Last week, I did a short series on skinny fatness and scale weight obsession. Since those articles were fairly well received and spawned quite a few email questions, I’ve decided to explain another major reason diets fail: calorie blindness.
Calorie blindness is the condition where people exclusively base their weight loss efforts on a strict accounting of the number of calories they consume compared to the number of calories they burn through exercise.
You can easily spot someone who is calorie blind by their exclamations of “I only eat ___ amount of calories and whenever I exercise I burn at least ____ calories. I should be losing weight but the scale never moves! What am I doing wrong?”
What is wrong is that these individuals are listening to the countless fitness experts, doctors and dietitians who base the bulk of their diet advice around two fundamental constructs of fat loss math:
* 1 lbs of fat = 3500 kcal
* calories in = calories out
As the theory goes, as long as you create a 3500 kcal deficit each week, you will lose 1 lbs of fat. Yet ask anyone who has tried this approach how effective it is… to put it kindly: not very.
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For reasons that are only partially driven by biology, humans place a strong emphasis on physical appearance. I have no problem with this as I too enjoy looking fit. Unfortunately, our society has developed a real sense of entitlement that everyone should just automatically look good.
This is a line of thinking I’ve never really understood.
We don’t expect to become a doctor without going through med school or anticipate becoming rich if our career aspirations start and end with serving fries at McDonalds.
Yet, somehow, people have decided that it’s appropriate to yearn for a 6-pack, but are unwilling to accept the reality that without many hours of physical activity each week and careful attention to their diet, it probably isn’t going to happen.
As 8-time Mr. Olympia bodybuilding champion Ronnie Coleman is fond of saying,
“Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder but nobody wants to lift no heavy ass weights”
In other words, we often want great things, but are unwilling to invest the time and energy required to make those dreams a reality.
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Yesterday, I highlighted three major diet and exercise mistakes that contribute to the preponderance of skinny fat females:
1. An over-reliance on low-intensity physical activities.
2. Terrible exercise selection when they do resistance train.
3. Eating too many highly processed “diet” foods.
Unfortunately, simply acknowledging these behaviours as problematic isn’t enough. We need to dig deeper and tackle the root cause of skinny fatness: the fact that females seem to use body weight as the primary determinant of body image.
So sit down, grab a coffee and let’s begin.
Ideal Body Weight = Irrationality 101
Look, I hate to be the one to have to break it to these ladies, but most of them have a totally unrealistic conception of an ideal body weight. Not that I blame them, they’ve been fed a whole lot of half-truths their entire lives. But the only way most females could achieve their theoretical “ideal body weight” would be to:
* diet in such a fashion so as to lose prodigious amounts of muscle mass
* perform ample amounts of cardiovascular exercise to make sure that muscle mass never returned
Now I say that a bit tongue-in-cheek, but sadly must acknowledge that these “weight loss” strategies are still the dominant ones being preached today. And it boggles the mind!
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