That’s me in the picture. You don’t have to be perfect.
If the thought of eating a french fry makes you want to gag at the impurity of it all, this article isn’t for you. I’ve been trolled for saying it’s okay to eat candy, you can lose weight eating carbs, and six-pack abs aren’t all that healthy.
I’m far from perfect. Most weeks, my family eats processed meals from the frozen section of the grocery store and fast food once or twice (sometimes more). The clean eaters of the world likely think that means I’m unqualified to give health and fitness advice. If that’s you, I get it.
Hear me…
Unconventional advice fitness pros won’t tell you
Bryan Krahn first tells this story in an article titled, “Survivorship Bias in Fitness,”
When planes began returning to base riddled with bullet holes during WWII, the US Army Air Forces (USAAF) knew it had a problem.
How could they shore up the planes to better protect the crew?
The brightest minds at the USAAF immediately began looking for ways to reinforce the damaged areas.
They studied the areas riddled with bullet holes, particularly the wings and tail.
That is until Abraham Wald, a statistician and mathematician, made a key observation — they were only looking at the damage on…
What you should know when the scale makes you say WTF
It’s that time of year when millions of us renew our focus on health and lifestyle changes we want to make for the coming year. Whether you choose to go on a diet, start exercising, exercise more, or some combination of new habits, the start of a new year is a great time to approach your goals with enthusiasm and vigor.
As with any goal, you’ll need to measure your progress. For those interested in losing weight, the bathroom scale often becomes a torture device — one that can make or break your day in a matter of seconds.
As…
Hint: intermittent fasting helps, and you don’t need to give up carbs
You may have heard the term metabolic flexibility recently. The concept isn’t new, but the idea has gained more traction on popular websites, as being metabolically flexible is becoming a key marker of health.
Metabolic flexibility’s formal definition is the ability of an organism to respond or adapt according to changes in metabolic or energy demand, as well as the prevailing conditions or activity. That’s a lot of scientific speak to say metabolic flexibility is how well your body can switch from using carbohydrates to fats for energy depending on what you’re asking from it at the moment (i.e., working…
#6 something called optic flow
By this point in our evolutionary history, we all know walking is good for us. Yet, many of us still leave this fundamental component of health up to whatever we manage to squeak in while walking around the house, to and from work (if that’s even happening), or while running errands.
We may think we counteract the amount of time we spend sitting with a 30–60-minute gym session, but our bodies weren’t designed to sit all day and then push as hard as possible for a brief amount of time.
According to a study in Diabetes,
The average non-exercising person…
The answer is yes, and here are a few helpful tips.
If you like to wind down with an alcoholic beverage or watch your favorite team over a beer or two, there’s nothing more disheartening than thinking you need to quit entirely to lose weight. Whenever I consult with a new client, the question inevitably comes up. What about alcohol?
The quick and dirty answer is yes. You can drink alcohol and lose weight. A study published in Nature allowed half of the 40 female participants on a low-calorie diet to consume 10 percent of their calories from wine and the other half 10 percent from grape juice.
At 1,500 total…
Carbs aren’t why losing weight is hard, it’s your metabolic flexibility.
Staring at a pile of dirty pots full of food my family didn’t eat, I eyed the cauliflower rice and thought there must be a better way. My house smelled like rotten eggs, and all I wanted was to devour a family-size bag of potato chips. Instead of looking fit and fabulous, I felt tired and hangry and was unable to make any progress.
For years, low to no-carb diets have dominated the diet landscape. Yet, celebrities like Jennifer Anniston have recently come out in favor of carbs, admitting their bodies feel better having them on board.
“Carbs give us…
It doesn’t make me a bad mom
One perfect evening during the otherwise hellish summer of 2020, I found myself sitting around our family’s gas fire pit laughing and sipping wine with my closest friends. Our children ran around playing outdoor games made more fun by the cover of darkness. A Bluetooth speaker quietly played rock tunes in the background.
Stopping to cook S’mores, the kids came and sat with us around the fire. “Can I play a song,” asked my 10-year-old son. The next thing I knew, he was rapping the lyrics to Travis Scott’s Sicko Mode. I stared at him with my mouth open. …
Let go of what you “should” do and choose what works
I grew up in the 80s and 90s with parents who worked full-time and two brothers who could consume a week’s worth of groceries in a few hours. Vegetables came from a can or the freezer, not a farmer’s market or grocery co-op. Every once in a while, my mom prepared a salad that I’d pick the tomatoes off and pour tablespoons of Ranch dressing on top.
No one batted an eyelash. My mom didn’t feel guilty that she didn’t cook dinner from scratch. Instead, she came home from teaching a bunch of rowdy third-graders to shuttle us off to…
Surprisingly few people do this
Disclaimer: I don’t believe weight equals health, and larger bodies don’t need to shrink to meet a diet culture standard of beauty. But, I also understand many people would like to lose weight, and this advice is for those people.
It doesn’t matter if you’re an athlete training for a bodybuilding competition or a working mom looking to lose a few pounds. Many of us have body composition goals, and the biggest mistake I see people make is not looking at the calendar and scheduling how they want the achievement of those goals to play out.
Let me explain. Say…
