Thursday, May 24, 2007

Fad Diets

It's a scam....really.

Diets, I mean.

There is the simple hard truth that, of all the jillions of diet schemes that come along, none of them really work. Statistics show time and time again that people can lose weight on just about anything. But, after a few months, it all starts creeping back to the waistline. There's low fat diets, high fat diets, fruit diets, vegetable diets, meat diets, liquid diets, diets from movie stars, diets from doctors, even diets designed around fast food joints featuring spokespersons who claim to have lost weight by eating their greasy slop every day. And then there are the magic diet pills that claim you can lose massive amounts of weight and put on extreme muscle by popping some obscure herbal capsule.

It doesn't work. Yet, people (me included) can't throw money at them fast enough...because...well, because we don't like looking like a lumpy sack of taters.

I read the endless reports on the failure of this diet and that diet and see a common theme; no exercise. It seems that losing weight is really easy and you can do it eating anything, just eat less. The trick is to put on some muscle, to change your physiology so that your body burns fuel rather than store it.

That's why I keep coming back to Body for Life. It's a sane approach and I believe it is the only one that will work, and keep working for the long haul. No special foods, the concept is portion control. Lower fat but not eliminated. Well balanced between protein and carbs. The only prohibition to what I would call absolute junk food is to indulge for one day of the week.

And....and....exercise. Weight lifting, to be exact. No way around it.

Oh sure, EAS is a big company that runs the BFL challenge, and EAS is in the business of selling supplements. Certainly the reason that they have the challenge is to get people to buy their stuff and claim that their products are what did the trick. That's okay. EAS does have some good products and they probably do help folks achieve their weight loss goals. Still....they never claim that just ingesting their products will magically transform your body. It all centers around hard work. I mean hard. Not strolling on a treadmill for an hour or two, but intensive exercise nearly every day that forces your body to build muscle and burn fat. In my opinion, Bill Phillips revolutionized the weight loss game years ago when he came up with the Body for Life concept.

Anybody can be fit and healthy. Without magic, without pills, without extreme food plans.

In this culture, we eat bad and we live bad. To change the way we look we must change the habits that got us here in the first place.

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