What You’re Seeing
Though certainly not a paragon of fitness myself, I’ve followed the subject of fitness with rapt fascination for most of my life — not least in the hope of identifying the mental obstacles to my own fitness aspirations.
I’ve come up with a list of what I think are the three greatest fitness myths — i.e. the ones that hold people back, fitness-wise, the most:
“To be fit, you have to spend hours a day at the fitness center, lifting huge weights and running mini-marathons on the treadmill.”
“To be fit, you must eat large amounts of broccoli, and salad, and soup, and other not-so-satisfying foods, and you’re fooling yourself if you think you can get fit with delicious protein shakes and bars, and chicken sandwiches and steaks.”
“You can blow off your fitness plan on any given day, as your whim dictates. As long as you intend to pick it up again in a day or two, then there won’t be any adverse effects at all. Or if there are any, they will be extremely slight, and almost immediately reversed, probably within a day of jumping back on your program.”
The truth is that to be fit, you need to spend only maybe a half-hour a day, six days a week, at the fitness center. And you don’t need to eat any broccoli or salad if you don’t want to, as long as your diet gets the majority of its calories from protein and complex carbohydrates, and you eat in moderate quantity, and take a regular vitamin supplement.
But — you cannot blow off your program any old day you want to! If you’re really fit (like you want to be) today, and you blow off your program for a day or two, the negative impact, although slight compared to your overall fitness, will take maybe two or three weeks to undo! So if you blow off just a couple days each week, then you will steadily slip away from fitness into a very noticeably less-than-fit state. And if you’re not in-shape today? Then if you blow off a couple days a week, you will never become decidedly fit, as you wish to.
No Voom
Many people, it seems, think of fitness as similar to cleaning your house. You can let your house get messier and messier for days or weeks, then in a whirlwind of cleaning you can straighten it up in one or two days. After that you can kick back and let it get messy again, knowing that you can repeat the procedure as necessary.
Fitness just isn’t like that. You can’t overeat and neglect exercise for days or weeks, then make it up in a one-or-two-day whirlwind of exercise and healthy eating. That’s a recipe for burnout and injury, and it won’t give you the fit physique you want — not even for a day or two.
Consistency
Whenever you see some really fit people, and think, “I’d really like to be fit like them! How do they do it?” Here’s how they do it: Focused, reasonable exercise for 30 to 50 minutes a day. Moderate eating and a high-protein, low-fat diet. And no blowing it off.
When you look at a fit person, you’re looking at consistency. Day after day, week after week, month after month. Just staying on the program perpetually, and refusing to blow it off no matter what. That’s what you’re seeing.
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