7 Unpopular Fitness Truths Explained
7 Unpopular Fitness Truths Explained
Ever wonder if this things are true or not?
Just because you don’t like or believe something doesn’t mean it’s not true.
This is especially true when it comes to fitness and nutrition.
And with all of the misinformation and wives tales that run rampant in the space, it can be hard to know what’s true and what’s fake news.
In this article I’m going to explain 7 Unpopular Fitness Truths.
Here are the topics:
1 - You don’t have to “go nuts” on junk food to easily gain a few pounds of fat every year.
2 - Getting your steps in and “being active” is not a good substitute for doing actual workouts.
3 - The body changes that most people expect from running, biking, rowing, swimming, yoga, pilates, and other group classes only come from lifting weights.
4 - Stretching a muscle that hurts or “feels tight” doesn’t usually help the matter.
5 - As far as weight gain or loss…When you eat only matters to the point that it affects how much you eat.
6 - Low-carb diets are no more effective for weight loss than other interventions.
7 - Stress and hormones control fat gain or loss only to the point that they affect appetite and psychologically driven eating.
Ok, let’s get straight into #1!
1 - You don’t have to “go nuts” on junk food to easily gain a few pounds of fat every year.
The average adult gains unwanted weight every year. Typically 1-3lbs. #sad
The average person also lives an average life, and eats an average diet. That’s what average means, ya know?
So, if you fit the bill of “not too bad”, but “not super good”, you can pretty much know what to expect.
But even people who do “eat pretty good” (whatever that means), can easily find themselves slowly sliding up the pants size scale as the years go on.
There are two main things that make this happen.
#1 - We don’t understand the impact that eating highly processed foods, and food from restaurants has on weight gain.
It really only takes a surplus of about 3,500 calories to gain a pound of fat.
Spoiler Alert: Going “a little off track” on a holiday weekend could easily account for 3000-5000 calories without “going crazy”, or blacking out at an all-you-can-eat buffet.
An entree of a bacon cheeseburger, fries, and an IPA at a restaurant, followed up with a scoop of vanilla could easily be over 2,000 calories, and that’s just 1 normal meal, not a binge session by any measure.
Maybe you’re thinking: “I already know that a hamburger and fries aren’t good!”
But did you know that a “healthy” salad from Panera might have as many calories as 3 slices of pepperoni?
Or that a “healthy” Acai bowl might be the nutritional equivalent of fried chicken?
This misunderstanding is totally frustrating.
It leads to the feeling of: “I didn’t go crazy, I don’t understand why I gained weight”.
You’re right! You didn’t go crazy!
The inconvenient truth is that most food from restaurants (even the healthy options), have a ton of calories that can make you slowly gain weight over time.
When you add in holidays, vacations, and other normal shenanigans, it’s the recipe for a creeping waistline, if you don’t understand how to offset those extra calories.
The next reason you don’t have to “go nuts” to gain a few pounds of fat every year…
#2 - You move less every year
The saying goes “Your metabolism doesn’t slow down, you do.”
Your natural tendency as you get older is to be more sedentary. More time working behind your computer, and unwinding in your armchair than going out for a walk.
You hire a lawn service instead of doing it yourself. You order stuff online instead of walking around the store.
All of that decreased activity lowers your calorie burn, making those “not so crazy” calorie indulgences more likely to lead to weight gain.
Ok, on to the next unpopular truth…
2 - Getting your steps in and “being active” is not a good substitute for doing actual workouts.
“I couldn’t make it to the gym, but I was pretty active around the house this weekend.”
“This week was a bust on training, but I got my steps in most days.”
Being active, and getting 7-10k steps every day is amazing. It’s one of the 17 Elements of a Stress-Free Fitness Lifestyle that we promote.
But make no mistake about it…Getting steps, working in the yard, doing chores, and being active is not a replacement for doing your workouts.
Every once in a while isn’t a big deal… But if you find yourself slipping into the habit of swapping activity for actually working out, you’re strength, muscle mass, and cardio capacity will suffer.
Remember, the reason that training makes us stronger, fitter, and more muscular is because of the stress that we apply through our workouts. Not enough stress = no improvement, or even regression.
A good sign that you’re swapping activity for training too often is if you’re seeing unwanted changes changes in body composition. More fluff, less buff.
Get back to actual training friend.
#3 - The body changes that most people expect from running, biking, rowing, swimming, yoga, pilates, and other group classes only come from lifting weights.
We’ve talked extensively about this on our podcast. Here’s the deal…
When it comes to improving your physique, just about everyone wants their own version of the same thing.
To have somewhat defined, toned, visible muscles…
And to actually look like they work out.
They don’t want to be massive, and they don’t want to be skinny-fat.
THAT look (having defined, visible muscles) has a recipe you must follow if you want to get it.
You have to build the muscles that you want to see, and then you have to lose the fat that’s covering them to reveal their definition.
It really is that simple.
However, most people that want to change their physique, skip the building part and go straight to the burning.
They do more cardio and eat less food.
They do yoga, pilates, and boot camps full of high-intensity bodyweight reps.
And while all types of exercise can be beneficial, there is truly only one type of exercise that builds muscle.
Strength training.
Lifting weights while following a program that includes progressive overload is the only stimulus that will cause your muscles to develop in any meaningful way. Hard stop, end of story.
Again, I’m not talking about becoming a juiced-up bodybuilder. I’m talking about seeing the outline of your triceps in a tank top next summer.
I think one common reason people get this wrong is because they see the physique of the instructor leading these classes, and assume that they got them doing the same thing they’re teaching.
I can assure you, if the man or woman leading your Peloton class has a nice body, they built it with the barbell, not only on the bike.
You can learn everything you need to know about this topic in the blog article below.
Moving on!
#4 - Stretching a muscle that hurts or “feels tight” doesn’t usually help the matter.
Muscle strains, tweaks, and injuries stink, but they happen.
Shoot, I’ve woken up several times with a tight neck for no reason at all.
When we’re hurt, we want two things.
1 - To know what happened so that it doesn’t happen again.
2 - For the pain and tightness to go away ASAP.
As far as knowing what happened, sometimes you will, and sometimes won’t. Life be like that sometimes.
And in an effort to make it go away, we often jump to the modality of stretching it out, when that might, in fact, be ineffective, or even counterproductive.
If you think about it logically, a muscle strain is an injury of overexertion. The fibers of the muscle have been pushed too far, and they need to heal.
To do that, we need 3 main things. Motion, blood flow, and time.
But the kind of motion we need is normal, not extreme. Pushing a strained or sore muscle to its limits isn’t helping.
Find motions that mimic the natural range of motion of the affected area, and do them as fully as you can, without increasing pain.
It’s time much better spent than stretching.
If you’re someone with chronically “tight'“ muscles, consider stretching them using weights.
What I mean is, that you’ll gain more lasting flexibility in your hamstrings by doing Dumbbell RDL’s than you will by doing seated toe touches.
And if you’re someone with a chronically tight neck and upper back, you might consider doing an audit of your computer station, and the posture you take when looking at your phone.
Strengthening your upper back with exercises like face pulls, band pull aparts, and rows are great but…
There’s no neck stretch that will counteract 8-10 hours of slumping forward with your head down.
#5 - As far as weight gain or loss… When you eat only matters to the point that it affects how much you eat.
I have to admit it. There was a time that I didn’t understand, and therefore believe this.
I used to think that if you ate food (especially something “bad”), and then you were inactive, (like when you go to sleep), you wouldn’t burn any of those calories, and they would be stored as body fat.
So following that logic, you shouldn’t eat past a certain time of day, otherwise, you’ll just end up gaining weight.
Maybe you’ve believed that in the past or you still do today.
Well, you can take a big sigh of relief, and push your dinnertime back to 8:00 PM like the French without worrying about it leading to weight gain.
The truth is that weight/fat gain happens over a much longer term than what happens overnight while you’re sleeping.
Your body is constantly shuttling glucose, fat, and other nutrients through your blood and in and out of your fat cells to meet your energy (calorie) needs.
The truth is, “activity” is a very small part of the daily calories you burn, known as your “Total Daily Energy Expenditure”, or TDEE.
Most of the food you eat is burned off just by doing things like breathing, digesting, and circulating your blood. You do all of the above even when you’re sleeping.
Check out the graphic below:
Maybe you’re thinking “Yeah but I always weigh more the next day when I eat late at night!”
Well, yeah… Of course!
The weight of that food is still with you in your stomach and intestines. But that doesn’t mean you have gained any fat.
Fat gain or loss isn’t determined by food timing. It’s controlled over the longer-term balance between how much you eat (measured in calories) and how much energy you expend. We call it “energy balance”.
Here’s another amazing graphic that Blakley made:
We teach our nutrition coaching clients that when they eat doesn’t matter, so long as their choices support their goals.
Which brings me to a point I need to bring up.
When was the last time you scarfed down 5 Honeycrisp apples while watching The Food Network in the dark?
How often do you wake up stressed in the middle of the night and polish off an entire bag of spinach?
I’m guessing never.
The thing about nighttime eating is that you tend to gravitate toward cookies, ice cream, crackers, cereal, chips, candied popcorn…
And when you do, it’s easy to eat more than we should. And unfortunately, the calories in those tasty late-night treats throw off the energy balance equation while placing the blame on the time that they were eaten.
Giving yourself a time cutoff for eating each day can be helpful if this is something you struggle with.
It’s also important not to make these foods completely “off limits”. You’ll end up building up so much anticipation and desire for them that you’ll eat way too much of them when you finally give in (everyone does).
You’ll think you need to “get it out of your system”, and then get back on track later, which never actually works.
We teach our clients to allow themselves to make all foods part of their overall diet, including the stuff you might think would be off-limits.
Next on the list:
#6 - Low-carb diets are no more effective for weight loss than other interventions.
Oh yeah, this is a big one.
I can take this truth two different ways. The sciencey route, or the logical route.
I’ll try a mix of both.
If you like cold, hard research… It’s been done to death on this topic:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19246357/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19246357/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21058203/
And my personal favorite… A randomized control trial with 481 participants concluded that cutting carbs was no more successful for weight loss (and keeping it off) so long as calories and protein are kept the same. https://examine.com/articles/low-fat-vs-low-carb-for-weight-loss/
Let’s get logical and figure out why this might be the case.
In the first couple of weeks of a low-carb diet you lose a lot of weight. This makes you think you are crushing life and losing fat hand over fist.
Low carb for life!
But that honeymoon period of rapid weight loss is almost exclusively made up of your body depleting itself of a bunch of water weight.
The word “carbohydrate” pretty much tells the story. Every gram of carbohydrate stored in your muscles and liver binds with a few grams of water too. Notice that I didn’t say fat, I said water.
So as you drop water, you drop weight, but not necessarily fat.
Remember 2 minutes ago when you learned what causes fat loss?
Energy Balance.
You could eat a diet made up entirely of carbs and lose weight so long as your total calories are in check.
In fact, a crazy professor of nutrition in Kansas lost 27lbs in 2 months eating carb-filled Twinkies and Little Debbies. How so? He made sure he was in a negative energy balance by eating only 1800 calories per day.
I 100% would not recommend stocking up on Twinkies for weight loss. But I’m here to tell you that you don’t have to eliminate carbs to lose weight.
In fact, if all you do to lose weight is cut out all of the carbs… What do you think is going to happen when you can no longer rest the smell of fresh, homemade flour tortillas?
You’re going to gain all of the weight back.
If it’s not something you can see yourself doing for the foreseeable future, you’d be better off hooking up with a qualified coach who can help you figure out a more sustainable approach to reaching your goals.
If you’re someone like us and our clients, you also have physique and performance goals. Guess what powers the type of training that we do? Carbs. Plenty of carbs.
This final one is quite misunderstood and possibly even controversial:
#7 - Stress and hormones control fat gain or loss only to the point that they affect appetite and psychologically driven eating.
Stress and hormones are like an annoying younger sibling.
One minute they’re sweet, and the next they’re unpredictable, crazy, and make you want to put them in a chokehold.
Sometimes it seems like they’re acting up JUST to make us react to them.
Or maybe this is a terrible analogy, and I was the only younger brother who would intentionally push his sister’s buttons to get her to do something that would get her in trouble.
The main hormones that get talked about in the context of health and fitness are testosterone, estrogen, and cortisol.
If you know quite a bit about the subject of nutrition and fat loss, you might throw leptin and ghrelin in the mix. They’re the hormones that regulate your appetite.
I don’t claim to be an expert on hormones, but I know enough to understand the mechanisms by which they affect metabolism and fat storage/oxidation.
The main misunderstanding regarding hormones is that we give them too much credit for how they make us gain weight, or prevent us from losing weight.
As an evil younger brother I would purposely get up in my sister’s face making gross noises, setting the stage for her to want to smack me.
I didn’t make her smack me, but I sure made it easy for her to do it!
If she acted on the desire to let me have it, she’d be in trouble. If somehow she resisted the urge, I’d move on, find someone else to annoy, and she’d stay in good standing with our parents.
Stress and hormones can act as professional stage setters for the actions that cause weight gain, and they can certainly make you wanna smack somebody.
If your adrenals flood you with cortisol after a stressful meeting with your boss, you don’t gain weight.
But if that stress makes you decide to eat 6 of the Crumbl cookies in the break room, you will.
If your estrogen is all out of whack because you’re going through perimenopause, you’ll be sitting front row on an emotional roller coaster that will tempt you to skip the gym and find comfort in food and Netflix.
But your fluctuating hormones have no power to make you gain fat without actually eating the food or skipping the workout.
Men, did you get your T levels checked only to find out that they’re in the tank? That might explain your lackluster energy levels and zero motivation to grab the barbell.
But again, on its own, the hormones can’t take all of the blame.
Hormones don’t cause action directly.
Work, financial, relationship, and life stress make fitness harder because they make taking consistent positive and healthy actions harder.
Stress crushes your sleep, which makes you extra hungry.
Stress makes you want to curl up on the couch instead of curling dumbbells
Stress makes you want to eat and drink a pint to cope.
But stress doesn’t cause you to gain fat without you taking action on it.
Hormones affect your mood, your motivation, your energy, your appetite, the way you physically feel, and to some degree where you store body fat.
But beyond a little retained water weight that isn’t fat, they don’t have the power to stop you from losing weight and becoming the healthiest you yet.
They can sure make it more challenging, but the actions you choose to take are still in your control.
At the end of the day, you get to choose what to do with this information.
One choice is to take the role of the victim in your story.
The victim is powerless and suffers the fate of whatever circumstances in life have aligned to hold them back.
The victim never transforms.
I’d recommend taking on the role of the hero in your story.
The hero accepts the challenges stacked against them and focuses on a way to win in spite of them.
The hero takes massive ownership over the choices that affect their outcomes instead of blaming external forces for their lack of results.
I hope you choose wisely.
If you need support, and a common sense plan to get in shape, please hit the button below today, and let’s talk. CLick the button below to apply for coaching today.
Jonathan