On the fitness conversation, I have always tried to follow this saying I came across quite a few years ago. "You CANNOT out train a bad diet." I saw a video that depicted the saying perfectly. There were 2 guys standing by a treadmill. One guy got on the treadmill and started to run. He would count off the number of calories the treadmill said he had burned as he ran. As he was running, the other guy was standing next to him eating pizza and drinking a soda. As he finished eating each slice, and drinking the soda, he called out the number of calories he had taken in. The guy on the treadmill was sprinting his butt off and after a few minutes, he had burned about 100 calories. In the same time frame, the guy eating pizza and drinking the soda had consumed about 900 calories. It was a very eye opening video to watch.
One of the biggest things I see when people start to work out to get in shape is that many fear weight lifting. And when I talk about weight lifting, I am referring to lifting heavy weight. There is a very big misconception about it. Many people who say they lift weights will lift very light weights and do a lot of reps to "tone up". Many will say that they don't want to get too muscular, especially women. They are afraid of looking like bodybuilders and I totally understand that. Most people do not know what lengths those bodybuilders go through to look like that. Many take performance enhancing drugs, or they have been lifting super heavy for the past 20 years, and eating 4000 or more calories a day to help pack on lots of muscle. Pound for pound, muscle will always out perform fat in terms of caloric burn. With the right amount of heavy weight lifting, cardio, and a good, clean eating diet, you may never see the number on the scale change. What you will see is that your clothes will fit a little looser, certain parts of your body will look smaller, but the number on the scale is the same. You took off many inches of fat, and replaced it with some lean muscle mass.
I will be the first to admit, I love to eat sweets. Chocolate, cake, ice cream, you name it. I will never pass a churro stand at Disney without buying one. The best balance is to eat in moderation. If you totally restrict what you eat, you will always crave what you "cannot" have. When you do that, you will always fall off the wagon. If you do fall off the wagon and have a bad meal, or even a bad day, don't beat yourself up over it. Start fresh the next day and move on. What is in the past is in the past, move forward.
