Where Fitness Has Flopped
Exercise. It's a complete game-changer. The endorphins, the burn, the athletic improvements, and the challenges it can bring when you start to get serious about achieving a specific goal:
Quarantine handstands in my Airbnb
I also love how versatile fitness can be with respect to what you want to accomplish over the course of many months. Gain muscle, lose weight, get better at strength, improve your endurance; there are so many practices that you can dive into which makes any fitness pursuit fun, to say the least... or so I thought.
Where Fitness has Flopped
Now, don't get me wrong. There are many upsides when it comes to getting into fitness and achieving a certain goal. However, somewhere along the lines, it’s become easy to get sidetracked by all of the information /misinformation within this industry itself.
Buy this product, don’t eat that, dirty bulk, clean eating, 10k challenge, get shredded, stay lean year-round, etc. All these extremes may be different for each person and the pressures to succumb to them are arguably at an all-time high. So, in this article, I wanted to touch on a few of these topics that I see come up relatively often. And although there are other issues beyond what this list mentions, raising awareness around these
Flop 1: Pressures to be Lean
Now this one hits home for a lot of people whether you're brand new to the gym, or a long-time lifter. Social media, advertisements, movies, etc. all glamorize this idea of being a low body fat as if it's no sweat to maintain and a gold standard goal to go by.
In reality, however, being and also staying lean throughout the year can be pretty difficult for the vast majority of people. This is because maintaining low body fat for long periods of time by no means feels like the normal thing to do.
For example:
Putting up with discomforting hunger.
Restricting food.
Dealing with mood swings.
Feeling cold a lot.
Feeling lethargic.
All of these are side effects of trying to maintain a low body fat which is never really talked about or often discussed. And yet, we tend to idolize this "look" as if it's something to strive for when in reality, it can be an uphill battle with hunger, monitoring food, and low energy depending on the person and their daily activity.
Flop 2: Supplements
Or magic pills as some will call them, the number of supplements available to us today is quite high and the claims they come backed with are often pretty bold. "Burn fat at 10x speed"; "Build twice the amount of muscle"; "Enhance your focus"; "Feel 18 again".
Ehh.. not so fast.
And although these supplement companies can market a product how they please, the chances of them actually working as advertised is often pretty slim despite our high hopes. Lack of research, low quality (and potentially harmful) ingredients, and the fact that most of these supplements may just pass through the body without being absorbed are just a few reasons why these products can be a bit of a hoax [2][3][4][5][6][7].
On the contrary, lifestyle interventions and behavior changes over time seem to be most helpful when it comes to producing the results we want [8]. However, a pill seems like a much easier option which can be why so many products are sold each year. In short, there are no fast tracks to good health which ultimately leads us to flop number 3.
Flop 3: Quick Fixes
Detoxes, fad diets, extreme workouts, etc. All of these approaches are great in theory, but they typically aren't sustainable if we can't find greater meaning.
Instead, exercising and improving our health should be built around a process-oriented goal rather than something so short-lived as going "too hard too soon" can lead us right back to where we started. Research has shown, for example, that utilizing small energy deficits for weight loss in athletes may be superior to deficits more extreme [9]. And although this weight loss may take longer as a result, the upsides to the slower approach seem to outweigh the faster option.
Other research around the use of extreme diets for weight loss has also shown similar findings as the lack of variety and lack of nutritional balance seem to be the disrupting factor. People adopting these types of diets seem to re-gain the lost weight as well, most likely due to their unsustainable approach [10][11].
A Short List But Others Still Exist
And although this is a very brief list, I think it's helpful to raise awareness around these topics given how popular they are among the public. Spending too much money on supplements, wasting too much time on a diet that may lead to bad eating habits, and spending too much time worrying about how much body fat we carry can all accumulate to time poorly spent. Regardless, it's important to enjoy what you do in terms of exercise/fitness and to also be skeptical about any advice that's strictly black or white. Good things take time; and when it comes to your health and improving your levels of fitness, patience is required to make the necessary changes.
References
1."Dietary Supplements: What You Need to Know - Consumer ...." 3 Sep. 2020, https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/WYNTK-Consumer/. Accessed 24 Mar. 2021.
2. "Introduction and Background - Dietary Supplements - NCBI Bookshelf." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK216048/. Accessed 24 Mar. 2021.
3. "What You Need to Know about Dietary Supplements | FDA." 29 Nov. 2017, https://www.fda.gov/food/buy-store-serve-safe-food/what-you-need-know-about-dietary-supplements. Accessed 24 Mar. 2021.
4. "Banned and discouraged-use ingredients found in weight loss ...." 27 Jul. 2016, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27475836/. Accessed 24 Mar. 2021.
5. "A Public Health Issue: Dietary Supplements Promoted for Brain ...." 10 Apr. 2020, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7153641/. Accessed 24 Mar. 2021.
6. "Dietary Supplements Pose Real Dangers to Patients - Pub Med." 24 Jan. 2020, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31973570/. Accessed 24 Mar. 2021.
7. "31: Do Those Supplements Actually Work? | University of Utah Health." 4 Feb. 2020, https://healthcare.utah.edu/the-scope/shows.php?shows=0_1dum7dno. Accessed 24 Mar. 2021.
8. "They all work...when you stick to them": A qualitative investigation of ...." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2607302/. Accessed 25 Jul. 2021.
9. "Metabolic adaptation to weight loss: implications for the athlete." 27 Feb. 2014, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3943438/. Accessed 25 Jul. 2021.
10. "A practical guide to fad diets - PubMed." https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6571242/. Accessed 25 Jul. 2021.
11. "Pros & cons of some popular extreme weight-loss diets - NCBI - NIH." 26 Sep. 2018, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6366252/. Accessed 25 Jul. 2021.