“It’s as simple as eat less calories and move a little more”
I’m sure if you’ve ever had a weight problem or know somebody who has you’ve heard this before, right?
The problem is it is that simple but it’s also not that simple. We don’t live in the same environment as that anymore.
We are inherently wired to do the opposite. Eat as much food as we can manage and move as little as required to obtain said food.
Caloric abundance
Now think about the environment we live in and how easy it is to follow the “Eat more, Move Less” that is wired into our brains. Most of us have kitchens full of food and if not we are a 5-10 minute DRIVE from a grocery store where we can load up on food ready to make sure we don’t have to move around much for the rest of the week to get food.
Often the most active part of the trip to the grocery store is walking laps through the aisles and if that’s too much we now have the option to pay someone else to get all of that sorted and sent to our doorstep.
Now if we really want to even skip the hassle of the grocery store and cooking the food we have an abundance of takeout options.
Really that’s what it comes down to for us now. We live in a society that is abundant in food and we no longer have to move as a requisite to get the food.
If you fall victim to this you’re not to blame. If there was a never-ending supply of chocolate bars put straight in front of any of us back when people had to go in search of food do you think they would keep looking around for berries or animals to eat?
I don’t think so either!
The evil tricks in food production
Not only is the food too easily available to us, the food is different, it messes with our appetite signals, makes you crave more, overeating on calories while undereating on nutrients.
Let’s look at the food we eat. Ever wondered why sometimes it’s not even the taste of the food we crave but the texture, the sounds. We are meant to enjoy food and part of the process of enjoying food helps encourage positive cravings towards key nutrients that we may be lacking in our diet.
Food companies figured this out though, they know that by making the food hyperpalatable (really damn tasty if you didn’t know what that meant) they can overload our appetite signals and make us crave more of their foods. What comes to mind when you think of Rice Bubbles?
Snap, Crackle, Pop?
They know they’ve got you on the sound, texture and taste of the cereal so much that they even market their product with the very thing that makes you crave more. This is also the very reason why most of these food products don’t change much over time. It costs the brands too much money on the front end to figure out the right palate combinations that they couldn’t just keep changing the products every few years.
Now on the opposite side of that. How many times have you thought “Damn, that plain chicken breast was tasty”?
Probably not too often right? The reason why natural whole foods don’t have that same degree of palatability is that we are designed to eat a wide variety of foods to avoid nutrient deficiencies or on the converse nutrient toxicity if we overeat on one food. So our appetite tells us that we have had enough when we should stop. With refined foods often our sensory system is off due to the flavour and texture combinations blocking the signals.
So the major problem here is that food is no longer as it was when “eat less, move more” recommendations began. It’s no longer a level playing field and we are now fighting an uphill battle. So let’s move on to the issues with move more.
More Training, More Problems
When the purpose of movement was to source food for ourselves and our loved ones it was damn simple, find animal, stalk animal, find a way to quickly kill the animal (not the chase after it until it dies first theory, but let’s not go into that), then carry it back to the tribe and eat it. Now only one of those pieces really had any intensity about it, kill the animal. Most of it was at a very easy pace until it was time to ramp up the energy.
Now let’s look at the exercise most of us who train do. It generally looks like sitting around all day at work then jump straight into hard training like heavy lifting, crossfit, bootcamps, F45 circuits.
This style of training works, there’s no doubt about it and I love training but what we forget about is we are only designed for so much intensity. That’s part of the reason it works so well, our body isn’t used to handling it so the stimulus and adaptation are so high.
So what happens when we are already doing 3-5 days of hard training and we still aren’t getting results. Given we have been told to move more, we do just that, more high intensity work, 7 days a week, double days etc. We start to overload ourselves and our ability to handle stress diminishes, we end up worse off than where we started and our body tells us to hold onto body fat and reduces our exercise outputs to hold ourselves back from injury.
We need to be thinking move better not more. If we are already going hard, maybe it’s time to add some easy exercise into the mix when adding more. If we are doing a lot of easier training then let’s definitely add some intensity because it does produce awesome results.
Eat Better, Move Better
This is what it comes down to, less food isn’t always the best option when we are designed to aim to eat more. If we have a problem with eating we need to focus on most food coming from quality sources and eating minimally from the food sources that cause us to overeat.
Likewise more exercise isn’t always better. Try getting outside of the gym and being active without needing to add more and more training in. Mountain biking, hiking, surfing, kayaking and all that sort of fun stuff can be way more effective as an addition if you are already training hard.