Generic fitness & nutrition advice: Not your typical generic over the counter medicine
We frequently opting in buying generic grocery brands and medicine to save money. Cheaper is better right? Especially if the product is capable of giving us the same results. When it comes to fitness and nutrition, we may think that the rules are the same. In a way, yes, we also get cheaper and less optimal results. So let’s enumerate some of those generic advice.
Eat healthy to lose weight
What is a healthy food in the first place? There are so many confounding variables that affects one’s health such as lifestyle, body composition, type of diet, foods included in the diet, etc. In short, healthy food has no one exact meaning. Eating healthy depends on the context of application. You may be eating nutritious foods but if you are constantly eating too many calories beyond your daily needs, you won’t be able to achieve the goal of losing weight. Losing weight and eating “healthily” are two separate goals which often overlaps to one another although the optimal way is to aim for both. Whether a food should be eaten on a diet or not, it totally depends on the dose and the context.
Do the Xtensity exercise to maximize fat burning
There is no single exercise that would cater to the goal of solely losing weight. Some people would argue that you should do unlimited cardio exercise to lose weight while the other group will tell you to do high repetition resistance training and the rest will have their tiny bit of advice. Who’s correct? The answer can be found somewhere in the middle. Losing weight is a result of creating an energy deficit meaning you either need to eat less calories than you need or expend more calories through body movements/ exercise or by doing both. Many fitness gurus, tv infomercials and alike(I know you’re familiar with these) would try to convince you that they found the True way of burning fat(TM) but in reality(read the fine prints), their program is also based on eating less calories while increasing calorie expenditure.
Avoid sugars, avoid fats, avoid blah blah blah
Better avoid listening to this whomever know-it-all diet guru at all! Here’s the hint: if this person cite one specific type of food or certain macronutrient as if it’s some sort of a tool of the devil, most likely that this person has no clue on what he’s talking about or he’s probably deceiving you to buy something from him but the truth is, he was just voluntarily/ involuntarily misleading you from facts. This type of fallacy aka broscience doesn’t die because it often works! But the rationale behind these claims are often fraud. Just like what I said above, the key is “dose and context.”
The primary reason why these advice are called generic is simply because it applies to specific type of population and scenario. One major mistake many people often does is generalizing advice as if everyone’s situation are the same. The best advice be it training or diet will always depends on the context of application which means it must include critical analyzation of the situation to identify the possible solution to a given problem.
People are creatures of emotions that’s why it is so easy for the most of us to be confused from false advertising. A good way to identify whether a fitness hype is true or not is by familiarizing ourselves to logical (types of)fallacies.
Remember that everything produces results. These results however can be distinguished between what works(often so-so results) and optimal results(satisfactory, wow results).
Context Dieting Solution 