The Most Influential Fitness Tip Influencers Don't Tell You
It's all about your relationship with food and exercise
The bread and butter of the fitness culture today is made up of quick, easy fixes, and weight loss hacks. Everyone wants the fastest and simplest route to reaching their fitness goals. To meet this demand there is a surplus of, more often than not, bull crap advice. “Influencers” will make up crazy workout routines, and prescribe incredibly restrictive diets. People will sell juice that "melt the fat away", and use bro science to push crap advice. Successfully selling them because they are thin or in shape.
As someone who has fallen for weight loss hacks tried extreme dieting and even purchased terrible diet and workout plans. It is frustrating to see people's naivety get taken advantage of, and feed them bad advice.
It's similar to people assuming someone with an expensive car is good with finances. They may be, but you don't know how chaotic their financial habits really are. Maybe that person is a gambler that got lucky. Maybe that person is actually in debt and isn't meeting the payments for the car. Maybe that person just lucked into it. Much like that, people use their bodies to justify their knowledge, when in reality their journey to that body might have been incredibly unhealthy.
This is the shitty truth of the fitness industry, guys and gals who got good bodies in shitty ways, preaching their methods to be right and true. More often than not, they are internally struggling, have a bad relationship with food, and have body image issues. To have long-term success in fitness and in health, the most influential tip is to work on your relationship with food and exercise. Whether you are underweight, or overweight, this plays a role. This is something being talked about more about now, but it is still a minority. Throwing aside all assumptions about which diet is the best, to get results and stay consistent in your health journey; it all begins with your relationship with food and exercise.
The Origin Story
My weight has fluctuated to both extremes of the scale. At times I have been very skinny, at other times much too large. I grew up a pretty skinny kid, but then the weekly trips to taco bell and frozen hash browns eaten by the packet caught up to me. I would eat extra servings of most food. I would stay up late at night, reading harry potter and binge on tubs of Meijer cookies and cream. Food was my best friend, my escape, and my comfort. Near the end of middle school, and starting high school I had turned into a little brown bowling ball. To that point, my weight had been something I was ashamed of, but I never made effort to change it.
Before High School, I had always assumed that I would just “grow into the weight”, so I made no effort to lose it. This all changed on one fateful day in high school. Before band class, I was talking to a girl I thought was cute. I remember saying “Hey (girl), I see you got new glasses..” and without missing a beat a classmate comes up, slaps my gorgeous breasteses, and says “Hey Karan, I see you got new tits”, and walked away. Leaving the girl giggling and me awkwardly frozen, and thinking "...what just happened?" High school is just like that though, can't change it. In hindsight, I can look back at this and chuckle, but at that moment, I was mortified and ready to lose weight.
A Learning Phase
For the next 8 years of high school and college, my weight fluctuated many times. I tried my hand at keto, low carb, paleo, low fat, calorie restriction, the military diet, and countless other things. I would yo-yo from being in shape to being incredibly overweight. I would go into incredibly restrictive diets, fueled by shame, unsurprisingly fail, and end up binging. It was a vicious cycle.
At times, people would ask me what I did, and how I got so skinny? Depending on the diet I was on, I would look back and proudly explain to them the harmful effects of carbs and fats. Elaborate on how you need to work out 2-3 times a day, drink protein shakes, fast for 12 hours, take fat burners, and swear off all foods that won't “help you get skinny”. Brooooo, so stupid!
One of my favorite sources, good ol’ dr. oz. Yeah, I fell for that devil’s crap. One moment, I still remember vividly, is trying out what one of his guests called the “Five Bite diet”. For the diet, you can eat 5 bites of ANYTHING that you want, three times a day. The resulting calorie deficit would lead to weight loss, and since you could eat whatever you wanted, it was therefore sustainable. Yeah it did not work
I got to the point of refusing to eat cake on my birthday. I may have been skinny, but in no way was I fit or healthy. My relationship with food was terrible and would see-saw between extreme dieting to extreme binging with no in-between. For exercise, if I wasn’t working out 2-3 times a day, I would assume I would get fat. Not the move chief.
It wasn’t until this past year and a half that I finally build a good relationship with food and exercise. I went from a Kelly and Ryan relationship to Pam and Jim. (do yourself a favor and watch the office if you don’t get this reference)
What Does A Healthy Relationship Look Like?
To sum it up in one sentence. It is not rooted in shame, and self-loathing. If you are dieting and exercising because you hate yourself. See eating healthy, and working out as punishment, you have a bad relationship with food.
The first step to building this relationship is recognizing that you have a bad one in the first place. Throwing out all concepts of which diet is good or bad. At the end of the day, when you eat what you deem to be "unhealthy", or miss a few workouts. What is your internal dialogue?
If the scale tips more towards the negative side, you need to work on building a better relationship with food and exercise.
The second step is changing your viewpoint. Learn to flip the script. If you go to taco bell one day, rather than feeling guilt or shame, just tell yourself that it’s okay. Think of it as rocket fuel for the next workout, and go back to eating nutritious food. If you miss a few days at the gym, see it as much-needed rest. In the grand scheme of things, missing a few days is not bad.
This takes a lot of practice, and to notice these patterns and work on them, you need to meditate and journal. Notice these thoughts, capture them down on paper and work through them. That is the boring truth behind most successful changes. The relationship has to change.
When you start seeing healthy food as something you enjoy, rather than something you are punishing yourself with, you will eat better more often. When you see exercise as fun, and something that changes your mood for the better, only then will you consistently go to the gym. To figure this out, you need to try diets, and different exercise routines, and this is where you should listen to professionals. People who won’t force you to constrict your diets to only certain food groups. Who understand that failure is a part of the learning experience, and shame should never be in the equation. Here are some of my favorite fitness influencer’s Instagram pages tagged below.
This was definitely a bit more of a serious post, and more chill nerdier ones are coming up. Appreciate you for reading, you glorious bastard.