The “Weight-Centered Approach” to fitness is overly simplistic and does not stand up to medical and scientific scrutiny. This way of thinking also serves to doom people to failure in their efforts to lead a healthful lifestyle.
The prevailing wisdom in the mainstream – celebrity fitness types, personal trainers and magazines – is that people are either fit or fat, but cannot be both. Kind of like you are either Republican or Democrat, a Red Sox or Yankee fan or as the old joke goes, you’re either pregnant or you’re not.
I’m here to tell you that while it may be true that you cannot be a Red Sox and a Yankee fan, you certainly be fit AND fat. As a personal trainer and professional strength coach, I’m also here to tell you should ignore the personal trainers and other charlatans who have deigned you a failure or weak minded if you can’t subsist forever on a 1500-calorie/day diet, can’t lose some randomly determined amount of weight or exercise like the idiots who subject themselves to humiliation and torture on televised fitness farces.
People can be healthy at any size.
Rather than waste your time and effort and emotional energy on worrying what the scale says, start to realize that people can be fit and fat.
Embarrassments like the television show “The Biggest Loser” and the misguided fitness experts and personal trainers who have made a name – and a fortune – for themselves on the backs of the unsuspecting and trusting public have done more damage to the cause of living a healthful lifestyle than almost any other entity. The misguided approach to fitness that basically boils down to telling people to lose weight, without regard for other demonstrably more important factors, rules the day.
People have been conditioned to think that lean and light is better than fat and heavy. In the process of turning F-A-T into a 4-letter word millions of people have been turned off and turned away from fitness, and dooming people to failure before they could even start to make changes.
What’s been going on since the 1970s is that so-called fitness experts have created flawed programs based on a narrow-minded and misguided premise, which almost guaranteed that the vast majority of people would fail to live up to the standards set up by these mountebanks. In the process, this weight-centric approach to fitness established the fatally flawed idea that appearance equals fitness and health.
Of the thousands and thousands of visitors that have come to this site, I am certain that the majority of these visits were by people who feel that at some point they either have failed to improve their health or are frustrated and/or confused by the messages promoted by the fitness mainstream. At HealthAndFitnessAdvice.com you have found a place that will show you how there’s more to fitness and health than the 3-digit number on a scale.
The keepers of the flame of the weight and fat fallacy are very sensitive and protect their turf with great vigilance. I have received countless emails and comments on the various sites that I write for from the defenders of the weight-centric approach. In their all-or-nothing mindset, the weight-obsessed equate the healthy and any size position with telling people that there are no consequences from eating anything that they want.
The weight-centric crowd ignores the fact that problems typically – willfully – associated with excess weight can be resolved independently of weight loss. There is no question that metabolic fitness depends on insulin sensitivity that has significant effects on glucose tolerance, blood pressure and lipids profile. What the “fat can’t be fit” crowd ignores is that insulin sensitivity is improved by a combination of increased physical activity and healthful eating.
Metabolic fitness can be improved independent of weight change.
And just to be clear for those who feel that you can never be to thin and that thin is in, the concept of health at every size is not about disregarding healthful eating or ignoring the consequences of real obesity. But at the same time what I – and others – am trying to tell people is that fit and healthy bodies come in all shapes and sizes.
The message is to engage in regular exercise and consume a healthy diet – reduce saturated fats and refined sugar intake. Don’t be a slave to the scale or the Body Mass Index (BMI). People who were supposed to know better have told me on several occasions that I need to lose weight because at 6’ 1” and 208 pounds my BMI is too high, without any regard for any other significant measures. This is nonsense, and nonsense that plenty of you have been subjected to.
Don’t let these fitness Brahmins create a weight-based caste system that relegates the vast majority of us to irrevocably low status because of their lack of knowledge.
