FitnessFixation.com

Did y’all catch the New York Times article on how long it takes to see significant physical changes through diet and exercise? Because there’s lots of equipment and gadgets and programs and gyms and trainers out there who promise that in six or eight short weeks, you too can remake your body completely. I mean, just follow the simple, fun, and effective steps outlined and watch the pounds melt away and the muscles emerge until you look so goddamn good, you’ll be a physical specimen to behold, right? Right?

Um, fuck no.

Well, how about maybe you can. It really depends. You might be a genetic outlier, one of those people who sees instant results when you engage in some physical activity. Or perhaps you will follow a program that has such a drastic regimen, you’ll immediately drop weight like nobody’s business. (Keep it off? Um, that’s another story.) Or maybe you’ll develop a big old meth habit or get a nasty disease and not eat for a week and that will make you skinny. Oh please, let me get a parasitic worm from that local watering hole so I can be thin! I mean, it could all happen.

But if you check the NY Times and you believe it, you’ll find that for most folks, you’d be better off thinking six months to a year for big changes. And that was the result when people followed specialized programs. Um, yeah.

And this friends, is why when people start training with me and they say, “I have such-and-such event in a month and a half—will I be near my goal of losing x pounds and looking awesome by then?” or “How long will it take for me to be where I want to be?” I say, “yeah, I dunno, but I wouldn’t bet the farm on some big short-term change.” And I say, “you should probably think in three-month increments, and by that I mean you’ll likely feel different in three months, and then wait at least another three before you start assessing your body, but really, this shit is for the long haul.” (It also takes about three months to get fully acclimated to my frequent use of profanity as well.) I am the hope-giver, eh? But I’m just not going to promise something like that and put anyone on a 1400 calorie diet and then make them think they failed if they can’t do what I frankly wouldn’t do myself and what I wouldn’t risk for anyone, considering what it could possibly do to long-term health. I give the best workouts I can, and I hope people will develop affection for this exercise stuff in a love-hate way, and I always secretly hope people will find their inner badass and be better for it, but I’m plumb out of pipe dreams, I smoked them all myself when I was in college and spilled the skunk water on the carpet, and I’ll be damned if I never did get the smell out, it was easier just to move into a new place.

“But wait!” you say. (Just say it so I can keep writing, even though you know better, be the disembodied voice for me, pretty please.) “I know someone who lost 20 pounds in two weeks/ I had instant success before on x program/ The infomercial promised it would work in six weeks with a money-back guarantee. What about that, huh?” Ya. We are all individuals, and some people get faster results for a whole mess of reasons (lots of them become trainers and assume the same will happen for everyone, it can be a biased sample) with a whole range of programs at varying points of time in their lives, and I could go into why but do you care what works for one person or worked at one time unless that person is you and it’s right now? (By the way, it might just take you six weeks to read that run-on sentence, and it’ll burn maybe three calories, so go crazy and eat one and a half sugar-free breath mints, you just earned them!)

I know this is supposed to be devastating news and all, because we like immediate results, myself included. I’m very big on instant gratification, cough. And the prospect of a whole year of eating a stringent diet and exercising vigorously sounds so baaaad, it’s reason enough to not even start.

Well, except for one thing: You did, um, want to maintain that badass new body, right? (I do, I do!) Because for that, you’d be looking at maybe, well, oh, perhaps a lifetime of this stuff. And once you are a year into a program, there’s a good chance you’ve made it a habit and a big part of your life. So the payoff comes right around when you can probably realistically expect to maintain it too, as long as there’s no major changes or turnarounds. Hey, is that a silver fucking lining or what?

As for the diet piece, I do believe I’ve been pretty out with my feeling that food is one of life’s great pleasures and if there’s not enough happy in your diet, your diet might just be shit. (And your happy might be different from my happy, which is covered in frosting and really moist and tasty and I’m not being porno.) Sure, too much happy is always problematic (as a personality trait it’s just annoying) but god, there has to be something to love in there, and I don’t mean “I love how totally disciplined and righteous I feel” because that’s pretend-happy, the kind that means we could use your ass as a coal-to-diamond factory. I know that pretend-happy, and I was sickly and producing diamonds in the hollow where my ass used to be. Is this getting to vague and weird? It’s just that life is too short (too short, too short) to be any more stringent than you absolutely must be. I’m a big believer in doing the minimum you can get away with in diet and working out like a fiend and just relaxing so the coal gently drops to the ground while you enjoy your beautiful, badass life.

Good god, it’s like I work in a coal mine. Take it or leave it, it’s what works for you.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 29th, 2009 at 11:37 pm and is filed under blah blah, body building, cake, exercise, expert advice, healthy crap, linkorama, love, news and research, nutrition, sanity, sports, stress, weight. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.