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.
With every new revelation about what is part of the proposed government health care program it becomes more obvious that government’s involvement in health care is a bad idea.
Set aside your rooting interest for a moment – it doesn’t matter if you are a democrat, republican or independent – the government cannot, and does not, do a better job than the private sector of providing goods and services. The US Postal Service is a great example of this.
The “Post Office” was a monopoly for generations – and had a huge head start over the private sector – yet cannot efficiently and effectively deliver packages and mail. If Federal Express and other private entities weren’t prevented by law from delivering mail, the government would have been out of the mail game long ago.
Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are a mess. If you’ve ever had to deal with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) you can’t be too thrilled with the prospects of having a government worker hold sway over your health care program. The IRS and state tax collection systems are a mess.
We all know what a debacle the feds made of the mortgage business and have heard the stories of waste, mismanagement and inefficiency in federal agencies in Washington, D.C. down to local municipalities. Many states have let private enterprise take over formerly state run endeavors, such as the division of motor vehicles, precisely because the state had made a mess of things.
If you doubt this inherent inefficiency, how else do you explain the current administration’s promise – as part of their push to pass health care reform – to get rid of billions of dollars in fraud and waste from the current Medicare and Medicaid systems? Why can’t the feds fix these problems independent of passage of new health care legislation?
The answer is, “They can’t.”
There’s word that the federal government will put pressure on individuals to lose weight, stop smoking and adopt other purported healthy habits. If we head down this slippery slope we will to lose other freedoms. The government will no doubt rely on the discredited philosophy that fat and weight are culprits to be dealt with. In turn people will pursue unhealthy options in order to lose weight. What possible way could the government reliably enforce such regulations?
The answer is, “They can’t.”
The “science” driving the “fat-is-evil” movement is as unproven and reliable as the “science” that has given us global warming. This is nothing upon which to base, and make, policy. And there’s no reason to subject hundreds of millions of Americans to a new iteration of a failed experiment, state run health care.
Oh, and if the government really thinks smoking is killing people they should ban tobacco, not just attach exorbitant taxes to it.
Government inefficiency and wastefulness doesn’t discriminate and people of all political persuasions get less– and pay more – when government is involved.
