Author: Jonathan Ross, TRX Master Trainer, Discovery Health
Fitness Expert, www.AionFitness.com
Third, the
article drops hints at the real problem with obesity, but the dots are never
connected for you. The real source
of the obesity problem is not that “exercise does not help you lose weight.” Here’s the real reason that exercise
doesn’t do much for many people’s weight loss efforts.
Exercise
is powerless against poor nutrition habits.
You get
hints of this in the article, but nothing more. The article references the “lip-licking anticipation of
perfectly salted, golden-brown French fries after a hard trip to the gym.” Another reference is to someone who
does a light workout and then grabs a massive coffee shop muffin afterwards.
I’ve worked
with a lot of people over the years, some have lost a lot of weight while
following my exercise programs, and some of them haven’t. Did I give them different
programs? Did I treat one client
better than the other by withholding some sure-fire exercise strategies from
one and not the other? Of course
not!
The main
difference between results and frustration is in one’s ability/willingness to
end their love affair with junk food.
If you regularly fantasize about a threesome with Ben & Jerry,
no trainer or exercise program is going to get you very far. This romanticized, weak-kneed reaction
to stuff that barely qualifies as food is the real problem…and this leads
directly to the fairly obvious conclusions from the research that the author
(and unfortunately many of the researchers) missed.
The correct
conclusion from most of the studies is to note the overpowering effect that junk food has on our metabolism, health,
and minds. And to be clear, I
don’t blame the individual for having difficulty staying away from it. Recall that the main study the author
cites to form his premise featured already overweight women who made no changes
to their dietary habits.
Let’s see…we
all eat several times per day and maybe exercise 2-4 days per week. And we know that in this case, the
women clearly were already living a lifestyle that led them to become
overweight so it’s not a huge leap to assume their nutrition habits were a
teensy bit off. You just cannot
conclude from this study that exercise is worthless in weight loss. What if your car had no tires, but I
made the engine run better and got it in tip-top shape? Your car still wouldn’t go
anywhere. Do I conclude the engine
work has no value?
Although all
of our choices for food are up to us, I don’t blame the individual for having
difficulty in staying away from junk foods. You can find the truth if you look for it in books like “Beating the Food Giants,” by Paul Stitt,
“Why We Eat More Than We Think,” by
Brian Wansink, and more recently, “The
End of Overeating” by David Kessler.
The powerful
chemistry – and the marketing – that is put to work on us through junk foods by
corporations who are not necessarily setting out to make bad foods, but are
most definitely setting out to increase profits, has us consuming more and more
empty food. If they make
satisfying, nutritious food, we’ll eat less of it and they’ll have lower
profits.
If you strip
away the nutritive value of food and you add the taste sensations of fat and
sugar, and then add the “emotional gloss,” as Dr. Kessler says, of comfort
foods that we ingrain in ourselves by soothing every skinned knee with an ice
cream cone as kids, then we find ourselves in the situation we’re in now: a
world where despite “trying everything,” people can’t lose weight.
It’s no
coincidence that the timeline of our massive obesity problem flows right
alongside our major industrial advances and the advent of large-scale food
processing. Our brain and body
chemistry is powerless against the “engineered
addictiveness” of junk food, and no amount of exercise can undo the “sins”
of eating.
We’ve been
“exercising” forever as we’ve needed to hunt and avoid prey to stay alive for
millennia. Modern living has
engineered the need for movement out of our day-to-day lives so the need to
reinsert it is self-evident.
Whether it is through challenging chores or full-on exercise, the choice
is yours. But there is a real myth exposed from the information in the article: And that is the myth that “there is no
such thing as bad food.” The truth
can hurt. And in this case to say
so would incur the wrath of the big food companies and the mouthpieces they’ve
brainwashed. But since you can’t
sue the makers of “exercise,” it’s a safe target.
The cover of the issue of Time featuring this article really
does say it all. It shows a
woman on a treadmill eyeing a giant cupcake with green icing and
sprinkles. The colors we used to
eat in fruits and vegetables we now eat in cupcakes sporting the colors of
health food but consist of junk.
Is
the problem with exercise or with the food?