Recently in my city there has been a surge of people participating in a brand new MLM company.  I’ve been approached by these types of people many times over the years, and to a number they have all been exposed as companies that are not at all interested in your health, they are interested in your money and taking it from you while promising that you are going to be wealthy and have an amazing life if you just work for them and get all of your family and friends to participate.  I’m not totally against MLM, because some companies are more ethical and provide some really good things, while others simply are a method for some good salespeople to make a quick buck and then move onto the next company they choose to represent.

The most recent one has you taking two shakes a day and then eating a small meal for dinner, and promises that you will lose weight, feel amazing and totally transform yourself – all in only 90 days.  I can digress quickly and ask what these people are supposed to do after the 90 days are up?  Go back to their previous eating habits and lifestyle?  In fact, on some blogs for this company, their representatives actually state that “exercise is NOT required to lose weight on this program”.  To me this is completely ridiculous, and just feeds into the idea that you can have a quick fix and get results (while also parting with about $200 a month) and not have to worry about establishing a long term healthy lifestyle.  Digression over.  I’ll rant about that at the end.

So when I see things advertised like this or hear people talk about it, it makes me cringe, and then it just pisses me off.  95% of the time, these quick fixes do not work, and the poor people who have fallen for a line from a salesperson just lose their money, maybe some water weight and then gain it all back plus a bit more.  I have dozens of examples both personal and professional of people losing weight rapidly and then gaining it back just as rapidly (if not faster) plus a few reinforcements just in case that ever happens again.  I’m sure you have too.  One of my clients recently told me of a friend who actually did the Bernstein diet – three times!?  And now her body is still obese because she gained more weight back each time and as an added bonus her kidneys and digestive system are constantly in turmoil and discomfort.  Go figure.

Here is the funny thing about your body.  It doesn’t like rapid change.  There is something within your body called homeostasis.  It is the way that your body regulates everything and “tends to maintain a stable, constant condition of properties”.  In a nutshell, when something changes within your body skews it one way, under the condition of homeostasis your body will do what it can to skew it back.  For example, when we get really hot or exert ourselves, our body kicks in and starts to sweat as a cooling mechanism.  If we exert ourselves too much and drive blood away from the brain, our body makes us fall down (fainting or passing out) in order to put blood back to the brain.  Blood clotting, metabolism regulation, and insulin/glucagon balance are all examples of positive and negative feedback loops.  In a nutshell, your body likes to stay stable as much as it can, even to the point of simply shutting you down if it needs to.  Your body isn’t stupid.  It is a massive supercomputer that deals with trillions of chemical interactions every minute.  You can’t expect it to be happy when you suddenly make a radical change.  If you suddenly decide to go outside and run for 20 kilometers when you never do it you are likely to have a heart attack or get hurt also.

So what happens when you go into caloric deficit like in these diets?  Well, you lose weight.  Of course you do.  Typically on diets like these people are dropping their caloric intake by up to 1000-1500 calories a day while also greatly reducing the amount of crap they are eating on a daily basis.  Then they get where they want to be (or “finish the challenge” with lots of pictures and raving fanfare) and simply change back to what they were doing before.  Most people under report how much they eat and over report the amount of exercise they actually do.  So the weight comes right back to where it was before, and you typically gain more because you feel like you deserve more after all of your hard work.  By the way, the whole “starvation mode” thing is a myth.  If you actually kept your calorie intake the same as it was when you’re on this “diet” then you wouldn’t necessarily gain all the weight back.  But nobody does that.  We magically think everything will stay the same, even though we have radically changed the rules of the game.

In our society today we all want quick fixes.  We want results right now and are willing to pay more money in order to get them faster if we really want something.  That email needs to be returned right away so I get a 4G phone instead of 3G.  That item you want you can buy online in five minutes rather than going to the store.  Results guaranteed in 90 days.  Even my clients expect miracles sometimes with removing their pain and getting them moving properly again or changing their body composition.  Sometimes I’m actually good enough to pull it off, but more often than not, it takes a while to get everything right again after years of abuse and neglect and a lot of work on their part doing everything right to bring it all together.

Olympians train for four years for one event, and we expect our body to change completely in 90 days.  The thing is, you can’t do that to your body.  It’s too smart.  It knows that stress, doing things quickly and trying to push beyond its’ current capacity means bad things, so it takes steps to not have that happen.  I’m going to ask you to simply listen to it.  Take the time to let it adapt, learn and move forward because whether or not you think you have time, you certainly don’t have time to waste.  As a society we need to get away from this idea that everything needs to happen right now and get back to what nature intended – slow, gradual change for the better.  I’m a firm believer that you can do anything that you want to do, but you have to give your body the chance to get there.  Let me know if you agree!

I gained a new perspective this past weekend.  I’m currently going through the stages of the Resistance Training Specialist Mastery program which has really opened my eyes to seeing what we as exercise people do every day in a different way.  Often times I will hear a trainer tell a client or another trainer “that exercise is bad for you.”  They often do this without any other qualifier or they have that perspective simply because they were told it by somebody else and believed it to be true without looking into it themselves, as happens with pretty much everything within our industry.  I have been guilty of this myself.  A good example is this little exchange:

“Leg extensions are bad.”

“Why?”

“Because it puts shear force on your knee.”

Normally then the person being told this will just think shear is a horrible thing and they need to stay away from it forever.  Usually this trainer will follow up the discussion by telling their client how they need to squat instead, because squatting is really “functional”.  Squatting on a BOSU is even better because it’s an unstable surface so it works your “stabilizers”.  The issue is simply that 99% of the time, the person giving the advice has no idea what shear even is, how it is represented as a force within that movement and how it is applied to the joint, or (more importantly) whether or not it should be.  Again, I’ll reiterate that I have been guilty of this too because I don’t want it to seem like I’m completely innocent with conversations like this.  I used words all of the time that maybe I shouldn’t have because it is an easy way to get a point across to a client or co-worker without them looking at you blankly.

Some questions that immediately spring to mind is does that person even know what shear actually is?  Why is shear bad?  Why is it bad for that person?  Is there another way to do the same thing with a different overall result?  Or a way to get the same result doing something different?  Often we as trainers don’t think much beyond “good or bad”.  What we don’t consider is if this is good or bad for that person at that time within the capacity of having no idea what might be going on within that joint beyond what we can find out with our limited ability to check it.  It brings things to a higher level of responsibility, which is where in my opinion people in my profession should hang out.  Unfortunately most of us can’t or even worse, can’t be bothered.

There really is no good or bad exercise, there are simply increasing and decreasing levels of appropriateness of the exercise based on the person involved, what you are trying to do to them and why you are trying to do it.  The great thing about what I am now learning is that I can completely alter the force going through a joint to make it harder, or safer, or apply things there that I want to without causing things I don’t want to have happen.  It’s like magic, but really it isn’t – it is just attention to detail, being as sure of something as you can be and keeping the intention in mind to help the client get what you want them to get.  It brings in the mastery of what we do, which is affect the body and it’s many joints in a way that can either bring something good or something bad.  There is a lot of trial and error involved, but as we get really masterful at it, there might be a bit less error.

I know a lot about the body and how it moves and works and does all of the little things that go on every second of every day that affect your daily living and health.  One of the most valuable things I probably learned this past week was what I don’t know.  And that’s okay – provided that I don’t pretend that I do or just ignore it and do something to somebody anyway without any mindful thought towards what I am doing.  That’s what study and application is for.  You just can’t label things right away without knowing exactly what is going on.  I’m happy to have this new perspective and with any luck I’ll be able to affect people in a much more appropriate way now that I have it.  Feel free to comment on what I’ve said and think about it yourself.  You might be surprised!