Facts About Weight Loss & Dieting

Being overfat requires the body to work harder than it was designed to. Excessive strain from the additional weight weakens organs and impedes normal biological functions. Imagine your body as a simple car, say a Volkswagen Beetle, designed purely for efficiency. It has a simple engine constructed to get you from point A to point B. When taken care of properly, your Beetle requires very little fuel and maintenance, a situation that makes it ideal for passenger transportation. But what if your Beetle was forced to perform tasks it wasn’t designed for, like moving furniture? Say you attach a toe hitch to your Beetle, hook up a trailer with a 900-lb. bedroom set, and continue driving it around. The engine would still work and your car would continue to perform but, the excessive work would gradually wear down the gears and engine. Then one day, your little efficiency car would simply burn out and stop working.

When the human body becomes overfat this is exactly what happens. A mere 10 to 20 pounds of additional weight is a heavy burden on your heart. The extra labor required to support the increased girth increases the risk of heart disease by 1.25% in women, and 1.6% in men. In addition, it becomes a catalyst for other problems, such as gallstones, non-insulin dependent diabetes mellitus, osteoarthritis, respiratory disorders, certain forms of cancer, and an increase in overall mortality.

Americans Are Struggling to Lose Weight
It’s not that Americans don’t care about being overfat—we do. Constantly faced with the pressure to be thin and, wanting to avoid the stigmas associated with being fat, at any given time, 40% of women and 24% of men are actively working to lose weight. On average, each person will attempt six weight loss methods a year for approximately two years. These same individuals annually spend over $5,000 to lose the weight, only to gain it all back (plus more!). It goes without saying that our current approach to fat loss is failing us physically, mentally, and financially.

Regardless of these facts, we are trying to shed the pounds by any means necessary. In a rush to get body fat under control, people hastily jump onto the low-calorie band wagon but neglect to learn the physical and mental components required to achieve long-term fat management. Hence, when fat loss is carried out in this manner it does more harm than good; each failed attempt only makes it twice as hard to lose weight again. In the end, dieters never learn how to train their body and change their lifestyle to prevent the pounds from coming back.

So why is it that with all of the technology and information available in our modern era, we're losing such a seemingly simple battle against fat? Is it because we’ve just never been taught how to correctly manage our weight? Or could it be the mixed messages we receive about what we should and shouldn’t eat? Whichever is true, we are now stuck in the middle of an overfat epidemic and riding on the axles of a wrecked vehicle. At what point will our nation, and health authorities, realize the traditional wheels of weight loss are broke, and need to be replaced?

This article is a revised excerpt from the book
TrainChange: A Unique Step-by-Step Analytical Approach to Fat Loss
By Al Smith, Jr., The Fitness Specialist®