When someones sets out to lose weight they have a number of resources they can turn to for information. But most of these resources make a critical error that can stall your weight loss before it ever gets started. And that error is assuming there is a right and wrong way to lose weight.

Eating for weight loss is already tough enough, and being told there are right and wrong ways to do it makes it feel even harder. This is where the fallacy of fitness and health come into play.

The local gym personal trainer or fitness magazine will suggest there is a correct and healthy way to eat for weight loss. They’ll go on to also explain how to exercise to become fit and lose weight.

In both cases the emphasis is turned away from the fundamental principles of weight loss and turned towards the nebulous and entirely undefinable conceptions of ‘health’ and ‘fitness’…but this was never the point…the point was ‘weight loss’…that’s it.

The truth of the matter is that there is no correct way to lose weight. However you can get it done is the right way…The weight loss itself is what will produce most of the health benefit.

This is evident from people who use laproscopic band and gastric bypass surgery to lose weight. They obviously didn’t adopt the typical fitness marketing strategy of ‘eating clean and working out’.

In this case they have a surgical intervention to get to the root of what causes people to be overweight…eating too much. And the best thing for them isn’t to adopt some workout routine or start eating spelt and quinoa…no the thing they need is to eat less…even if it means a surgical intervention to allow less food to enter their stomach.

If weight loss is your goal then you have to keep your eye on the prize and don’t allow yourself to get side tracked with popular fitness media dogma about the right or healthy way to lose weight.

There is no correct way to lose weight, there is only weight loss, or no weight loss.

John

Forget the "Rules" You've heard, make up your own.

The diet and fitness industry is hardly at a loss for words. Browsing the interwebs (or is it the world wide net…) will bring up thousands of pages of information, tips, and endless ‘must do’ and ‘never do’ lists.

Within 5 minutes of searching you could easily come up with dozens of ‘rules‘ of fitness and ways to live a ‘healthy’ lifestyle.

Almost all of them revolve around some sort of dietary intervention like changing the timing of a meal, or the composition of that meal.

After that you’ll get extensive lists of good and bad foods, supplements you should be taking, specific ways to workout, and specific times of day to workout etc…

At no point is the practicality of these recommendations considered, the story you hear is preached like a gospel and you may start feeling lousy about yourself if you can’t follow every recommendation you’ve heard.

The stress and guilt you might start feeling for not following these ‘rules’ could easily erase any health benefits you’re getting from doing what you can.

This is hardly a way to approach health and fitness.

Every little bit counts, and whatever you can do and whatever fits with your current lifestyle is just fine.

If you’ve heard that ‘cardio’ in the morning is best, but you can only do it in the evening, that’s just fine. Don’t let some magazine or website steal the positive emotional boost you get from exercising by telling you that you’re doing it at the wrong time of day.

If you lift weights but you don’t have the money or time for a post workout protein shake then don’t worry about it, you’re still going to build muscle and strength no matter what the web-o-sphere of self proclaimed experts say.

Protect what gets into your brain, because it's going to be hard to get it out.

The moral of today’s post is to be careful what you read and what you let get into your brain.

If you’re reading this blog you probably already do lots of healthy and positive things for your body on a daily basis, but if you read too much ‘info’ out there you might just end up forgetting what you’ve done that was good and stress about all the ‘rules’ of fitness you’re still not following.

Instead of following everyone else’s rules try making up a few things for yourself.

Try  to do one exercise ‘thing’ per day for your fitness, and one ‘nutrition/food’ thing per day.

Make it up just for you and it’s gotta fit your life.

I’d like to hear what you’re planning on doing if you don’t mind putting it in the comments section.

John

Slaving away in the gym isn't the answer to reducing blood pressure.

I was browsing some headlines on the interwebs today and I found an interesting report about a study about fatness vs fitness and risk of high blood pressure.

In general the study showed that fatness was linked to high blood pressure even if those people scored well on ‘fitness’ tests.

The more interesting part was the fact that a higher level of ‘fitness’ only seemed to matter for people who had lower/normal bodyfat levels.

This just reminds me how sad it is to see people wasting their money on personal trainers in big fitness clubs trying to lose weight by exercising (assuming they’re not changing their diet, which it is obvious that many of them aren’t).

The worst part is, not only are they not losing weight, they’re not even reducing their risk of heart disease or their blood pressure.

So the morals of this very short story are:

1) Losing weight will have a much bigger impact on decreasing your blood pressure.

2) Staying overweight and trying to build up your ‘fitness’ level by doing cardio isn’t going to help you reduce your blood pressure (and therefore will have little impact on reducing risks of heart disease).

3) Becoming more ‘fit’ only seems to help further improve blood pressure in those people who already have normal bodyfat levels (as measured by BMI)

Focus on reducing weight to reduce your blood pressure and risk of heart disease. Once you’ve got the weight down you can start thinking about improving your ‘fitness’.

John

For the most part Carl is right. You’re going to die (but likely not from a knife attack). But the health and fitness industry seems to scare people into buying products and idea’s that essentially are promising a way to cheat death.

The concept of being ‘fit’ hasn’t really translated into people living much longer. In fact the only lifestyle intervention that has ever been proven to help extend life is simply caloric restriction.

In other words, eat less food.

That’s it.

Eating less food is the only thing you can do that has any scientific suggestion that it can help extend life, or at least help you avoid a premature death.

I’m not suggesting that exercising is a waste of time, but rather to realize what it can and can’t do.

Exercising can make you stronger, or better at a specific movement pattern or event (like running, or lifting or some sort of sport). It’ can also help with bone density, flexibility, stress relief and a host of other positive systemic benefits…BUT we have no proof or indication that it has any effect on longevity (independent of caloric restriction)

In other words, exercise and ‘fitness’ itself isn’t enough to affect your long term health if you don’t also combine it with some degree of calorie restriction or control.

John

Mr Incredible is superhuman, and it seems we all want to be just like him.

‘Health’ and ‘Fitness’ are meaningless terms by themselves. They only become meaningful when you take the time to give your own personal definition to them as it applies to you.

Many people will change the way they eat, exercise and live in an effort to be ‘healthier’ and ‘fit’, but how do you measure this?

One of the obvious answers is the look of your body. It’s reasonable to assume that a healthy body is a healthy looking body.

There are other metrics like blood markers of disease risk and physical ability to do work (running a distance for time etc)

But these don’t seem like an end in and of themselves but rather sign posts along the way.

I believe all of our health and fitness pursuits are simply an effort to cheat death and live as long as possible. After all would do an exercise that made you look better, and made you more fit, and reduced your risk of disease, but also shortened your life?

John