Choices.

As adults, we have this really nice thing. We get to make our very own choices. We take opportunities and we leverage the benefits of the opportunity against the cost of the opportunity and if the benefits outweigh the costs, we go for it. Yay! Pretty simple there.

Last night many of you had an opportunity presented to you. Although the benefits may seem a bit nebulous to you and the utility may not be as apparent, you now get to make a choice. It is a very temporary, albeit substantial choice in the foods you choose to consume. If you're up for the challenge, cool. If not, no big deal.. But consider the following.

Analogy time:

Suppose young Barby read up on some nutritional things which told her to abolish fats and stick to a higher carbohydrate percentage in her diet. These are things that tend to spike insulin levels very rapidly by raising blood glucose levels. No magic there. Now lets say Barbie also happens to be more insulin sensitive than others which will not only trigger triglyceride production in the liver but will also stimulate excess lipoprotein lipase to deal with it all and then subsequently put it all away in convenient triglyceride storage cells until the metabolic backup clears up for triglycerides (your metabolism is busy with glucose because glucose is awesome and easier to metabolize and proffered).

Translation: Barbie blows up in fat. Barbie's adiposity is exclusive to HER genetic and epigenetic profile but in this case she is just more predisposed to it. It's not her fault, but the dice rolled that way. Suddenly Barbie is bummed out. She's depressed because it's her senior year, she's young and energetic but no longer looks like it. Eating helps her depression onsets but it's only exacerbating the problem. She decides that it's her lack of exercise which is slowing down her metabolism and not the foods that stimulated adiposity that made her fat. She decided this because her skinny friends told her that they stay skinny by constantly exercising (burning all of the sugar out of their blood). She also saw a commercial on TV saying that burning calories on strange machines will surely squeeze you back into that freshman bikini. Another "expert" told her it's because she eats "too much" rather than what she eats that stimulated the growth reaction.

Translation: Barbie is sick and has a physiological problem that stems from a psychological disorder of not being able to discipline hunger away. Sounds a bit crazy, but since everyone is saying it, it must be true. So Barbie decides that the only logical solution is to do more with less. She's going to exercise until she collapses every day and eat as little as possible thus creating this fool-proof, idiot-simple caloric deficit, nevermind the fact that she has no idea what a calorie is or what it does. She doesn't realize that a colorie is just a unit.. like an "inch". She bears no attention to things like nutrients and nutrient density; it's just a simple numbers game to her. She busts her butt at the gym. She parks farther away. She is peppy and motivated to get the job done. It's all very inspirational and her friends support her all the way.

What young Barbie fails to put together in her bullet-proof logic is something called energy balance. What you lose, you must replace. If you lose more, you will replace more. It's just like sweating. The water has to be replaced. Barbie, much like many others, fails to realize that exercising and exessive energy expenditures (high intensity) stimulate appetite because you are now hungry at the cellular level. You cannot outsmart your cells. You have two options: eat or slow the metabolism down. So Now Barby starts slowing down because she is disciplend and can control her hunger. She becomes less energetic but is still motivated. 2 weeks in and she has lost a little bit of weight and has a couple little muscles bulging out. But boy is she hungry. Especially since the exercise is stimulating growth of muscles, which requires food as well. She is now grumpy a lot and getting frustrated. She is hurting bad for anything of substance. The vices really get her though. They serve chocolate cake in her dorm which is so much tastier than the whole-grain bagels she chokes down because they're "low-fat".

16 days have gone by and the headaches are getting almost intolerable. Statistically, Barbie is already a success since most would have quit long ago. The scale has become the only metric of health and fitness that matter, but realistically, no part of this is healthy even though the "fitness" industry tells her it is and encourages her to press on. The misery is intolerable. Barbie caves. The chocolate cake is too much to resist and watching the skinny girls gorge on it is too much to resist. Barbie tears into one peice. Her body responds with relief and brief hapiness (positive reinforcement). She feels good. In comes the second slice. Still amazing but now guilt starts taking over and depression not far behind.

After the cake storm, it's time to start rationalizing and negotiating. "I've been working out really hard and ot eating.. I've lost 6 pounds already and the rest will just fall off of me any minute.. probably sometime during my next 2-hour-long cardio session. I deserve to eat dessert." Meanwhile every starving and miserable cell in her body agrees. Thus begins the slippery slope and pretty soon Barby has not only caught up to her pre-workout intake but will surely surpass it. The problem is that now she eats even more of the stuff that got her where she is since it's all deemed "healthy" by various authorities (USDA, FDA, the government, grain farmers). Thus the adiposity cycle continues. Even though she may be losing a bit of weight and building muscles, innevitably, Barbie will succumb to the same fate that almost everyone who has ever followed this template has. She will blow up again and will probably even be worse than before.

Does this sound familiar to any of you. To many of us in the fitness industry, this is the status quo. It is so universal that it is ubiquitous at this point. It is so common that is has become "normal"; and that is dangerous. It's is like the frog that boiled in the warm bath. Eventually normal becomes extreme but non of us will ever notice.

All because "Barbie" listened to the everchanging-hype and blinded herself to reality. The fact of the matter is that adiposity (the process of converting and storing fat) is a hormonally triggered growth rather than a magical dumpster for excess calories, and vigorous execise stimulates apetite. It's a nice cycle that can't really be outsmarted. But it can be intelligently controlled.

Not everyone gets fat from excessive glucose. Not everyone gets lung cancer from smoking. Not everyone gets heart disease from inflammation. But in Barbie's case, she did. All Barbie had to do was ask her great-grandmother what to eat (as Michael Pollan would suggest). I like to imagine that after beating little Barbie with a nice thick paddle, she'd tell her to eat her meat and veggies and to stay away from the processed junk that comes in wrappers and boxes and packaging (meaning factory processed and adulterated). Your great grandmother would not consider that food and neither should you. It just so happens that much of that stuff also happens to stimulate adiposity via the hormonal cascade.



In a way, Stephanie preached the word of your great grandmothers. She told you to eat your meat and vegetable and stay away from less nutrient dense foods like grains and beans and the factory-produced byproducts. She told you to prioritize ethically and optimally raised animal meat (which just also happen to be much healthier for you) and higher quality vegetables (which also are strangely more nutrient dense). You get the point.

If you choose to participate in the challenge, it probably won't be easy. But it's not very hard either. It's only 30 days. Less-than 10% of a year. 30 measly days.. 30.. that's it. If at the end you feel worse and your numbers are garbage, go back to your old ways and disregard everything you've been told. If you feel a little better, maybe you'll just adopt a few of the habbits. Some may have a revolution take place in their household.. Who knows. Either way it will be entertaining to see what happens. At the end of the day, if we learn to prioritize nutrient dense foods and get rid of factory-produced, "conventionally raised", adulterated, modified, enriched, dehydrated, hydrolized, emulsified, fortified, sweetened, artificially flovored, artificially colored, preservative-infused, glutamate-rich, grain-fed, nutrient void garbage.. then everyone wins. Even Barbie.