Written by There is a very common trend in the health and fitness industry and it is extremism. Extremism is what builds followers, sells plans, and fills gyms. People will generally flock towards these things because the louder someone is or the more absurd a diet seems the likelier the idea of success. However it’s more like arguing about what color that dress was; Black and blue or white and gold, you can argue your point all day but in the end you still wasted your time and those on your side have now found something else to flock behind.
The important thing that most “professionals” forget is that you’re dealing with people. You’re not dealing with numbers, yourself, or theories –people are much more complicated. Here’s the thing though: extremism in the fitness sense will work on some people, and those will be your go-to people to post about and try to push your ideology, but after a while most will stop seeing results and leave. Pride might be a factor, but the important thing at the end of the day are your clients and potential clients seeing results and understanding that you will learn and unlearn things to improve their well-being.
Be open to changing things up; improving your skill set, and realizing that if what you’re doing now is not working then most likely changing will. For those of you that already struggle with diet after diet: there might be a reason they do not consistently work. Maybe you’ve been doing super-low calories for so long that you’ve impeded other processes in your body. Maybe for once you need to focus on gaining instead of losing.
Nutritional trends change all the time. Fat was bad, now fat is good. Protein is good, but only certain types. Carbs were good, now carbs are the devil. Try things and see what happens. All that telling people which macronutrients are “good” or “bad” will do is give them a weird relationship with the specific nutrient and create a long-term aversion to it. Look what’s happening now with low-carb diets. If someone loses 10lbs while eating low carb (which is almost always the case as you’re basically just losing water), they then think they have to avoid carbs forever which impedes so many potential improvements later on, or it ends with weekend-long twinkie and oreo binges because they “just couldn’t say no”.
Stay away from labeling food as “good” or “bad”. Keep what works, experiment, and learn about your body. Don’t get sucked into all-or-nothing nutrition.
James
