Myth: I can eat as much junk as I want if I go to the gym.

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I recently had a conversation with someone about making up for eating junk with intense exercise. The person said that “I can eat junk cause I’m physically active, so it balances out”. I still hope it was a joke, but the person was in a hurry so I couldn’t get into it at the time. Sadly, a number of us really do believe we can balance it out by simply burning the excess calories via intense exercise. 
You are guaranteed to lose weight if you burn more calories than you consume. This is easier if you simply start by not consuming too many calories in the first place. You give yourself a daunting task by consuming a lot of calories cause now you need to burn a lot more. Mind you burning calories is not as easy as it sounds. 

A large cheese burger with large fries and a coke will give your about 2,000 calories. That alone meets the average recommended daily calorie intake. If you count in breakfast, dinner and snacks in the day, you’re probably over 3,000 calories. If you are trying to lose weight, your fight is to burn more calories than you consumed. To burn 1,000 calories you will need more than an hour of intense exercise to burn those calories. To burn more than 3,000 calories will require more than 2 hours of intense exercise. Simply not practical. 
Even if your goal is not weight loss but toning or sculpting, you do not need so much food to fuel your workouts. It is only justified for professional athletes cause they need to be able to endure non-stop intense physical activity. Eating a ton of carbs or calorie-dense food doesn’t make sense for doing 5km around the block. 

If you’re trying to sculpt your body and not necessarily be skinny, know that other than plastic surgery, there is no way to “spot-reduce” fat. There is no way to turn fat into muscle. Unfortunately I once tried this, I wanted a shortcut plus I hate cardio. I convinced myself I had fat in my lower body that I could transform into muscle. Laugh with me. Luckily, now I know better, muscle and fat are very different and can’t be converted, you burn the fat, you build the muscle. This also means you watch what you eat to avoid fatty foods. No shortcut. This phenomenon has been proven by scientists so if you don’t want to take my word for it, trust science. A study was published in 2015 by the British Journal of Sports Medicine titled “It is Time to Bust the Myth of Physical Inactivity and Obesity: You Cannot Outrun a Bad Diet”.
Depending on body type, you might have certain trouble zones like midsection or hips. These will usually be the hardest areas for you to tone or trim and this is also where the extra calories go. With the abs especially, you can have abs under a layer of fat. The abs won’t show up until you lose the fat, ab workouts alone aren’t enough. You need to closely watch what you eat if you hope to have great abs.
A very important thing to note, is that not all calories are created equal. So although you might say you’ll eat a small serving of ice cream so you consume fewer calories, you’re better off getting those same calories from a something more nutritious that will benefit your body. The sugar in the ice cream will just get stored as fat whereas a nutrient dense food will get to work in your body.

Myth debunked.