Top ten truths about fitness and weight loss you refuse to believe.

Normal sized human beings, circa 1983

Well... hopefully YOU will believe by the end of this article if you didn't already, but these are the hotly disputed but actually true facts that people need to face up to.

1: The Body Mass Index IS a suitable and accurate assessment.

Let's set this straight, once and for all.

As of the past couple of weeks... I'm obese. aka BMI 30.

Now, a lot of what you might call BMI denialists might read that last sentence and say "see? how can you be 'obese', you're a trainer, you're healthy and active. This proves the BMI is flawed!"

No.

It took me YEARS of hard work to get up to this size. And if you think training was the hard part, you'd be wrong. The hard part was training my APPETITE in order to be able to consume enough food to maintain this body weight. Now... it might be easy enough if I didn't train, ate high calorie junk with no nutritional value day in and day out etc... but to consume enough calories with some attention to macronutrition ratios and end up at this weight with a reasonable ratio of lean mass to body fat... eating that much was HARD WORK.

In plain English, it's not normal to be this size. It's out of the ordinary. Now since I'm phenomenally strong my body is putting all of that extra fuel to good use... but to be at this weight (relative to my height) due to an inactive lifestyle and excessive consumption of unhealthy foods. That's clearly not the ideal condition for a human being to be in, and it should never be considered normal.

The scary part is, there are people out there so much bigger than I am, and not because they're elite strength athletes.

Now to further illustrate my point... I was watching some old episodes of The Goodies on youtube the other day and the first thing I thought was "wow, look how skinny people are". Then later on, I watched one of those embarrassing "spring break" type movies from the early 80s on tv. Again... I'm struck by how slim people are, especially women's arms. You know what though? Those are NORMAL SIZED human beings... probably around BMI 22 or so.

We're just not used to seeing normal sized people any more, and when you really stop and think about it... isn't that terrible?

Here's a great article explaining the Body Mass Index.

Stay tuned I've got 9 more of these to come in the days ahead! In the meantime if you haven't done so already, go check out my new profile on the gym's website especially if you're looking for a Personal Trainer In Brunswick.