Despite the greatest efforts and best intentions most New Year’s fitness campaigns, most fail. You plot a massive and intricate plan of attack, only to have one little snag crumble your entire plan of attack. This snag—this trap—is all it takes to kick start chaos and confusion. Just ask Admiral Ackbar. He’ll tell you all [...]
Despite the greatest efforts and best intentions most New Year’s fitness campaigns, most fail. You plot a massive and intricate plan of attack, only to have one little snag crumble your entire plan of attack.
This snag—this trap—is all it takes to kick start chaos and confusion. Just ask Admiral Ackbar. He’ll tell you all about traps.
As we turn the page on a New Year, lots of people will fall into traps as they crusade to physical rejuvenation. Over the next few days, I’m going to throw out some of my quick hitting tips to “trap-proof” the Way. Some—like not listening to nutrition labels—are easy and more common. Others—like embracing nutritional chaos and losing muscle in order to enhance muscle building potential in the future—aren’t so common.
So saddle up. Traveling through hyperspace ain’t like dusting crops.
1. Low fat foods
The low fat fad hit for a long time, and it still lingers. No matter how many times I tell my mom that not all fat is created equally and that not all fat is bad, it doesn’t quite sink in. The earth is round, folks. Get with the times.
When people became fat-phobic, companies were quick to eliminate fat from their processed foods sold at the store. Problem with this is that when you take fat out of food, the taste tanks. So they did what any sensible, money hungry organization would do: replace the fat with something else to maintain taste, without giving one lick of care to what that “something else” is.
As long as fat gets eliminated from the label, who cares?
Most times, the fat is replaced with sugar. Without passing judgment on whether chugging fat is better than downing refined sugar, let’s just say that if something is low fat, there’s something that’s secretly compensating for it on the backend, which almost always defeats the initial purpose.
2. Low calorie and all natural foods
While we’re on the subject of food advertising, let me pass down a tip that will guide almost any question you might have on what I recommend eating.
Along with low fat foods, you’ll also find foods advertised as being lower in calories or even “all natural.” The rule of thumb here is that if a food has the potential to be advertised upon, it’s probably not something you should be eating. It's not a set on stone heuristic, but it's good enough for me.
As of now, there’s no such thing as the new lower calorie apple or the new lower calorie granule of rice. Same goes for broccoli, steak, eggs, and, well, you get the picture.
Basically, eat mostly things that have one primary ingredient: the food itself.
3. Most fitness “transformations”
One of the reasons people expect this gig to be easy, most likely, is because of the typical advertisement strategies for lame products that exist. I wrote about this before, and what kind of difference can be made when taking two pictures just seconds apart. There’s a fancy infographic floating around that shows even more of what can be done.
The sad part is that, knowing eager souls fall for this kind of trap on the regularl, it forces even the honest folk out there to adjust their marketing strategy in order to compete.
It’s like magic, really. It’s just a sleight of hand, but you’re duped into thinking it’s real. Don’t fall into the trap. And this is just photo tricks — I’m not even going to get into the fact that most people you see are probably on some kind of drug that helps them maintain muscle mass as they lean down.
I don’t think it’s unrealistic to say that 90% of the bodies you admire and want aren’t reality. They’re either short term diet down stints that only last one day or they are digitally enhanced or something about them isn't quite honest.
4. Spot reducing body fat
A widely accepted belief right now is that targeted fat loss is impossible. In other words, you can’t preferentially lose abdominal fat. In other other words, crunches won’t tone your tummy.
While the jury isn’t totally finalized on whether or not spot reduction is 100% impossible, in my opinion, if you’re trying to spot reduce you’re going to fail unless you already know how to lose fat. So if you struggle losing fat, trying to spot reduce isn’t going to end well.
Do the work to understand what you need to do in order for your body to start munching on its own body fat before worrying about any kind of targeted fat loss work.
The next round
There you have it: four quick hitting beginner tips that fool the best of us when we're just starting to find the Way. Next time, we'll talk about testosterone and its relationship to sex drive, whether aerobic training will wither you into a wire, and other good stuff you won't want to miss.
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