What Do You Do When You're As Health And Fit As You Can Be?

Why do you suppose anyone reads about health and fitness? My guess is that they want to improve both their health and fitness (kind of obvious I know)

But there has to be a point where you simply cannot continue to make measurable improvements…or at least there will be a point where more information, more effort, more planning will have diminishing returns.

So how do you know when you’ve read enough and done enough?

Is it a life long thing that can only be measured when you’ve reached some longevity goal (living to over 100 perhaps)

Is it a strength goal or endurance goal? (this wouldn’t make much sense unless you also included age as a dependent variable…in other words, your strength at age 65 will be less than your strength at age 25)

Is it just to know more than other people?

Is it to have good markers of health as defined by various governing medical organizations? If so what do you do when all of this looks good and you are in so called ‘optimal health’. Do you actually try to be better than this? (I think some people in fact do try to be better than optimal by striving to be more and more ‘fit’)

In my opinion people read about this stuff because they want to believe that they can take an active role in their own health and fitness (which of course you can considering you will also define your own health and fitness)

But I think problems arise when people do to much reading and theorizing and not enough ‘doing’. Information gathering can easily become more stressful and lead to a deterioration of health and fitness rather than helping you improve it.

If you find that you read more about fitness than you do about fitness you need to get your priorities in line.

30 mins of reading about what might be healthy will NEVER be as good for your health as a 30 min walk.

You’ve only got so many minutes in your life, so you might as well get the most bang for your buck out of each one.

John

I was having a discussion with a friend of mine who has recently lost about 20 pounds and looks really good (almost a perfect venus index)

She goes to the gym 4-5 times per week, mostly running and a bit of weights. Her diet is nothing special, she is a great cook and eats whatever foods she likes, no rules about carbs, fats, protein, wheat dairy yadda yadda. She just eats whatever she feels like for the day…BUT she just doesn’t overdo it with the total amount of food.

She often gets invited out for dinner with friends and on such occasions she will throw in a low calorie day or a fast just before the night out so she can afford to ‘eat big’ on the night out without it affecting her weight loss/maintenance goals.

Now here is where it gets messed up and where most people miss the point about the lifestyle of living lean and exercising.

Her friends actually criticize her for eating pizza or burgers or whatever happens to be the food of indulgence on said night out. In their minds she is the ‘fit’ and ‘healthy’ one and therefore they think and actually accuse her of being a hypocrite for eating pizza and burgers! (they can’t comprehend someone who is in good shape that can actually eat a burger and remain in good shape)

To them being fit and healthy means having a restrictive diet and never enjoying food and not partaking in social eating events that involve things like pizza burgers, chicken wings, etc, and being obsessive about exercise.

This of course is completely backwards and missing the entire point of being in shape in the first place.

The goal isn’t to be in shape in spite of your lifestyle, the point is to find a way to be in shape and enjoy the processes as it fits into your lifestyle.

It’s also about enjoying food and social gatherings without worrying about gaining weight or negatively affecting your health. (I think her system does this perfectly)

In total she probably only spends 7-8 hours per week working out (this isn’t much, I’ll bet most people spend more than this watching tv)…she spends zero time obsessing about food and eats freely (just not too much).

If you’re revamping your entire life in order to lose weight and ‘get healthy’ and in the process you end up losing out on social events, or eating foods you enjoy, or spend more time preparing and worrying about food and good foods vs bad foods, and going to the gym than socializing with friends and family…then you’re missing the whole point of being fit and in shape in the first place.

Unfortunately as this example demonstrates many people think that you can’t have both and might just forgo even trying because of what they erroneously think must be a difficult life.

But it’s actually really simple, and they’d find that out if only they would try.

I guess it’ll be our little secret for now.

John

So I’m going to start writing a new book about health/fitness/diet but I don’t really know where to start and what issues to tackle or what questions to answer or what problems need solving.

What do You Want to Learn?

In the past few months we’ve had some good discussions on this blog and it’s becoming apparent to me that I don’t really know what you want to learn about when it comes to health and fitness. Some topics that I thought were really important seemed to get glossed over…and then other topics that I thought were old news and obvious seemed to get the most interest and discussion.

So I need your help.I need to know what this book has to say to be the most useful diet/fitness/health book for you.

Here are the things we got covered so far:

1) Eating for weight loss – We’ve got this covered with Eat Stop Eat and all of the Eat Stop Eat family of materials that really explain how fat loss really works.

2) How Much Protein for Muscle Building – We’ve already got this covered with Brad’s book “How Much Protein”

3) Working out for your best proportioned look – We’ve got this covered with Adonis Index and soon to be available the Venus Index

My thought at this point is a book about the diet/health/fitness industry and how to tell what is truth from what is nonsense. I guess you could say it would be a diet/fitness/health myth busting manifesto…a proverbial handbook or user’s guide to the health and fitness industry.

I’ve been so far into this industry for so long that it’s easy for me to forget that you probably don’t have a graduate degree in nutrition and human physiology, or a career formulating and developing sports supplements, and haven’t been a strength and conditioning coach, or done clinical trial research, or trained with a powerlifting team or any of the stuff that I’ve been doing for the past 15 years.

So I need your help. I need you to let me know what you want to know. Your answer will be what I use to formulate the basis and topics of this new book.

For now the project name is called “The Health and Fitness Survival Guide” …I think this is an ironic sounding name because the words health and fitness seem to already be synonymous with ‘survival’!

Please put your suggestions in the comments section.

John

In yesterdays discussion the common logical fallacy was brought up about the false dichotomy between “fitness” and “fatness”. This is a false dichotomy because ‘fitness’ is not the opposite of ‘fatness’…not always.

To start off we have to define the logical fallacy “false dichotomy”

A false dichotomy is an erroneous reduction of many possibilities down to only two. Essential creating an either/or situation that doesn’t exist.

In the case of fitness vs fatness the false dichotomy assumes that the opposite of fit is fat when in reality it is not.

The opposite of fit is unfit, and the opposite of fat is lean.

This doesn’t mean there can’t be some overlap between fatness and being unfit, and being lean and fit, but they are not categorically the same things.

At this point we need another definition…what is ‘fitness’?

I’d say fitness is a poorly described term at best. a quick browse of the interwebs will give various descriptions but it’s not that obvious what fitness is.

It seems to be a vague idea of being able to sustain some level of exercise without losing your breath (but not necessarily a distance runner type of endurance)…it doesn’t seem to really relate to maximum strength (as many powerlifters and strong men are massively strong but not what people would consider ‘fit’)

It seems to relate to having a lower heart rate than average, lower blood pressure than average, and good to above average blood markers of health (LDL, HDL, total cholesterol, triglycerides, total lipid profile etc)…it might also have something to do with VO2 measurements (volume of oxygen you can consume while working out)

If you want to get really text book geekish then ‘fitness’ simply refers to genetic superiority/preference as a mate for producing viable offspring. (and this is one of the deep rooted subconscious reasons we’re attracted to healthy and ‘fit’ looking bodies)…so perhaps this is the best definition of all…

It doesn’t seem that fatness is really the opposite of fitness, at least not all of the time…it seems the opposite of fit is simply unfit.

With that said I think there is a continuum of fatness that eventually becomes a good indicator of a lack of fitness.

In other words, someone who is carrying around 10-20-30 and even 40 extra pounds of fat could still have very good markers of fitness, they could easily be able to run 10 kms in a good time, be very agile, have good muscular endurance, have good blood markers of health, a strong heart, low blood pressure and all of the rest of it…they just have extra fat on them from years of overeating that they’ve not managed to burn off yet.

BUT, when it starts to become 50-60-70 pounds and beyond of extra fat it would seem reasonable that there is less and less chance this same person will have favorable blood markers of health, or be able to run any distance without pain and joint issues and lack of breath, or be able to maintain low blood pressure and a low heart rate (and all of the other measures of ‘fitness’)

So as body fat levels increase fitness seems to decrease, but there is a considerable range of bodyfat levels that most likely cannot predict fitness. I’m not sure where the cutoff is, and it doesn’t seem that there is any good data yet describing this break point.

My guess is the break point is somewhere around the 30-40 pound range of extra fat for the average man and maybe 20-30 pounds for the average woman.

It seems reasonable to assume that at some point the extra weight itself stops a person from engaging and attempting exercise that would lead to increased ‘fitness’.

At extremely high ranges of body fatness almost all measurable levels are in poor standing and can be drastically improved by simply losing weight by a calorie reduction without doing any exercise at all.

So when a very heavy person needs to get in shape…their first issue is not exercise at all, but rather weight loss by way of eating less. The simple act of eating less and losing weight would actually return any unhealthy looking markers of health and fitness back to at least ‘normal’ ranges…Once they’ve lost enough weight to resume exercising without risk, then they can actually start working on improving their ‘fitness’ level from normal to above average.

One of the biggest mistakes I see people and trainers make in the gym is taking obese people and making them train like an all star athlete in the gym. In reality the best things these people could do is start eating less and then once they’re at a lower body weight start exercising. But the trick is how to get them to eat less? I say Eat Stop Eat (yes I know this is a biased opinion, but hey I think it’s the best way to lose weight)

John

P.S. Your contribution to the discussions here are what make this blog worth writing, so I just wanted to take this moment to say thanks and keep em’ coming.

The health/fitness and diet industry is based almost completely on factoids and half truths. Today I’m issuing you a test to see if you can tell fact from fiction. But first we have to define what a ‘factoid’ is.

A factoid is a questionable or spurious—unverified, incorrect, or fabricated—statement formed and asserted as a fact, but with no veracity. The word appears in the Oxford English Dictionary as “something which becomes accepted as fact, although it may not be true.” However, the word can sometimes mean, instead, an insignificant but true piece of information. (wikipedia)

Most of the claims you hear or read about in the health/fitness/diet industry are simply factoids.

In many cases they started with a misinterpretation of a scientific theory or fact and quickly turn into something completely untrue and in some cases the opposite of what the science tells us.

Finding out if a claim is a fact or a factoid takes time and effort to research where it came from and how it became popular.

Many claims in the health and fitness industry are difficult to prove in your daily life (if you gain 1 pound this week, was it muscle or fat?!)…so factoids can persist and many people get taken to the cleaners spending money on products based solely on factoids.

So here is the challenge. I want you to guess which of the following claims are facts or factoids…(re-read the definition of factoid above if you have to while you’re doing this exercise)

1. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day and kickstarts your metabolism. If you skip breakfast you’ll overeat at the end of the day and you won’t perform as well at work/school.

2. Eating late at night causes you to gain fat

3. Your metabolic rate is determined by your fat free mass (all the parts of your body that aren’t fat)

4. Adding an extra pound of muscle to your body causes you to burn about 50 more calories per day

5. High Intensity Interval Training causes you to burn more calories than steady state cardio (given the same amount of work)

6. Cardio on an empty stomach in the morning causes you to burn more fat than glycogen

7. Low insulin levels are correlated with a shift to a high percentage of fat burning

8.  Working out your abs will give you a flat stomach

9.  Certain foods cause you to burn more calories digesting them than others

10. The only scientifically repeatable and proven way to lose body fat is to eat less calories than you burn

Put your answers in the comment section. If you think it’s a fact just put “F” and if you think it’s a factoid put “FT”

I’ll be taking up the answers with 10 video posts throughout the rest of this week.

And let the game begin.

John