"Don't diet in a straight line." If you just read that and have no idea what it means, I will explain in a little a bit. But first... Ever wonder why you still see fat manual laborers? Let's pretend you're an office worker. One day you come to the realization that a desk job is just not for you, so you quit and sign up to be a garbageman. Your first day on the new job is brutal. The next morning you wake up and are so sore, you can barely get out of bed. You think about calling in sick, but then you come to your senses and realize you don't want to be fired on your second day so you drag yourself to work anyway...
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In Part 3 of this How Not to Lose Weight series, I talked about how most of your weight loss results will come from your diet as opposed to exercise. This means that you will need to watch what and how much you eat. Some people take this to the extreme and meticulously count calories. In this article, I will talk about whether or not it's worth it to do that. When the general public thinks about losing weight, the idea of putting in time on the treadmill is usually conjured up. In most people's minds, you're not really trying unless you are going to the gym and spending an hour getting sweaty on a human hamster wheel for multiple days a week. But is it enough to make up for overdoing it at a holiday dinner? Or that extra slice of pizza? Is it even necessary? This part will look at what's more important: diet or exercise, and whether all exercises are equal. In Part 1 of the How Not to Lose Weight series, I talked about fad diets and why you need to be careful if you plan to follow one. In this part, I will talk about the difference between losing weight and losing fat and why it's important. There are many different schools of thought out there when it comes to losing weight. The only thing they all agree on is that you need to burn more energy than you take in. So to make that happen should you be doing a low-fat diet? How about low-carb? Or should you stop worrying about all that and just eat less? I don't know for sure one way or the other and I won't pretend to. Nutritional science is constantly changing and part of why is because we don't really understand how our bodies work as much as we'd like to think we do. The human body is a complex system. It's more like a nation's economy than some simple machine where you do this and it does that. So instead of writing a series of articles on how to lose weight, I'm writing one on what not to do. I remember watching some silly dating show on TV many years ago. It was a show where several guys would take turns going on a date with the same girl, one right after the other. If the girl wasn’t feeling the guy, she would say “next!”, he would leave, and the next one would come out. There was this one guy, of average build, who for some reason, thought it would be a good idea to take off his shirt. Right as soon as he came up to the girl to introduce himself, she yelled “next!” When the producers interviewed her afterward, she said… “How can someone be both skinny and fat at the same time?” |
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