Getting Fat and Getting Rich

This is one of those blog posts where the overall idea has been floating around my head for the past several years but never could figure out a way to write it down and simplify it.

The short version – there are no short cuts to losing excess body fat.* (Yes, there is an asterisk at the end of that statement because you could opt for plastic surgery or gastric bypass surgery but those involve elective surgery with potential complications or side-effects.)

Obesity threatens the health care systems around the world in countries were obesity rates are rapidly reaching epic proportions. If you love food or are obese I would suggest you read the book Salt Sugar Fat and watch the BBC documentary The Men Who Made Us Fat. People talk about the destruction that drugs and alcohol can cause but we always gloss over food. That is so wrong, because many of the diseases that people have are a direct cause of what they eat.

In the book, Salt Sugar Fat, they talk about Cheetos and its “vanishing calorie density” which means it melts so quickly that your brain thinks it has no calories, at that point in the book you realize you are screwed. What you soon understand is that it’s a losing battle to lose weight with several factors at play such as processed foods, increasing portion sizes, slick marketing and big business.

The formula for getting obese and getting rich are pretty simple in theory:

(eat more) – (decrease physical activity) = obesity (calorie surplus)
(work more) – (decrease spending) = rich (money surplus)

In order to lose weight you need to eat less calories and increase physical activity. Which means you would be running a calorie deficit which leads to weight loss. Studies have shown that 80% of weight loss can be attributed to portion and calorie control and the rest is from an increase in physical activity, just think about that for a minute…a majority of your weight loss can be accomplished by just shutting your mouth.

How many times have you jumped on a treadmill to run 30 minutes and the display says you’ve burned 150 calories. Then you drink a Jamba Juice smoothie in under 60 seconds which has 300+ calories. It happens to me all the time when I train for half-marathons, I’ll have a great 15 kilometer training run and then feel like I deserve an all day pass to eat whatever I want to…#fail. I always gain weight when I train for half-marathons when logically I should be losing weight.

When you start thinking of losing weight in terms of money, you will quickly realize you can work out all you want but if you don’t control the calories going in then it’s just a wasted effort. It’s similar to getting rich, you can save all the money in the world but if you work at McDonald’s you will never be able to get rich.