Having worked a lifetime in the health and fitness industry I’m still saddened every time when I hear the reason for working out is: “I want to lose weight.” The tragic part is in my fitness circle it is by far at all age levels the number 1 purpose. How can we change this narrative? Let’s explore.
If change is going to happen it needs a 360-degree approach. To get away from fitness with a “weight loss” motivation what needs to change? I see these 4 items as crucial to leading individuals towards fitness longevity and optimal nutrition.
- Promote real food consumption
- Assist in finding a different fitness motivator
- Move totally away from the calorie theory
- Stop snacking and investigate intermittent fasting
Eat real food
Full disclosure, I’m a low carb, heavy carnivore, extremely low sugar mature aged person. OK, now that we have that on the table, I don’t care what diet you eat as long as it works well for you. But, if you want maximum performance in daily life you have to consider what will best support you on a consistent basis, not one day or one hour.
Processed junk food in any way shape or form is a disaster. Unless of course you want to be on the roller coaster of hunger and satiety all day long. The same goes for a constant input of fruit/veggie smoothies and sugar bombs like energy drinks. Let’s call it what it is a dessert, not a meal, not a performance enhancer but a detriment to your health.
So now I hear you thinking oh I don’t have time to cook, plan a meal, pack a lunch or whatever excuse you can muster. OK then, enjoy the rest of your day. When one doesn’t make time for real food the price for ill health will be paid at some point. No matter the number of hours you spend in the gym this cannot be recovered.
Find a new fitness goal
Let’s imagine weight loss is not your goal. What could it be? Get away from even anything with the word health in it.
- Enjoy life better
- Play more with my kids or grandkids
- Travel with ease
- Do daily chores with energy
- Have energy to learn a new skill
- Give me more strength
Before the end of year, write down your new motivation. Pin it on your desk or refrigerator. Stick to it and share it profusely with friends.
Move away from the calories in, calories out theory
Here I defer to individuals who have written profusely on the calorie theory, Zoe Harcombe, PhD and Gary Taubes. They’ve both tirelessly researched the ins and outs of why this theory does not hold up to rigorous science standards. Gary Taubes with his investigative scientific journalistic skills, author of Good Calories, Bad Calories and Zoe Harcombe in her PhD thesis and author of The Obesity Epidemic. In simple terms A Calorie is Not A Calorie.
I love this request from Zoe. She is talking about the “theory” that ‘to lose 1lb of fat you need to create a deficit of 3500 calories’”
“I have a simple and reasonable request. I would like proof of this formula – that it holds exactly every single time – or I would like it to be banished from all dietary advice worldwide.
Any proof needs to source the origin of the formula. Then the proof needs to hold in all cases. There needs to be overwhelming, irrefutable and consistent evidence that each and every time a deficit of 3,500 calories is created, one pound of fat is lost.
Since, we already have overwhelming evidence that such proof cannot be provided, it is not enough that we quietly stop using this formula – it is too widely assumed to be true for us to just sweep it under the carpet. We need to issue a public statement saying that it does not hold and should not be used again. We need to tell people that they will not lose one pound of fat for every deficit of 3,500 calories that they create. We need to tell people that there is no formula when it comes to weight loss and we have been wrong in giving people the hope that starvation will lead to the loss of 104 pounds each and every year, in fat alone.”
Gary Taubes on the energy theory: “Treat obesity as physiology, not physics.”
“It is better to know nothing,” wrote French physiologist Claude Bernard in An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (1865), “than to keep in mind fixed ideas based on theories whose confirmation we constantly seek.”
Embracing a fixed idea is one of the main dangers in the evolution of any scientific discipline. Ideally, errors will be uncovered in the trial-by-fire of rigorous testing and the science will right itself. In rare cases, however, an entire discipline can be based on a fundamental flaw.
As a science journalist turned science historian, I have written at length about how and why this may have happened in obesity research. I have suggested that the discipline may be a house of cards — as, by extension, may much research into the chronic diseases associated with obesity, such as diabetes.
Before the Second World War, European investigators believed that obesity was a hormonal or regulatory disorder. Gustav von Bergmann, a German authority on internal medicine, proposed this hypothesis in the early 1900s.
The theory evaporated with the war. After the lingua franca of science switched from German to English, the German-language literature on obesity was rarely cited. (Imagine the world today if physicists had chosen to ignore the thinking that emerged from Germany and Austria before the war.)
Instead, physicians embraced the ideas of the University of Michigan physician Louis Newburgh, who argued that obese individuals had a “perverted appetite” that failed to match the calories that they consumed with their bodies’ metabolic needs. “All obese persons are alike in one fundamental respect,” Newburgh insisted, “they literally overeat.” This paradigm of energy balance/overeating/gluttony/sloth became the conventional, unquestioned explanation for why we get fat. It is, as Bernard would say, the fixed idea.
This history would be no more than an interesting footnote in obesity science if there were not compelling reason to believe that the overeating hypothesis has failed. In the United States, and elsewhere, obesity and diabetes rates have climbed to crisis levels in the time that Newburgh’s energy-balance idea has held sway, despite the ubiquity of the advice based on it: if we want to lose fat, we have to eat less and/or move more. Yet rather than blame the advice, we have taken to blaming individuals for not following it ‘properly’.
The alternative hypothesis — that obesity is a hormonal, regulatory defect — leads to a different prescription. In this paradigm, it is not excess calories that cause obesity, but the quantity and quality of carbohydrates consumed. The carbohydrate content of the diet must be rectified to restore health.
So What?
What’s that mean for your fitness routine? For starters you can forget that calories burned on your treadmill or Fitbit. Focus on the quality of food you are eating and make your fitness goals on movement performance, lifestyle enhancing and maybe just pure fun. As I tell my clients, “You lose weight in the kitchen and get fit in the studio.”
Put your energy in eating real food and real meals that don’t raise your insulin (read carbohydrates and sugar) thus putting you in fat storage mode. Think of food as performance, not a numbers/calorie-counting game.
Stop Snacking
The last piece of the puzzle continues the thinking process of above. I’m also not going to make any friends here: stop the incessant snacking. There are no healthy snacks. There are real meals and real food.
Snacks just put you on the roller-coaster of high and lows of blood sugar. As Taubes talks about above, high insulin levels continually keep you in fat storage mode, taking breaks, fasting and eliminating the constant input of food breaks that cycle.
Whatever nutrition path works for you, low-carb, keto, carnivore, ancestral based, make it be about performance enhancing. As Dr. Kevin Stock says of his choice of Carnivore “I think one of the most underrated benefits of the carnivore diet is the psychological change so many people experience. It fixes our relationship with food.”
Change your thoughts and you change your world.
Norman Vincent Peale
For more reading see Krisna’s book: “Finding Lifestyle Sanity: A Survival Guide” a no-nonsense approach to health and fitness.
