Focusing on weight loss is a massive waste of time and effort and sets up negative associations between exercise, eating and health. Without a concern for improving performance or increasing capability, weight loss is meaningless and certainly not a measure of success and certainly not a measure of fitness.
Everywhere you look there are health, fitness and diet experts saying that losing weight is a must in order to live as long and as healthy as possible. Rarely, if ever, is there a mention of any other kind of improvement besides the weight loss.
As a fitness development coach (formerly known as a personal trainer) if I let clients focus on weight loss as a goal I would be in big trouble. Any fitness professional that let’s their clients use weight loss as the main goal of their program must fight a constant, impossible to win battle against nature and the forces of genetics.
People cannot continue to lose weight and they cannot consistently lose weight over a period of time. When the weight stops coming off, a weight loss oriented program is deemed a failure and clients lose interest.
However, they can continue to improve performance and work to increase their capability level. I have clients who in their sixties are continually working on getting better; performing a pull-up, improving balance, learning how to sprint and how to perform complex Olympic-style lifts.
If these clients had been focused on weight loss they would have never been able to make the massive progress that has allowed them to achieve quite extraordinary things, which has improved their quality of life in ways that losing a few pounds never could.
Orthorexia is an eating disorder – or form of disordered eating – that you may not have heard about, but apparently is becoming a real problem among people who think that they are engaged in healthy eating. Orthorexia is characterized by a hyper-vigilance about the quality of foods and the ingredients contained within, not necessarily focusing on weight-loss/avoiding weight gain.
According to a recent article that appeared on ParentDish.com, when parents become overly concerned with the consumption of sugars, trans fats and other ingredients that have been deemed unhealthy in the efforts to avoid disease and illnesses, they can be setting their kids up for habits and attitudes towards foods and eating that can cause them to suffer from myriad eating disorders. Bulimia and anorexia are on the rise in the United States and many experts feel this is because we have a generation of parents have passed unhealthy attitudes towards foods and eating on to their children.
According to Dr. Steven Bratman, author of the book “Health Food Junkies,” orthorexia starts, “as a desire to overcome chronic illness, lose weight and improve general health or to correct bad habits of diet.” The National Eating Disorders Association says orthorexics get fixated on the quality of food and wind up severely restricting the kinds and total calories of food. Just like with other eating disorders, this obsession consumes orthorexics and dominates their thoughts and lives.
There is some disagreement in the eating disorder community over whether orthorexia is an eating disorder or a form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Frankly this is a chicken and egg argument, in that many extreme behaviors associated with diet and exercise has OCD elements. And really, does it matter? If a person is so obsessed with food and “eating healthy” that they become unhealthy, they need to be helped, not put in a category.
Orthorexia is an illustration of how people have totally lost the ability to eat intuitively, something that our species has done for thousands of years. Over a little more than a generation’s time, millions of people no longer know how to properly feed themselves and cannot eat unless they follow a plan. The multi-billion dollar diet industry has sold the public a bill of goods; you need to lose weight to be healthy and you don’t know how to eat so follow our method. Instead of helping, the diet industry has ruined people, even those who don’t need to lose weight.
Despite what we’ve been told by the doomsayers masquerading as public health officials, Americans are healthier and living longer than ever before.
According to the numbers provided by the Center for Disease Control National Center for Health Statistics, life expectancy in America is at a record high of 77.9 years. The dire predictions we’ve heard about today’s kids being so fat that they will be the first generation to have a shorter life span than their parents isn’t supported by facts.
The CDC’s report makes it quite clear that every year children are living longer and are healthier than ever before, and the “early death by fat” and “unhealthy kids” predictions are nonsense.
Here are some highlights of the CDC’s report.
- Life span has increased dramatically
- The mortality rate (deaths per thousand) is half of what it was 60 years ago when there were 15.3 deaths per thousand, versus the current rate of 8
- For the first time ever life expectancy of black males is 70 years
- Three out of every four deaths occur in the elderly
- The most common cause of death among people 15-44 years are from accidents, mostly thanks to motor vehicles
- Under 24 years of age the second leading cause of death is homicide
- When researchers controlled for homicides and accidents, the United States has the highest life expectancy in the world
This report also revealed a decrease in deaths from the traditional common killers by the following percentages.
- Heart disease 4.7%
- Cancer 1.8%
- Strokes 4.6%
- Diabetes 3.9%
- Influenza and pneumonia 8.4%
- Hypertension and hypertensive renal disease 2.7%
- In all 12 of the 15 main causes for death either went down or remained steady
In a related study the Vital Health Statistics of 2008 found that 90% of Americans said they were in good to excellent health, which is a 2% increase from the prior year.
The predictions of public health officials, complete with the sky is falling rhetoric, are demonstrably false. Fat isn’t the enemy, Americans aren’t dying young, disease isn’t rampant and kids aren’t on an expressway to an early death.
