Why Eating Clean Sucks

Why “Eating Clean” Sucks

by Terrence Thomas

 

Let’s discuss a mental construct that I believe is one of the major causes of yo-yo dieting. The idea that I’m talking is the “eating clean” and I believe has infected the entire health and fitness industry.  Here are three concepts about eating clean that explain how this mindset can sabotage your health, fitness, weight loss, and physique goals and what you can do to make sure you are not doing this to yourself.

 

1. Stop using the term “eating clean”.

The very idea that you are eating clean means that at some point you are not eating clean.  In other words you’re eating in a way that supports health and performance during a certain time and then the other times you are eating like crap. I don’t know about you but that sounds very much like an eating disorder. The mindset behind eating clean is that you are in some way depriving yourself. When the mind is in a dynamic of deprivation, it is relying on willpower to resist temptation. Eventually you will run out of willpower and the natural tendency is to either quit eating clean or go to the other extreme, which is to eat garbage or binge eat. Having “cheat” days are supposed to help deal with the deprivation aspect of “eating clean” but the mental dynamic of resisting or succumbing to temptation is still in play.

 

If you are constantly bouncing from eating “clean” to not eating clean you are on a yo-yo diet. On average, when you ask someone what eating clean means, they say eating in a way that helps them lose fat or get healthy. Why not eat like this all the time or at least consistent enough that when you do choose not to “eat clean” that it won’t totally derail your efforts.  Follow the 80/20 rule. In other words, if your are eating, living and managing yourself in a way that promotes health, fitness and vitality 80 percent of the time then when you should be able to tolerate the occasional culinary, or recreational vice without irreparable damage to your body.

 

2. Send the idea of Bulking up back to the 1970’s. If you want to gain quality muscle that lasts for a lifetime, eat quality whole food all the time. Eating garbage foods and supplements that only make you look swollen and puffy will give you the illusion that you are BIG.  If you want to have a real, bona fide brick shit house of a body, you must feed your body real whole food, train intelligently and consistently. Training intelligently means knowing when to crank it up and push it to the limit but also knowing when to back off.

 

3. Stop playing Tug Of War with our mind.

If you want achieve your health and fitness goals with zero resistance and a feeling of peace, stop creating extremes in behavior. Think lifestyle instead of dieting. Eat real food all the time and sprinkle in some treats instead of eating pathologically strict and then totally flying off the handle and single handedly keeping a local ice cream shop in business.

 

Disclaimer: With that said, I am fully aware of what it takes to achieve extreme levels of fitness, leanness and muscularity. For example if you are a physique competitor and are in pre contest training, you are asking the body to do something that by nature it does not want to do. This takes some specific training, diet, and supplementation strategies to achieve this and when done with a relative degree in intelligence can be done safely and at a high level. The key here is intelligence.  #BeBeautiful #BeStrong  #BeHealthy

How The Body Thinks Part 2: Exercise The New Addiction

Let’s take a trip down memory lane..

It all started way back with the first Mr. Olympia Eugene Sandow. He was considered the world’s most perfectly build man of his time. He was lean, symmetrical, muscular and strong. Eugene was truly the total package. He not only had the “show” muscles but he had the “go” as well. His feats of strength was his original claim to fame but is audiences soon became more enamored with his bulging muscles than what he could lift. From this point on the era of Bodybuilding began.

The concept of bodybuilding has evolved quite a bit since Sandow’s day. During the early days of physical culture, there was a pride and focus on not only looking good on the outside but living a healthy lifestyle and feeling good on the inside.

Within the last 5 to 10 years, there has been a shift from physical culture to the era of extreme fitness. High-tech gyms and super-charged supplements have created the great divide between form, health and function.

Extreme exercise has literally become the new addiction.  At least in the 70-80’s you had somewhat of a clear boundary between physical culture and the party crowd.

Now people are replacing their hard drugs with hard exercise.They are replacing the high of narcotics  with the train till you puke mindset. Think about it. If you’ve ever exercised until you threw up, didn’t it feel the same as a hangover?

At it’s core they are one and the same.  People are trading narcotics for stimulants and extreme exercise in the name of health. It is a step up the evolutionary ladder but I feel that we can and must keep moving up.

Just because an exercise is possible does not mean it is to be done. Not all exercise is for everyone and until we understand this, we are going to have millions of people brainwashed into thinking that they have to kill themselves to get in shape. This is not a good thing if we are trying to inspire millions of overweight and out of shape people to exercise.

These extreme workouts is not training. They are events. It is the equivalent to  running the full 26 miles at every session if you are training for a marathon.

Elite Strength Coaches,(I’m talking about the Real Elite Coaches) know that the extreme fitness programs are just fads.

The definition of a training program is being able to duplicate an executed session.

If you cannot duplicate the session without injury or burnout, then it was not a training session, it was a maximal event.

If I did a maximal event 3 times a week, I’d need a Red Bull or Red line or Nitro something to get by as well. Here’s a novel concept..

Train to tolerance and then rest.  Gradually and systematically  progress your way to higher levels of intensity. This way your results “stick” and you build long lasting results.

Give it a shot..

Much Chi##