There’s been a lot of talk lately about our overly large local waistlines, but perhaps the mere act of talking about it serves only to reinforce how we got into this spot of trouble in the first place. Maybe we just like to talk a little too much, when in actual fact, the time to act has long since arrived. They say charity begins at home, well so does fat-fighting, which most of us owe unto ourselves, so let’s start touching up our own front façades.
The worse the obesity epidemic gets, the more products and services we see cropping up to cater for the ever-expanding need. The more options we have, however, the worse our waistlines tend to continue to get. The solutions we have right now are failing, and for as long as people are willing to pay good money for weight-loss solutions, there will always be plenty of enterprising souls intent on accepting every last cent of the cash on offer whether the goods they provide work or not.
The profitability of fat-fighting products is indeed part of the problem, causing mass confusion through the sheer amount of conflicting and misleading information required to back up the various different types of magical weight-loss formulae.
The fitness industry must shoulder its share of the blame too, because in reality physical activity alone is not the miracle cure as we might sometimes be led to believe. Indeed, no treatment, pill, potion or programme in isolation can by any stretch of the imagination be considered a miracle cure, and where products claim to be so, then there is all the more reason to be suspicious. Physical activity alone will certainly help, but without the right backup you will quickly find you’re losing more will power than fat.
Whenever a weight-loss solution carries hefty and dramatic promises and seems even a little too good to be true, then beware. Beware of programmes promising results in short periods of time, as they often eventually involve more time and effort spent over the long term than you would have exercised with a little more patience from the outset.
The simplest way to achieve fat loss in practice is to reduce the total amount of food we eat and use more energy on an ongoing basis
Temporary measures lead to temporary results at best, and usually result in water or muscle loss, not fat loss. Treat the term ‘detox’ with caution as well, since such a term carries very little scientific weight and for the most part involves practices that are not backed up by any sort of sound research. You could be in for a lot of suffering and discomfort, as well as outcomes detrimental to your overall and long-term health.
Unfortunately, products that involve the much more realistic ‘lifestyle change’ term are a lot harder to sell, because we might immediately imagine impossibly long periods of time and very boring approaches we surely must have unsuccessfully attempted before. It’s almost like we feel the solution cannot possibly be that simple. It reminds me of a story I recently heard, set in the future at a time when people forgot they needed to water plants with plain old water. Despite all sorts of advanced complex formulations nearly wiping out the world’s entire plant population, people finally realise in the end that the simplest solution was actually the best one.
People store fat for an important evolutionary reason. The ability to store extra energy from a good meal means that going hungry the next day doesn’t have to kill us, because our body will have stored away some of the extra for a rainy day. The only way to safely and healthily remove body fat is to appease this simple survival process. Using up stored energy only happens when we enter what is known as an energy deficit, or negative energy balance. This occurs when the energy we use exceeds the energy we consume.
The simplest way to achieve such fat loss in practice is to reduce the total amount of food we eat and use more energy on an ongoing basis. It sounds overly simple, but you will often find the problems only start when we begin to doubt or misinterpret this elementary fact of nature, and instead follow more bombastic and supposedly advanced formulations. By reducing our calorie intake and switching to healthier foods, we can pepper our day with bouts of simple physical activity to increase our energy expenditure and tap deeper into our energy stores. Squeezing bouts of activity at every opportunity throughout the day can really add up over time and, adding in structured workouts outdoors or in the gym, will tip the balance even further in favour of lasting fat loss, as well as furnish you with a whole host of additional benefits.
So perhaps the most important piece of the puzzle of all is to flex the most powerful muscle we possess, the one between the ears. This is because the only reason why any fat-loss initiative based upon the simple yet sound principle of forcing an energy deficit only fails if you give up on it too soon, before giving it a chance to demonstrate its brutal fat-fighting efficiency.
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