Saturday, September 6, 2008

Face the Truth..............Save Your Money

There are SO many people willing, and anxious, to sell you something! This doesn't make them bad. They are in business, and are there trying to make money. What is sad to watch is the amount of money that people are willing to shell out in their never-ending quest for a fitness magic bullet. The food supplement and diet industry is, almost without exception, an industry based upon flawed logic.

To be fit and healthy, you need what our ancestors had. Aerobic exercise, limited caloric intake, and strength training.

It really IS that simple! Primitive man didn't have the luxuries available to us today. We hire someone to go out and kill the animals that we eat. We hire someone to pick the fruit off the trees, and we hire someone to gather the vegetables for us. What's worse, we pay someone a premium if they add things to our food, or prepare it in a way that pleases our palate for the moment, such as extra salt, extra fat and extra sugar.
Look, the truth is, you can't depend upon somebody else for your decisions. If you "go on" this diet, and that diet, and sign up to be a member of the "whatever" weight loss club, it won't help you at all unless you ..........EAT LESS! Realistically, you won't belong to these things for the rest of your life, and if you are relying upon them for guidance, you are setting yourself up for a fall.
Once you get busy, or have a personal crisis, or move, or change jobs, or get married, or have a child, you will find a reason to get away from them. If you do it on your own, (and you really can), you will be able to maintain your lifestyle decisions through any such changes.......provided that you have the desire to do so. So here are your choices:
1. Eat Less and get more exercise.
2. Buy weight loss products, and......Eat Less and get more exercise.
3. Join a weight loss group and.........Eat Less and get more exercise.
4. Enroll in a commercial weight loss program and........Eat Less and get more exercise.
Do we see a pattern developing here? No matter what you do, you won't achieve real, long term weight loss unless you .............Eat Less and get more exercise. That's not opinion. That's 2 million years of evolution that produced your body. That's how it works. When food is plentiful and not much physical effort is needed to obtain it, the human body stores fat for later. When food is scarce, and a lot of effort is required to obtain it, the body burns the fat stores to produce the energy needed for survival.
In another million years or so, our bodies may evolve to the point that they can throw off those excess calories consumed rather than store them as fat. Until then, you need to treat your body like what it is. We have the bodies of primitive hunter/gatherers, and to keep them healthy, we need to provide that for which they were designed. Lots of effort, and the right amount of food. If you don't, you will be fat.

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Ubiquitous Food!

The problem is systemic, and world-wide in "developed" societies. Grain and sugar are cheap to produce, handy to eat, and packed with calories. Every fair, theme park, sporting event, party, or other gathering of people has a plentiful supply of "treats". Sugar filled cereals are marketed to children, and purposefully placed on lower shelves so they will see them as they walk down grocery ailes.



Television commercials are filled with pizza, sweet rolls and multitudes of snack foods. They are slick, well thought out, and specifically crafted, down to the syllable, to get you to buy and eat more junk.



The diet industry makes billions of dollars every year selling you "weight loss" products and schemes. The money is driving this, and that won't stop, unless and until there is no market.

Your health is at stake here. Will a healthier diet make you live longer? Who knows. You could eat a healthy meal, then get hit by a bus on the way home. What a healthy diet WILL do, however, is increase the LIKELIHOOD that you will have a longer, more productive life.

The human body is very resilient! It has evolved over the past 2 million years or so to survive adverse conditions. You can eat junk, sit around, gain 100 or 200 pounds, and you will probably still live quite a few years. You may be bedridden, or in a wheel chair or electric scooter with "knee problems", or "foot problems", as a result of carrying around all those "stored" pounds for so long. The problem with fat is that it doesn't do much, except ride around with you to provide extra energy when your body needs it. It doesn't help you move, think, feel sensations, or support yourself like muscle, bone, brain or nerve tissue. It is a storehouse of energy that you are carting around to be prepared for leaner times. Your body doesn't know that you will have plenty of food tomorrow, next week, next year, or for the rest of your life. It simply knows that it is receiving more input of calories than needed for current operations, and storing it away so that it will be ready if the food supplies run out.

Have you ever seen a skinny person in an electric scooter? I haven't. Granted, if you NEED to be in one of those things for a physical reason, it is difficult to burn enough calories to prevent weight gain. That being said, weight gain CAN be prevented by limiting the calories consumed. If you are unable to walk because of lower body problems, they are BY DEFINITION, made worse by carrying around excess, unnecessary weight.

This sounds like preaching, but it's only common sense. Is my weight perfect? Nope. It's a lot better than it used to be, and I'm constantly working on it and monitoring it so that it doesn't go back. I'm not doing anything that anybody else can't do. If you want to be healthy, you need to stay committed, and use some self-discipline.

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Look Around

If there is any doubt in your mind, just look around you, particularly at those places/events where people go for "recreation". The term recreation is a kind word for overindulgence, most of the time. Parties have huge tables of gooey sweets, fat filled goodies, bowls of chips, nuts, candies, you name it, just sitting there for "grazing". People, not conscious of, or not caring what they are doing to themselves, repeatedly gorge themselves with enough calories for 5 people, and then step on the scales, wondering, "Why did I gain weight?" "I only drink diet soda!"

People, it will take a lot to change this situation. It can be done. Stay tuned.

Monday, September 1, 2008

Waddling Happily Toward the Grave

The simplicity of it is mind boggling! If you look around (or probably just look toward your toes), the people in modern society are just becoming fatter and fatter and fatter. The reason is a simple equation, really. In western society, at least, there is a virtually unlimited supply of food (mostly carbohydrates), and very little physical movement necessary to get through the day. The human body is an amazing machine. It was designed and developed over 2 million years or so to survive and reproduce under a wide range of conditions. Unlike many animals, we can survive on meat, on fruit, on vegetation, or any combination of those, for extended periods of time.

Our ancestors, of course, couldn't wake up in the morning and walk to a cupboard, grab a bag containing 5,000 calories of whatever, and eat their fill. They had to find-catch-pick their food. That required caloric expenditure. This went on until about 10-20,000 years ago, when man figured out that he could keep animals penned up, grow grains and fruits close to his abode, and access them at his leisure. Unfortunately, our bodies have yet to catch up with our intellect. Although we have solved the problem of having enough nutrition available, the human body is still programmed to store what we find, in the way of fat, until the next period of plenty arrives.

When our paleolithic ancestors found a migrating herd of caribou, they could kill and eat for weeks, gaining precious fat as an insurance policy against leaner times when food was not plentiful. Now our bodies perform the same way, not having changed much in such a short time. We do not, however, still have the "leaner times" during which the fat was drawn upon for energy.

This is why nearly everyone you see has a large abdomen protruding in front of them, as they happily graze the samples at Costco, or descend upon the "birthday table" of sugary sweets brought into the office by a co-worker to "celebrate" some milestone or event. Add this to a sedentary lifestyle, a habit of eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and you have ........fat people