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

When It Comes To Weight Loss You Don't Want to be an Outlier

I get a lot of questions about weight loss. Most of the questions don’t make much sense because the people who are asking are making a fundamental error in their thinking and that is:

They all think they’re different from everyone else.

They think weight loss in their specific case is much harder and that they are somehow an outlier thinking they are the one person who can’t lose weight with the traditional means of a caloric deficit.

9 times of out ten (and probably even more than that) these people are simply eating too much to lose weight.

By definition you would have to lose some amount of fat and weight if you were eating in a caloric deficit for more than a day or two. If you’re putting less matter in than is going out how could you possibly be at the same weight all the time?

Dieting for weight loss isn’t easy, and many people aren’t ready to take the necessary steps to make it happen. So instead of facing the fact that they’ve got more work to do they romanticize about being the one and only person who can’t lose weight because of some 1 in a million genetic anomaly that they’ve cooked up in their minds about themselves. This is both arrogant and disrespectful to those unfortunate people who DO have a legitimate genetic problem (as rare as it may be).

I’m sure there are the few unfortunate people who really do have some sort of genetic abnormality that makes them prone to weight gain, but for the vast majority of us it’s not a genetic issue. And if you did have such a problem you likely would already be diagnosed and be under medical supervision or on some sort of pharmaceutical therapy.

In other words, if you’re reading this you’re likely similar to everyone else and you just need to eat less. And that’s a good thing, it means the path to weight loss is simple, predictable and 100% achievable.

John

You can't hold your breath to death, but you sure can starve to death.

Well this one takes the cake. I received an email about a man who claims that he has not eaten food or consumed water in 70 years. His claim is that he survives from some sort of supernatural life force and simply breathing is enough.

Believe it or not some people actually believe it’s possible to survive on nothing more than oxygen, it’s called ‘breatharianism’ and it’s about as wacko as it gets. Of course nobody will ever try this because they’d be dead within a few weeks. The specific article that was sent to me was pointing out how this particular man had gone 6 days without food without any adverse effects…this shouldn’t be a surprise as there is well documented cases of morbidly obese people fasting for weeks on end in order to drop weight.

I even did a 5 day fast a few months ago…it’s just not that big of a deal.

Breatharianism is the final stop on the continuum of craziness that starts with the good and bad food dichotomy.

It starts with a list of foods that are good and ones that are bad, then the bad foods list grows due to contamination of toxins (whatever the hell that means), genetic modification, veganism, raw foodism, fruitism, and so-on until there is nothing left to eat.

I’m not suggesting that all people who believe in a good and bad food paradigm will end up with the breatharian belief, but a case can be made for showing a common origin of the thought process behind both ideas.

It’s easy to find fault in almost any food if you examine it enough. No matter what food you choose there is a criteria that could end up labeling it as ‘bad’ and not worth eating. Taken to the absurd extreme this would leave you with nothing left to eat (as a breatharian would believe is a perfectly fine conclusion)

Reason and common sense just isn’t with some people.

John

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