Speaking of struggling... How awesome is this?!?! I’ve known countless personal trainers who stay thin on a diet of chocolate, donuts, and alcohol. And if I had a dollar for every overweight, frustrated trainee who actually was doing what they were told, and was still making no headway, I’d be a wealthy man. It doesn’t make sense. Yet we still believe the rules and ignore the countless exceptions, spouting platitudes like ‘the exception proves the rule’. What does that even mean? And how is it supposed to be helpful? Basically, if you don’t struggle with this stuff, my blog isn’t really for you. But if you are struggling and confused, I hope I can add some helpful perspective to all the prejudice-infused garbage out there. It’s so hard to know who to believe. When we in the health and fitness industry interpret scientific papers to the broader community, we who have varying scientific knowledge to begin with and our own agendas anyway, it’s easy to misrepresent (intentionally or not) the findings of certain studies... Studies which might only have been undertaken to try to discredit someone else, anyway. What results is confusion and fear, and people start to make food choices contrary to what their intuition (note: not their whimsy) is telling them. This can be problematic in so many ways.
5 Comments
This is a follow-up post about insulin resistance, obesity and diabetes. You can read the first part here. In the interest of being clear, and not over-simplifying the matter: being obese won’t give you diabetes; there’s a mechanism to it and many interrelating factors. We are sold fat-fear and propaganda in the name of health, but what’s actually good for you, what’s practical and achievable is a little bit different.
Although obesity doesn’t cause diabetes directly, the association with insulin resistance and obesity needs to be addressed, which is where it gets both tricky and interesting. When it comes to insulin resistance – in and of itself – that’s not enough to give you diabetes. And even if you are insulin resistant and obese, that doesn’t mean you can’t do anything about it, because exercise – almost any sort of exercise – dramatically increases your insulin sensitivity, even if it does not result in any weight-loss whatsoever. Why, when we start to exercise, do we think that the ‘exercise isn’t working’ if we ‘fail’ to lose weight? So what if you aren’t getting smaller? The question I’m asking is whether or not that matters, and if so, how much? Years gone by: in need of a shave... Today I bought myself a new brand of after-shave balm, which I've never tried before but which smells both lovely and manly, and has no artificial preservatives, products derived from mineral oils, or tests performed on animals. I also purchased a face and body scrub, again with a pleasant, slightly woody, man-who-takes-care-of-his-skin type of smell, and finally some razors. The razors I've used before. Despite the fact that I've only used the face-scrub so far (and my face is feeling lovely, by the way), I feel very good about doing something a little bit indulgent for my skin and therefore my health. Actually, it isn't really indulgent, it's pretty standard really. But it still makes me feel a bit warmer inside, like I'm pampering myself a bit. I've let my face-scrubbing practices fall by the wayside for far too long! It feels nice to do something simple and good for myself. Big and strong. It's not just a saying. An internet search for fat acceptance will yield a lot of good reading, and a whole pile of hate-filled results. People ask if it’s really possible to be healthy and fat, but in my current slightly cynical frame of mind, I find myself asking if it’s possible to be healthy and thin? Thinness is not a protection against disease, and fatness does not seal your doom. Fitness trumps body size every time and I've often seen fat acceptance blamed for increased mortality - in relation to deaths that weren't even caused by being fat in the first place. So what gives? Obesity is popularly associated with all kinds of diseases, particularly diabetes, but let’s take a look at the mechanisms for a moment: Type one diabetes is an autoimmune condition. Your immune system malfunctions, and your body mistakenly identifies certain pancreatic cells as foreign matter and starts to attack them. After this onslaught, the pancreas is no longer capable of producing insulin, so injections of insulin are therefore required. I believe that we have an innate ‘liking’ for the things that are good for us. But I think it gets conditioned out of us by health experts and media who would have us believe that because we eat ‘bad’ foods we are therefore ‘bad’ people. That the fat on our body should make us feel ashamed. Sooner or later, we start to despise the things that are good for us, not because they are good for us, but because we are all secretly rebellious at heart and respond really badly to being told how to live our lives.
Have you ever watched Supersize Me, and then had a crazy, irrational craving for junk food? This is as much an expression of our rebelliousness and independence as it is an expression of anything else, and having cravings for junk food is not actually a sign of weakness. In the context of training, and in particular discovering the childlike joy of movement, what does that mean? If you hate exercise, is it because you don’t like being told what to do and how to live your life by sanctimonious hypocrites (such as myself!)? Do you hate gyms because you don’t want to feel like you’re trapped in a structure of ‘what you should be doing’ for the rest of your life? Or is it really the barbells and treadmills that you don’t like? |