don’t have a property called “goodness”. There’s no way of measuring that. You can lose fat just fine by including 100 calories of “bad” chocolate in your day, and you can gain fat really easily by including 1000 calories of “good” peanut butter and avocados in your day.
“Everyone knows” that if you work really hard on your diet during the week, you deserve to relax and eat more or less what you want at the weekends. Unfortunately, your fat cells have no concept of what you deserve. They make no moral judgments whatsoever - they just sit there impassively storing more fat if you’re in a calorie surplus over time, and they release fat if you’re in an average calorie deficit over time. They don’t know or care if you deserve a pizza.
If you’re not getting results, do a quick audit to see if you’re relying on any strategies that “everyone knows” about.
Everyone is probably wrong.
