What Would You Eat?

Simple mental exercise for you today.

What would you eat if you knew the food choices you made wouldn’t adversely affect your weight or your health?

I’ll start: I would eat just about everything I am currently eating.

John

Manny and Anthony got this discussion going yesterday and I think it needs further exploration…and that is how much exercise should we be doing per week?

Exercise shouldn't be a sentence to pain and suffering

There are a few ways to approach the answer to this question.

The first thing to do is identify your goal.

Is it to do the least amount of exercise possible while getting into the best looking shape possible?

Is it the above mentioned goal as well as minimizing as many risks factors of disease as possible?

Is it some performance goal (like running a certain distance in a given time, or a strength goal etc?)

Is it some combination of the above?

In any case it seems that many people have come to believe that you can do far less work than you have to in order to get into your goal shape.

I think this is a symptom of the modern industrialized sedentary society. For many of us our daily routine barely requires us to even stand up let alone walk around.

If you spend the better part of your day sitting then there is a good case to be made for you to workout or at least go for a walk every day. At least move around a bit.

I think we’ve all become a bit too accustomed to a really sedentary lifestyle. And as Manny and Anthony pointed out even as little as 7-8 hours per WEEK sounds like alot of exercise…this seems a bit ridiculous…out of 168 available hours in a week does dedicating 8 of them to exercise and improving the look and health of your body sound like too much?

If it does sound like too much that is an artifact of the general busyness and sedentary nature of our societies and nothing to do with fundamental physiological principles.

We could all easily exercise for multiple hours per day if we had enough time. I totally understand that a 2 hour workout every day might not make much sense for everyone. But at least an hour of movement per day should be a bare minimum.

And then mixed within that could be 3-4 more intense and targeted training sessions to force muscle growth and adaptation.

The reality is that Anthony and Manny pointed out how far off our perception of what a realistic amount of exercise per week should be.

I think we’ve all become far too used to doing far too little.

If we learn to prioritize a mix of both targeted vigorous exercise (weight training/running etc) and general lifestyle movement (walking) as something that must be done every day then we’d be close to what our bodies were built for in the first place and many of our lifestyle disorders, issues with eating and dealing with stress would be much less of a problem.

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

I just finished doing a podcast about the definition of health and how this word doesn’t mean anything until you give it some meaning and values. You can listen here –> Your Definition of Healthy

Today we’re going to do a word association game. I’m going to write some of the more popular and relatively ambiguous terms in the health and fitness industry and I want you to answer with ONE word that comes to mind for each word in the list below.

But only ONE word each, so be honest and pick the one word that really comes to mind for you. If you write two words for any of them I’m going to delete your comment entirely.

List your answers in numerical order in the comments section. Write your words down before you look through the comments to avoid having other people’s answers influence yours.

Here’s the list:

1 – Health

2 – Fitness

3 – Fat

4 – Food

5 – Diet

6 – Sugar

7 – Obese

8 – Skinny

9 – Eating

10 – Muscle

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