There’s too much bullshit going about in the fitness industry. The ones at the top of this fugurative food chain are making the most money: publishers, writers, doctors, name it. When I was younger I was skinnier than Barry Oh is now, partly because I was a sickly kid who suffered for months from minor inguinal hernia that wasn’t corrected for a long time, and partly because I had no appetite (which I think tied in with the hernia thing). I think I was eleven when I learned the joys of gourmandism and my weight had been on a steady increase in the sixteen years after that. There were short periods in my life when I did get thinner, due to exercise, more than anything else.

My body still hasn’t settled into what I would call my desired fitness level. But after enough time spent reading study A and study B and news report C and hearing from fitness guru D and Gilad… I always fall back on two authors and one principle. The authors are Covert Bailey and Tom Venuto. The principle is simply calorie deficit. Over a period of time if you eat more than what your body burns, you will gain fat. If you burn a lot more than what your body eats, you will lose fat.

Where it gets a little more complex is how your body reacts to changes in dietary patterns. Some people who choose to eat less than what their body burns force their bodies into starvation mode, causing any excess calories to be stored as fat. Other people who overexercise end up destroying muscle, thus lowering their base metabolic rate. Result? Fat skinny person.

It took me a while but I kinda figured I can lose the fat around my gut and elsewhere by doing high intensity, long duration cardio (I’m doing an hour on an elliptical machine with my HR between 155-165) with a “toning routine” for weightlifting (4×12 as opposed to a bulking route of 3×8, or one set to failure). I’m losing weight, my bodyfat percentage (measured using an impedance meter) has gone down, and I’ve gained tone.

A lot of what we read in the media about fitness tends to appeal to the path of least resistance. The absurd level of contradictions in findings among studies is almost daunting to the casual reader. James Joyner, in the link above, ends his post by saying: “What none of these studies ever explain to my satisfaction is why, if obesity is essentially random, it suddenly appeared on a large scale in Western society about thirty years ago and why you don’t see random fit kids in those television reports of famine in Africa.” That’s because simple truth and simple facts don’t get grant money: our kids are eating more, we don’t cook as well, we drive too much, we watch too much TV, and we don’t want our children playing outside for fear of the latest bogeyman at the ten o’clock news so we stick ‘em in front of a Wii, or worse, any other game console, and expect them to stay fit.