Or how gym operators pay their annual expenses.
First off, happy New Year, since this blog should hit later this afternoon or tomorrow morning. Nursie poo knows that everyone has some kind of resolution for the new year. Personally, mine is to make sure that I finished my first cup of coffee before I start seeing patients. Many of you will have much grander and elaborate resolutions and to some extent that’s okay. However, I can tell you everyone that buys a gym membership in January will most likely be done using it by the first of February and will continue to pay 30 some dollars a month or higher for no reason whatsoever. Personally, I’m going back to the gym now that my toe is healed and working at the same gentle pace that I worked at before.
Of course, everyone is going to try some kind of diet as well. The not so funny part of this is that many of you will not seek the advice of your primary care provider and are back to looking at these shyster ads on Google. I’ve tried a lot of diets. I’m not the lightest person in the world for those of you that actually know me. I had some pretty rave results from some of these fad diets, at the expense of my health both mental and physical. And why is that? The answer is incredibly simple, it’s hard to change a habit. For most humans, you been eaten the same thing since you were able to have solid food. Before you get all excited and crazy about it and say well Nursie poo, I have been doing the banana diet for 20 years and I was able to change really in short order and I changed my diet. Great, it still took work, there still will be slip-ups in your diet. I posted a while back about diet and exercise and how exercise will improve executive functioning. The surprising thing that a lot of people don’t realize about diet and exercise is that it doesn’t take much. You don’t have to go to CrossFit 5 times a week, run marathons, or do some kind of crazy boot camp training every day.
What you do you have to do is eat sensible, which means a reduction in portion size, reduction in processed foods (meaning there’s a lot of sodium and other additives in them that you don’t have control of), and eating a balanced intake. Of course, all the authors of all those fad diet books will say no, no, no. This type of diet doesn’t reduce your weight fast enough and you want to look good in your bikini by May. Yeah, about that, you’re asking yourself to change a lifelong eating habit rapidly for the purposes of weight loss. The chances of that actually occurring depend on how you make those changes. And I’m here to tell you that the best thing to do is limit your portion sizes, not a ridiculous amount, like don’t go from a 16-ounce steak to 4 ounces of tuna fish every day. Just make it a sensible portion.
NPR put out a pretty interesting article that you can find here that talks about dietary success. As a slow and steady change and it puts out the 5 to 6 things you should look for in a diet. Nursie poo agrees with it. In general, there’s no need to send your body into shock, throw your blood chemistry out of whack, and try to magically lose 70 pounds in a week or two. In many cases, it took time to put the weight on from lack of exercise and dieting and the chances of rapid weight loss working is less likely than winning the lottery. The real effort is to make a healthy change. Yes, I know that with Keto, Paleo, 4-hour diet, blah blah blah you can lose the weight faster. Riddle me this, can you handle the change and how long after you get the weight off, are you going to pack it back on plus some?
Be good to yourself and use incremental changes and start with light exercise. Anything that gets your heart pumping and you moving a little for 20-30 minutes a day. You can do this easier than the 30 dollars a month you will shortly be wasting on the gym (because you go 3 times) and some fad diet that you will be able to handle for 2-3 weeks max.