By: Anthony Campo
Nobody who has ever achieved anything great has done it by just phoning it in. Fitness and nutrition is no different. Changing your health and body can be the most rewarding thing you ever do, but it takes a lot of work. It takes discipline and an appetite to learn. Unfortunately, these concepts are not usually what sell. Corporations have spent the last century brainwashing us into thinking that it is not necessary to put in the hard work but rather just as easy as buying their new product.
So many products and fads are centered on trying to extract the nutrients from food to try and make it easier to consume. Juices in particular are an example of how you can take a positive concept, like eating fruits and vegetables, and turn it into something that can have negative effects. Our bodies are designed to consume whole foods and not just the juice from it. A juice like this has removed the elements that help regulate blood sugar, and then to compound the issue, adds in a whole bunch of extra sugar to make it more palatable. So they have taken a fruit with many health benefits and turned it into basically pure sugar with fewer nutrients.
Every processed food on the market seems to be removing the “bad nutrients,” (example reduced salt, low fat, and gluten free products) and then trying to fortify them with other “good nutrients”. Special K is another great example of taking something positive and turning it into a negative. Though protein is an extremely valuable nutrient, reading deeper into the label shows that this product is fortified with soy protein, which actually has harmful effects in large processed quantities and does nothing to promote protein synthesis. Basically the protein is useless and could actually cause some harm. They use it because it is cheap and is easy to make taste good.
Corporate food marketing distorts real nutrition. It is just as easy to by and eat a real pomegranate or eat food with protein than it is to buy the juice or fortified cereal. The juice POM costs about 4 times more than a pomegranate and the cereal as much as about a pound of chicken. However these things have been sold to us as time saving health foods. These are falsities implanted into our head. Eating right does take more planning, but not more time.
There are also new apps and DVDs for fitness that follows this same distortion. If you want to be successful in your fitness goals you must learn the process, which means learning how to train correctly. These apps and DVDs are marketed as easier, however easy does not mean better. Embrace the learning process. Learn about the science of your body. Everyone doesn’t need to be the Albert Einstein of fitness, but it would serve everyone to learn some basic principles of training and mechanics. They will not only allow you to hit your fitness goals now, but also maintain your quality of life, as you get older. Documenting your nutrition or workout in an APP does nothing if you are not on a plan that fits your goals, and there is no way of knowing if your plan matches your goals if you do not become educated with it.
Take Home Point * Proper training and nutrition is challenging, but learn how to do it right instead of looking for the easy way out.