Don’t Fool Yourself
Stefanie, my sister-in-law and the Roots Business Operations Manager, texted me on Wednesday morning the following picture along with the text message “perpetuating the madness.”
The water bottles reads:
Side 1: I like running.
Side 2: Because I really really like dessert.
The words on the water bottle get at the heart of what we try to DISSOLVE at Roots - the notion that how much we need to workout is determined by how much we eat.
The media, diet books, and the resulting culture, interconnect exercise and food consumption to the point that most individuals gauge their need to workout almost solely based on their food choices.
At CrossFit Roots in our monthly Food Chalk Talk lecture we discuss health and fitness as being two separate pieces to one puzzle. As a society, we directly connect how much we need (or don’t need) to workout with how much we will eat, or ate. For example, when Thanksgiving rolls around many people will think they can “burn off the excess calories” with a few more hours at the gym before or after the holiday season. BULL SHIT.
The notion is ridiculous and we’ll get to that in a moment but what’s more important is that the connection between calories and working out is unhealthy and unmotivating and does not yield permanent benefits in either health OR fitness. Running two hours will never give you the HEALTH OK to eat chocolate cake and eating a perfect Paleo diet will never give you the FITNESS OK not to exercise your body at least 3 times per week. We must stop connecting the two if we expect to be truly sound in health and fitness.
At the root of this false connection between health and fitness is the notion that the argument of calories in/calories out is true. In other words, all we have to do is burn more calories than we consume and we will not only be lean but we will be healthy. We know this is not true. Hundreds of thousands of individuals walk around with 20-40 excess pounds of bodyfat on them yet they consume a 1500 calorie diet and exercise everyday. Something else is at play.
Author Gary Taubes rips apart the concept of calories in/calories out in his book This is Why We Get Fat. If you’re a recovering exercise-aholic-in-an-effort-to-be-skinny-AND-eat-whatever-you-want or you can’t figure out why you just can’t lose those last few pounds, this is a MUST READ.
I had the pleasure of hearing Taubes speak at a recent CrossFit HQ seminar and I sincerely hope the world reads his book and takes it to heart.
Calories in/calories out is based on bad bad science. As coaches, it’s our responsibility to educate our athletes so they can achieve both health and fitness (and sanity).
