5 Biggest Health Myths That You Haven’t Heard Before
April 1st, 2008 by Kavan WolfeHealth and fitness has to be right up there with religion on the stupid-bullshit-ometer. Much of the drivel belched forth by health and fitness magazines, tv shows books and websites these days is not only inaccurate, it’s dangerously misleading. Yesterday I saw a so-called “personal trainer” showing an 8-year-old how to do squats, incorrectly, at my gym. I mean, if you’re going to screw up the boy’s bone development by getting him on weight training when he’s too young, why not fuck up his knees while you’re at it, right?
Tangent aside, here are five fitness myths that are doing serious damage in western society.
5. Walking is the Best Exercise
Best in what sense? Lowest impact? No, that’s swimming. Most enjoyable? No, that’s sex. Can do it anywhere? No, you can’t do it in a car, and almost anywhere you can walk you can also run. So what gives?
Sure, walking is great when you’re 80 years old, and you have to start somewhere if you’re so completely out of shape that a light jog will give you heart attack. However, there’s no reason that most people cannot or ought not to be doing something more intense.
4. Skinny = Healthy
Healthy means you have the stamina to run 10 or 15 kilometers, the strength to lift your body weight, and the flexibility to bend over and put your hands flat on the floor with your knees locked. This has nothing to do with whether your ribs protrude from your skin. Unfortunately, in a society where obesity is so prevalent, people have begun confusing the anorexic physique with the olympic physique.
3. Lifting Weights will Add Bulk
The way the magazines tell it, half an hour in the gym twice a week will turn you into Hercules. This is laughable. The average man is incapable of gaining more than about 5 pounds of muscle in a year without steroids, hormone injections, creatine and colon-stretching amounts of protein. The average woman can expect even more limited results. Making it sound like bulking up is the natural effective of lifting some 10 pound dumbbells is a horrific insult to every diehard trainee out there. You don’t accidentally put on muscle. You have to fucking well work for it.
Besides, you’ll be amazed at what swapping 5 pounds of fat for muscle will do for your looks.
2. Weight Loss Diet Plans
It’s not that any particular diet plan is bullshit, it’s that they’re ALL bullshit. If you eat fewer calories than you burn, you will lose weight. The laws of physics make it so. Whether you eat carbs or protein or fat, whether you go over or under your weight watcher’s points, whether you eat Jenny Craig certified food or chili dogs, it’s all fucking irrelevant. All that matters is Calories In - Calories Burned = Calorie Deficit. For every 3500 calorie deficit, you’ll lose at least one pound, not counting water.
This is not to say that all combinations of food are equally healthy, just that if you burn more than you eat, you will lose weight no matter what you eat.
1. That’s Not Food You’re Eating
Much of what’s eaten in the modern, industrialized diet is not food, but synthetic, food-like substances. If it comes in a package and has ingredients you don’t recognize, it’s synthetic. White flour and anything containing it is synthetic. Corn syrup is synthetic. White rice is synthetic. White sugar is synthetic. Most cheese is synthetic. Frozen dinners are definitely synthetic. And you can bet that anything you eat at a fast food restaurant will also be synthetic. So are all sodas and much of the sugar-water that masquerades as fruit juice.
Many of these synthetic non-foods are devoid in nutrition and packed with salt, sugar and fat. If you want to be healthier, try eating real foods! You’ll be amazed at how much better you feel, how much more energy you’ll have and how much easier sleep will come.
Real foods include:
Fruits, vegetables and their juices (with no added sugar or preservatives)
free-range, organic meats, fish and eggs
Milk and natural cheese
Organic, all-natural whole-grain breads and pastas
Pepper, chilies, rosemary, thyme, sage, garlic, marjoram, basil, oregano, cloves, coriander, parsley, cumin, turmeric, mustard, bay leaves, tarragon, fennel, etc.
Flavoring real foods with spices and herbs will produce far healthier, tastier dishes that the fat, sugar and salt infused factory-food that oozes from supermarket shelves.
April 1st, 2008 at 4:38 am
Interesting list, albeit I have heard some of them before.
After reading just the headline I thought for sure you were going to include the “8 cups of water a day” myth.
May 11th, 2008 at 7:41 pm
Properly done weight training will not stunt growth. See _Starting Strength_ by Rippetoe and Kilgore. Most ‘trainers’ don’t know squat about squats and generally teach people to do half squats with all sorts of horrible flaws such as:
doing them in a smith machine
looking up at the sky
not going deep enough
wearing the wrong shoes
knees sliding forwards at the bottom
not keeping the back in the right position
not doing the valsalva
Obviously I don’t know what you saw this kid doing but there is a fair chance(unless you are in a crossfit gym or an oly lifting gym) that it was fucked up.
Agree with #5
#4 Running such long distances seems unneeded although there is nothing wrong with it. As far as lifting your own bodyweight it depends how it is done. Someone deadlifting only their own bodyweight is pathetically weak but pressing or snatching your bodyweight is very good. A very complete definition of fitness can be found here:
http://www.crossfit.com/cf-download/CFJ-trial.pdf
However, I agree that skinny doesn’t always mean healthy. I know plenty of people with some fat who still have very good anaerobic conditioning and are very strong and fast.
#3 While popular rags make it sound like you can be a bodybuilder while lifting like a dumbass lazy fuck I disagree that “the average male can only gain 5lbs a year”
If the male in question is doing a program out of a fitness rag that is probably true, if they are doing a sound barbell based program with progressive resistance and lots of food they can gain much more muscle(and some fat) than 5lbs! Now in the case of a person who is already trained and very used to weightlifting muscular mass will be harder to gain.
But you’re right that practically all the advice in popular magazines about weight training is crap and gives the reader all sorts of wacky ideas.
#2 Agree. The converse, that the only way to gain weight is to eat more than you burn, is of course also true.
#1 I’m not a big fan of junk food but even it has nutritional value. You can gain muscle while eating a diet of crap assuming your training is proper. On the other hand I agree that this sort of junk food ideally should be avoided(at least in excess)