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The Worst-Conceived Fitness Plans Ever
Diet Doctors Say the Most Seductive Exercise Plans Can Have Unseen Flaws
Trust for America's Health, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, released a report last week that states' populations are getting fatter. Yet somewhere, subconsciously, people know that weight management is simple arithmetic: Weight loss happens when you eat fewer calories than you burn.
But simple hardly describes the eccentric self-made rules and mantras that nutritionists, trainers and doctors hear about from their clients. Even reasonable people who wouldn't buy into magic-bullet weight loss pills can fall into total fitness flops.
To help others steer clear of the next plan that crosses the line between creative to ill-conceived, some of the best minds in nutrition have shared real-world fitness plan failures.
Correspondence Gym Courses
Above all, know thyself. According to Keith Ayoob, a registered dietitian and an associate professor of pediatrics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, an unrealistic view of your personality can make you susceptible to fitness failure.
"People get into ill-conceived fitness plans because they hate it," Ayoob said. "They hate it because it's drudgery, and if they liked it, they wouldn't be needing the plan."
Take, for example, correspondence gym courses. Brigham Young University offers a variety of mail-order gym courses that include correspondence jogging, bowling and swimming. Students can receive gym credit for mailing in written quizzes and honor system exercise time logs.
"That can be useful, but you have to know yourself," Ayoob said. "It's easy to slack off, it's easy to fake that."
As with many instructional videos, unless you're a home-schooled teen, or honestly don't know about running techniques, taking a correspondence gym course might be a fitness flop for the very reason the gym course seems appealing.
"If you're a self-starter, cool," Ayoob said. "But for many people, if they were self-starters, they would already be jogging."
Aside from being dishonest about motivation or interest in an exercise, Ayoob said some of the most common personal fitness flops are diet books with seductive reasoning.
"My favorite is that caveman diet book.," Ayoob said. "You eat foods only the caveman would eat."
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