I could tell people what they want to hear: that losing weight and shaping up is easy. I could slap my before and after photos on food supplement bottles and sell them as a miracle fat loss cure. I could compile a load of crap about diet and aerobics and flog it as an ebook for $37 a pop. God knows plenty of people are doing just that and making money. But I won’t.
I choose to tell the truth. The truth about the stuff I wish I had known sooner. The stuff I found out the hard way by sorting through all the bullshit – bullshit that can keep you from your goal and separate you from your money.
My message is not what most people want to hear. Most people are buying up worthless books, magazines, and supplements that tell them what they want instead of what they need. This is why 99.5% of people are failing to lose weight and keep it off.
To lose weight successfully, you need the truth. And the truth, as they say, will set you free. But first, it will piss you off.
Do you tell yourself that your loved ones, friends, and co-workers will keep you accountable and help you lose weight?
Do you ask them to stop you from overeating and to tell you to exercise more?
If you do, what you are really doing is using your loved ones, friends, and co-workers as a crutch for your lack of personal responsibility.
Your loved ones, friends, and co-workers cannot keep you accountable even if they wanted to. It’s not their job to save you from yourself - that’s your job. When you try to delegate that responsibility to someone else, you give up the power that comes with it. You give up the power to change.
Ask yourself this: if your loved ones, friends, and co-workers hold you accountable, how come they let you get fat in the first place? Are they accountable for that too? Of course they're not. You are. You got yourself fat, and only you can get yourself thin.
Do you tell yourself you are doing it because you don’t want to let them down? The only person you are letting down is yourself.
“You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself. That is something you have charge of.”
- Jim Rohn
It’s good to have support from your family and friends but, once you become an adult, they are not accountable for your actions. They can support and encourage you, but they cannot be held accountable for you and they cannot help you hold yourself accountable.
Taking responsibility can be scary. Instead of trying to ease your fear by blaming others, you need to take full responsibility and act.
People will do almost anything except eat less in order to get a lower reading on the scales.
Saunas, running in a rubber sweat suit, and taking water pills are a small sample of the things people tell me they do on weigh-in day. The thing these activities have in common? They are nothing at all to do with fat loss.
Something I (foolishly) assumed that most people knew until this week: there are approximately 3500 calories in one pound of fat.
To lose one pound of fat, you need to eat 3500 calories less than your body uses.
On the flip side, if you eat 3500 calories more than your body uses, you will gain one pound of fat.
Once you understand this, it becomes easy to spot the bullshit peddled by some weight loss “experts”.
A diet I heard about recently claims you can eat unlimited amounts of pasta and potatoes and still lose weight. This is nonsense. IF YOU EAT MORE CALORIES THAN YOUR BODY USES – regardless of where those calories come from – you will get fat.
Interestingly, the same diet tells you to limit the amount of bread you eat. It seems you can gain weight by eating too much bread but you can lose weight by eating unlimited amounts of pasta or potatoes. Bullshit!
Worryingly, people are paying five pounds a week to so-called weight-loss councillors (read: slimming club agents) who believe this fairy tale.
“It must be water”, “I can’t understand it, I’ve been good”, “I’ve been in the car all week”. Some of the excuses I’ve heard this week from people who have failed to lose weight.
Not one of them was prepared to admit to the real reason. Not one of them would admit that they had eaten too much.
This is not rocket science. It’s easy to work out what the problem is. If you eat too much you get fat. Blaming something else will keep you locked into a cycle of denial that will stop you from reaching your goal.
Have you ever signed one of those contracts you get in some
diet books - the ones where you commit to losing weight and you tell your
spouse, friends, or relatives so they can help keep you accountable?
It doesn’t
work.
It doesn’t work because you are accountable to one person:
you.
It’s the same as buying a gym membership and telling
yourself that you’ll use it because if you don’t you have wasted money.
If you need the threat of embarrassment or loss of money to
force yourself to lose weight and shape up, you are not ready. You have to want
to lose weight and shape up; you cannot force yourself to do it.
If you start to entertain thoughts of signing a contract or forking
out for a gym membership to keep yourself honest, stop. It means that you
really aren’t ready. Better to wait until you are.
If you want to lose fat, you have to get uncomfortable.
Not the kind of message you’ll get from your celebrity fitness DVD or see on the label of your favorite fat burning supplement and for good reason: discomfort doesn’t sell supplements or DVDs. But the hard truth is you’ll get nowhere until you accept discomfort.
“You must become uncomfortable. Feeling good does not create change. Feeling uncomfortable creates change.”
Larry Winget
Diet and fitness books tell you what you want to hear; to look for ways of making exercise easier – to potter about in your garden until you work up a “light sweat”, to roll around on an over-inflated beach ball and to eat every two hours so you don’t get hungry.
Don’t want to sweat or get hungry? Poor baby!
You need to get hungry and you have to get uncomfortable. How else will you find out what true hunger feels like and how else will you send your body a strong enough signal for change when you workout?
If you want to believe that effective exercise involves a leisurely jog along a golden beach while you grin like a Cheshire cat on heat, and if you want to believe that you can buy a slimmer body over the counter of your local health food store, then be my guest. Just don’t expect to lose fat.
Discomfort is where progress starts and fatness ends.
When things start getting uncomfortable, you know you are on the right track.
I had to get really uncomfortable before I decided it was time to do something about my weight. The discomfort was very real, very personal, and very scary. Instead of running away from it, I faced it head on. I discovered it wasn’t so bad after all. For 46 years I tried to bury my discomfort with food. I fed it until it became a 320lb behemoth that I could no longer ignore.
“There are risks and costs to a program of action. But they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.”
John F. Kennedy
The good news is that once you accept discomfort, it gets easier. The more willing you are to accept discomfort, the easier losing fat becomes.
Diet books and magazines want you for a repeat customer. It’s in their interests to keep you fat. That’s why they set their word processors to find words like “uncomfortable”, “hard”, and “work” and replace them with words like “enjoy”, “easy”, and “relax” - words that give you a warm glow inside but do f**k-all for losing fat.
Did that make you feel uncomfortable? Good! We’re on the right track.
“That day, for no particular reason, I decided to go for a little run…”
That’s about the best reason I’ve ever heard for running: no particular reason. You’ve got to love the simplicity of Gump’s thinking. He wasn’t running to lose weight, or for his health. If he were, his momma – who was wise beyond her years - would probably have put him right. Running is bad for your health and crap for weight loss.
“…so I ran to the end of the road.”
It seems that just thinking about losing weight flips a switch in peoples’ heads that gives them the overwhelming urge to run. Otherwise intelligent people start stumbling around the streets in shell suits and tight T-shirts, but all they get for their trouble is injuries and a potbelly.
“And when I got there, I thought maybe I'd run to the end of town.”
The Oxford Dictionary defines health as “the state of being free from illness or injury”. Does that sound like any runner you know? Does it? Really?
If you run, eventually you will get injured. Tapping a keyboard can give you repetitive strain injury, imagine how much damage you can do to your bones and joints by repeatedly striking the pavement with several times your bodyweight.
And please don’t be fooled into thinking that running shoes will save you. Running shoes are like the filter on a cigarette: they only reduce some of bad things – in this case impact forces - but not all of them. The big difference here is that cigarettes have a government health warning on them. Maybe it’s time the government put a warning on running shoes?
Warning: running can seriously damage your health.
“And when I got there, I thought maybe I'd just run across Greenbow County.”
When the little running switch in your head flips on, wellbeing is relegated to the dark recesses of your brain and “endorphin rush” and “enjoyable scenery” suddenly become your life’s purpose.
People tell me running helps take their mind off of their worries. Now, I fully understand the need to get away from the daily grind, but you can do this without guilt, injury, persistent colds, chest infections, comedy shorts, or expensive running shoes.
While we’re on the subject, there’s something I simply must get off my chest. Many fat people say they are too intimidated to use a gym - which I can understand to some degree. However, they don’t seem to mind mincing around the street in tight shorts and a headband looking like an extra from Shallow Hal. Now what’s THAT all about?
“And I figured, since I run this far, maybe I'd just run across the great state of Alabama. And that's what I did. I ran clear across Alabama. For no particular reason I just kept on going.”
And don’t tell me running is a fantastic calorie-burner because it ain’t.
The average marathon runner burns about 2800 calories. Now, 2800 might sound like a big number (and it is a big number if you place a “£” in front of it - well, it is to me), but when you consider a pound of fat packs a whopping 3500 calories things become a little clearer. It turns out that our marathon runner slogged away for 26 miles on the energy in a paltry 13 ounces of fat. That’s 13 ounces, NOT 13 pounds.
What’s more, our runner would use 300 calories if he just sat and watched the marathon on TV instead of running it. So those 2800 calories are really 2500 and that paltry 13 ounces of fat just dropped to 11 ½ ounces.
“I ran clear to the ocean. And when I got there, I figured, since I'd gone this far, I might as well turn around, just keep on going.”
You were designed to use energy efficiently; that’s how the human race survived. It’s also why you can run for half an hour on the calories in a jam donut. The same jam donut can keep your brain alive for 50 hours. Though, judging from the level of thought that many people seem capable of, I suspect that number is on the low side. I digress.
“When I got to another ocean, I figured, since I'd gone this far, I might as well just turn back, keep right on going.”
If you still consider running a viable exercise, let me ask you this: Do you feel compelled to run after eating a “treat” to “burn it off”? I have two words for you: guilt absolution.
That’s the name for what you are doing when you try to absolve your feelings of guilt by running after eating a “forbidden” or “naughty” food.
Does this sound healthy to you?
Running will not make up for dietary indiscretions. What it will do, however, is reinforce indiscriminate eating.
Many runners I know binge eat. Despite what they believe, there aren’t enough hours in the day to run off the amount calories in the chocolate, pizza, and beer they binge on. How do I know? Because they’re fat.
Feeling guilty after eating, and compulsive exercise are unhealthy.
“I had run for 3 years, 2 months, 14 days, and 16 hours…
…I'm pretty tired... I think I'll go home now.”
That’s what I love about the producers of Forrest Gump: they keep it real. After running all that time, Forrest didn’t lose an ounce of fat. What’s that? He wasn’t injured, either? Don’t count on it. I’m waiting for the sequel where Forrest has double hip replacement surgery and tendonitis in his knees.
“If Arthur Jones were alive today, he’d walk into the nearest commercial gym and open fire with a machine gun!”
Best-selling fitness author, Ellington Darden, is angry that Arthur Jones’ legacy is in danger of being forgotten.
From the early 70’s, Darden worked closely with Jones, who was the genius behind the Nautilus exercise machines that revolutionized the fitness industry.
The Present State of The Fitness Industry
“The fitness industry is in a mess”, says Darden, glaring at me across his desk. “Much of what Arthur Jones stood for is in danger of being lost.”
I was on holiday in Orlando and earlier that day Dr Darden invited me to his house for a chat. A few hours later, we were sitting in the study of his beautiful Florida home.
One half of the room is a fully equipped Nautilus gym with framed book covers and magazine articles hanging on the walls. The other half of the room is an executive office that looks out onto a private lake. Bookcases crammed with fitness books spanning several decades line the office walls.
“Toward the end of his life, Arthur was worried that he wouldn’t be remembered”, says Darden. It’s a legitimate concern. By 1984, Nautilus had become a household name and could be found in more than 3000 gyms; today most gym-goers are not familiar with the brand, yet alone the exercise principles that Jones and Darden promoted along with the Nautilus machines.
Jones' Work Lives On
However, Arthur Jones’ work lives on through Darden’s books - books that changed the way I thought about exercise and diet. He was the first author I read who promoted the idea of building muscle to lose fat - a method I employed to lose 140lb.
We spent a fascinating couple of hours discussing Arthur Jones, exercise, diet, and the state of the publishing industry before Ellington kindly gave me a signed copy of his latest book "The New Bodybuilding for Old-School Results".
“I’m old-school”, he says, “I believe in hard work and discipline because that’s what’s required for best possible results” – a message that’s reinforced throughout the book.
“It’s the best book I’ve ever written”, says Darden. That’s saying something, considering he’s published 49 books and sold over five million.
It’s clear that "The New Bodybuilding for Old-School Results" is a labour of love for Ellington. It’s the distillation of 45 years of hands-on experience in the iron game. It’s one of the best books I’ve read on the subject of high intensity exercise. For anyone who wants a comprehensive look at the history, characters, and principles of effective exercise and how to apply them to their training, it’s second to none.
Long, Lean Muscles
Shortly before I left, Ellington introduced me to his lovely wife, Jeanenne. Jeanenne, as Ellington points out, has fantastic genetics for strength training. She was an athlete in college and took to brief, high intensity workouts like a duck to water – and it shows. She has long, lean muscles most women would die for - disproving the common misconception that lifting anything heavier than light dumbbells will make women muscle-bound.
Jeanenne very kindly took a couple of snaps of Ellington and me standing in his gym and I departed for Orlando.
Driving back, I couldn’t help wondering if Arthur Jones’ contribution to the world of fitness would be lost forever. I sincerely hope not.
