I wanted to share with you an essay I wrote four years ago in college. I was just embarking on my interest in fitness. I had fallen in love with it after meeting a friend at college in an English class who introduced me to the idea of kinesiology. She is one of the most pivotal people in my life, she honestly changed my course forever. I thank God for her!
I wrote this essay to show why clean eating and working out were the answer and that there were NO shortcuts. Little did I know a few years later I would be working every day to inspire people to follow in that path.
22 April 2013
Fitness Is Simple, Really!
The
idea of being fit does not have a date or era to which we could pinpoint its
beginning. It could have started with the Greek Olympics, Roman Gladiators,
Chinese warriors, the Egyptian warriors or maybe the Vikings. One thing we can
know for sure is man has tried everything under the sun to achieve that
muscular physique. People have tried fasting, eating all meat, eating no meat,
swimming across oceans, and drugs. In all honesty, the idea of fitness must
have been around forever. The Greek Olympics seemed to portray the desire for
the muscular physique extremely well, considering they were completely naked. Michelangelo’s
David portrayed him in a muscular and attractive way. As time has past and the
way in which we do things has completely changed, we have lost every natural
healthy component in living. In ancient times, everyone ate natural food and
everything they did included movement and exercise. In present times, we rarely
eat healthy or exercise without trying. We acquired an attitude of I want to
pay people to do things for me. With that attitude we will not be doing work
and therefore will not be moving as much as we should. But which one of those
aspects gives a person a muscular physique, Healthy food or exercise? The
answer is a balance between both.
Many
people are famous for achieving muscular physiques such as Savannah Rose Neveux.
She is
commonly known through her blog as Muffin-Topless and is praised for turning
her life around. She claims to eat clean and exercise regularly. She blogs,
tweets, and video blogs quite regularly and in following her she tells her
readers about her amazing transformation.
One day, she woke up with a horrible hangover. She describes it as, “My
skin was tingling from dehydration, my head throbbed, the light from my window
seared my eyes, and the rolls of my beer gut squished together.” She realized
in that moment that she could not let her life continue on in this manner. She
got up and threw away junk food and alcohol. She joined a local gym. Then, she
started researching bodybuilding, nutrition, supplementation and fitness
topics. It took her many months of clean eating and weight training to bring about
her amazing transformation and impressive weight loss. She worked long and hard
to become fit. Then, the next year of college she stopped working out and
eating clean. She then, gained back the weight, because of her lack of healthy
living and her large amount of partying (Neveux).
During her senior year of college she “got real” (Neveux). She stopped
drinking and began eating clean again and doing a bodybuilding workout plan
(Neveux). She quickly saw changes in her physique and her parents were shocked
when she returned home (Neveux). Shortly after that she had her first fitness
shoot (Neveux). Now she is a popular blogger and an Instagram inspiration to
many people.
Savannah
Neveux’s experiences have changed many people’s lives. Everywhere we look, we
can find proof that fitness is a balance between eating clean and exercising. Such
as Weight Watchers, they recently changed their program to diet and exercise
instead of dieting alone. It is called Weight Watchers 360. Yet, it is quite
common to run into someone who only does one or the other and expects grand
results. No big industries have conducted a poll on this topic of what people
think, but a small website called Gamespot has. It proposed the question, “Diet
vs Exercise, which is better and more satisfying.” Twenty-four percent said
dieting is better and seventy-six said exercise is better (Gamespot). Very few
of the comments said both. It is true that a very small amount of people were surveyed.
Most people who answered this survey are people who seek them out, and who in
turn live on the internet. With that in mind, if very few of them know a
combination of diet and exercise is needed; what does the rest of the world
think?
Ever since the fitness frenzy
started, diets have been the number one answer. Popular diets include, but are
not limited to: The Chew-Chew Diet, Tapeworms, Weight Gain Tablets, Smoking,
The Master Cleanse, Relax-A-Cizor, and The Cookie Diet. The Chew-Chew Diet made
the dieter chew every bite thirty-two times. Nancy Redd in her book Diet Drama
describes this as “torture” (172). The tapeworm diet called the dieter to take
the tapeworm as a pill and then expel it by the mouth (Redd 172). Any logical
person knows that is crazy. The smoking diet came out in the 20s, which is no
surprise. The roaring twenties were a time of heavy smoking, so why not tell
consumers it will help them lose weight? Freedman and Barnouin give readers
their two cents on smoking in their book Skinny
Bitch. They say, “You cannot keep
eating the same…[unhealthy food] and expect to get skinny. Or smoke. So don’t
even try some pathetic excuse like, ‘But if I quit smoking, I’ll gain weight.’
No one wants to hear it. Cigarettes are for losers… Not only do they screw up
your whole body chemistry, but they also kill your taste buds” (11-12). Then,
the cookie diet no logical person would believe that eating cookies all day
would help anyone lose weight. But the diet is still very popular; someone
needs to tell them the little secret that fitness is a balance between eating
clean and exercise.
For
example, Sandra Woodruff is a low-carb enthusiast and dietitian; she believes
that a diet will fix everyone’s weight problems. She wrote the book Secrets of Good-Carb Living. In her
book, she gives the origins of the Low-Carb Diet. She starts her theory by
stating that 40,000 years ago no one ate carbohydrates (Woodruff 4). The Bible
disproves the fact that the world is 40,000 years old and very early on in the
Bible they start eating bread. In Genesis chapter fourteen, at the beginning of
the Bible they mention bread for the first time. Then, she lists all the
possible side effects if the dieter misunderstands the diet and does it the
wrong way. She holds a very tight leash, which proves that it is easier to simply
live a healthy lifestyle and not have to worry about carbohydrates. On the
other hand, Tosca Reno, who used to participate in physique competitions, makes
losing weight exciting in her book The
Eat-Clean Diet Stripped. She builds her plan on how physique athletes stay
in shape and healthy. She gives recipes, meals plans, and workout plans to help
her readers. Everything about her book screams that a life change needs to take
place.
Reno
calls her diet a “live it” rather than an actual diet (33). Her plan includes vigorous
workouts and clean eating. Clean eating may seem extremely bland, but in
reality it is not. Reno provides recipes like: Fish tacos, Take me on Vacation
Oatmeal, Skinny Soy Mocha, Salmon with Sweet ‘n’ Tangy Pineapple Chutney, Clean
Chocolate Cupcakes, Strawberry Dreamboat Bars, and Kombucha Pina Colada
(Mocktail) (210-297). Reno’s lifestyle
plan is fun and enjoyable.
Diets rather
than a lifestyle change, focus on excluding or limiting a certain food groups.
The low-carb diet does just that. This diet has been disproven by Rory Freedman
and Kim Barnouin, Marlene Wallach, Jessica Smith who quoted Rania
Batayneh, and students at West Virginia University. Freedman and Barnouin point
out that restaurants and soda companies offer options that cater to this diet
(22). Restaurants only change their menu for something big therefore the
low-carb diet must be popular. Oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon make up a
carbohydrate and a carbohydrate is “vital” for giving our bodies energy (Freedman
22-23) Simple carbohydrates are the only semi-bad carbohydrates and they are
only bad when consumed often. It is fine to eat fruit and bread. It is easy to
see that the low-carb diet is “utter nonsense” (Freedman 22).
Marlene Wallach proves that carbohydrates are good.
Carbohydrates are sugars which create energy. Simple carbohydrates are things
like soda, candy and cake (Wallach 62). This group of carbohydrates can be bad.
Complex carbohydrates include food like whole grains, broccoli, beans, and
pasta are good (Wallach 62). Simple carbohydrates give the body quick energy
where as complex carbohydrates give the body long lasting energy (Wallach 62).
The only concept we should grasp about carbohydrates is when to use them. There
is no need to ward them off.
Jessica Smith wrote an article in Shape magazine, in
which she quoted nutritionist Rania Batayneh. In the article Batayneh says,
"Eliminating carbohydrates not only reduces whole grains, B vitamins, and
a good source of fiber, but it also reduces the body’s feel-good capacity (it
is no wonder that most comfort foods are carbohydrate based)” (Batayneh qtd. in
Smith). If someone cannot believe this, consider chocolate covered strawberries
or pineapple dipped in Greek yogurt. How could we dream of removing
carbohydrates when they make us happy? Another fact that is pointed out is that
cutting a food group will make you crave it even more (Smith). Batayneh easily
makes her readers rethink about the low-carb diet.
Lastly, the students at West Virginia University say
that cutting any food is bad. They also say that this myth is based on only a
small group in the family of carbohydrates (West Virginia University). The rest
of the family of carbohydrates includes great fiber. All humans need fiber. There
is no reason to give up a food group because one piece of it can be bad. The
low-carb diet is fake and a complete myth. Go tell the good news! Everyone can
eat carbohydrates again!
On the other side of the
argument of Feder and Woodruff, writers of low-carb diets, might say, “It is
easier to cut something bad out of your diet rather than limiting it.” Yes,
that might seem true at first, but as mentioned earlier cutting foods makes the
human body crave them even more. Diet advocates might also argue that taking
food away from the body is faster than burning it off with exercise. Cutting
hundreds of calories rather than burning 200 seems easy. On the contrary, Reno
says, “When you build lean muscle you increase your metabolic rate and your
fat-burning speed” (196). In other words, exercise will increase fat burning.
Everyone can agree that eating is more enjoyable than working out. So what if
working out more meant eating more? Isn’t that kind of a win-win? Diets might
work in special cases, but there are easier, more enjoyable ways to change your
life.
Some days, it is hard to eat clean and workout. Some
may say why not just be unhealthy it is easy? Tosca Reno puts it like this,
“When you feed your body Clean, nutrient-rich food and create new cells from
superior building materials, you will notice improvements in every area of your
body” (23). Reno focuses on the eating side of living healthy in that quote.
Hobbs shows us how important exercise is by saying, “Exercise is as important
as brushing your teeth… We are all made to move.” (143). Leila Fazel, a former ballet dancer, gives us
all an encouraging tip, “Find something you enjoy doing, something that
challenges you and keeps you growing and that you never get bored with”
(Wallach 43). Even Feder, a low-carb fanatic, gives the top ten excuses why
people won’t start a diet (40-41). He realizes that people do not want to live
fit because it is hard, but a life change is a whole lot better than a short
term diet.
It comes down to two choices. Do you want to
diet for a short time and look okay for a while and then get fatter than before?
Or do you want to eat clean and exercise and experience life like never before?
We can all agree college kids are less likely than anyone to eat healthy, but
the students at University of New Mexico understand the idea of living fit. Christina
J. Paez and Len Kravitz wrote an entire argument on exercise vs. diet, only to
conclude it is a combination of both that is best. The truth is, there is no
easy fix. Eating clean and exercising is hard. Yet, we hear amazing things
about the people who seek a lifestyle change. Some finally get friends, some get
modeling jobs, some get off horrible medications, some get relief from joint
pain, and some even find that their eye color becomes more vibrant all because
of a healthy lifestyle. Life is short. Do not settle for the quick fix like a
diet. Achieve greatness and change your life by eating clean and exercising.
I am so thankful that Beachbody has given us such a great solution. Every program focuses on both good nutrition and working out. It is the perfect combination for results! If you would like to learn more about the monthly accountability groups I host, comment below with your email and I will reach out to you with more info!
