Fitness Simplicity

Image Credit: Amir K

Today’s article is by a dear friend of mine, Ryan Zielonka.  This is the first guest article here at JCDFitness and if writing here may be of interest to you, never hesitate to contact me with your ideas/topics.

Expecting greatness out of the ascetic servitude the world has deemed necessary for six-pack abs or firm thighs seems, on the surface, perfectly logical. Fitness gurus told us we need three days of high-intensity interval training and four days of metabolic weight-training a week to get there, while on a low-carb diet no less. But is all this really necessary?

We are raised in a culture where more is better. More hours at the office, more time at the gym, more gadgets and gizmos means more money, more muscles, and more happiness, or so we are told. The unfortunate reality is that this ambition has its limits, limits that are probably far lower than most people believe.

People come to me—or more appropriately—come at me with questions about getting their “skinny” on, asking what kinds of exercise they should be doing, what kinds of food they should be eating, and can they really have bread after six at night? Yet in my efforts to please, whoever happens to be on the receiving end of my insight often responds with incredulity when I tell them they need to exercise less and eat more of the stuff they like. Total nonsense, they think, and perhaps, so do you.

America is obsessed with efficiency: more work done in less time. But we rarely consider the purpose of that work. When a trainer says to do “seven hours of exercise per week,” it’s taken as gospel, but what does that actually mean? What if we could hack off four of those hours and go back to playing Playstation? Other fitness experts might scoff at this, but seriously, as a culture we don’t need more exercise, we need more perspective. We need to end this narcissistic crusade, stop being so self-indulgent, stop pretending that by enduring more we’re getting somewhere.

Most fitness experts and gurus operate from the premise that what is explicit must trump what is implicit, or intuitive. The industry thrives from its preoccupation of making radical changes to your diet, training program, and lifestyle. We are so willing to consider history and culture when discussing politics, but throw it out the window when we start talking about fitness.

The point of all this is to help folks get back to brass tacks when it comes to their lives. The fitness thing is an adjunct to your life, not the other way around. And if it is, you need to seriously reevaluate what you are doing here on earth. Let’s take a measured approach to all this. Here are five things you can do today to reestablish contact with your health of mind and your health of body.

1. Dial your taste buds and tell them to wake up.

Someone decides to go on a diet and what’s the first thing they do? They toss the foods they love out of their diet because someone told them they were “bad” or “unclean.” This, of course, makes absolutely no sense. When your feel-good neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin get depressed by low calories, why in the world would you want to make an already bad situation worse? Certainly there will be caloric limitations to how much you can eat, but it’s entirely doable, even in end-stage fat loss, to fit in pizza every now and then.

And for those of you not on a diet, ditch the chicken breast and brown rice and broccoli for awhile.

Seek out new foods that make you sit up and take notice. Indulge in ethnic foods and cuisine that you really love, and start incorporating all that (in sane amounts of course) into your diet.

2. Stop counting calories.

Blasphemy! Heathen! If you don’t count calories how will know how much you’ve eaten? I’m not claiming that calories don’t count, of course they do, and tracking intake is a great way to acclimatize yourself to what a sane and appropriate amount of food looks like for your body. But as a long-term lifestyle strategy, I just don’t buy into obsessive calorie tracking. It tends to divorce us from the bodily signals that tell us whether we’re full, empty, or in desperate need of a refeed.

Eat until sated, but stop before you’re full, and definitely before you are stuffed. This will take some time to get used to, but it’s important to get the experience of letting go of the spreadsheet reins. I have even aggressive fat loss clients take a two-week break away from counting calories, and with my maintenance clients, we work off a simple meal plan.

Simplicity is key, and for someone who is already health conscious, there is no need to needlessly reinforce ingrained eating habits when not working toward an aggressive physique goal.

3. Eat fewer times during the day, and the times that you do eat, aim for some culinary artistry.

Maybe the whole obesity thing isn’t about what we eat, maybe it’s about how we eat.

It’s an interesting thesis and one that I’m coming to agree with more and more. My time spent abroad in Europe made me realize how obsessed we are with expediency, with speed, with productivity in America. Rarely do we give thought to the quality of what we’re doing, or to the nature of the experience. This applies as much to our work as it does to our eating habits. Even in Tokyo, notorious for its hectic culture, I never once saw a person ‘eating on the go.’ Never. There is in fact a cultural stigma against it.

Stop snacking, stop relying on powders and bars and cottage cheese, go buy yourself a good cookbook, and promise yourself to make two well-prepared meals a day. Your waistline will thank you.

4. Try a new exercise activity and drop the excessive weight training.

Resistance training need be done at most four times a week, five times if you can intelligently rotate workouts and monitor recovery. Adding more volume into a program won’t make it better, yet it’s often the first thing guys do when they notice their gains are stalling. Instead, consider taking up active recovery in the form of yoga, or heck, just a walk with the girlfriend.

Aim for balance in training. Piling on more high intensity exercise is rarely the answer. Look for ways to get some lower-intensity activity during your week. Remember, growth happens outside the gym.

5. Schedule time for rest, relaxation and goal planning.

We work the grind, compressing more into less, and in the end it takes its toll. We can be really good about hitting every one of our workouts, but how about recreational time with the family, with friends? We have so many things vying for our time, and now even our time away from work has been innervated by the pseudo-work found in things like Facebook.

Stop it already. Humans were meant to explore, to bend with the forces of nature, to adapt. Get off Facebook and do something useful. Call someone, set up a dinner date, go rock climbing, get drunk, whatever.

Remember, there is no point in developing a flawless physique if, in the process, we lose the flexibility that makes us human.

Ryan Zielonka is an author, fitness expert, and specialist in the social sciences. His muses and meditations can be read at Ryan Zielonka.com.

Tagged as: Guest Article, Guest Post