We now live in a world where being a normal, social, active, employed person will make you unhealthy.
Being healthy is hard. It gets harder every day. And the only people that manage to avoid unhealth are those who research the food they eat, source it carefully, exercise a lot and live a disciplined, carefully planned life.
And who has the time for that?
There’s not enough time to be active.
Say you’re Joe Above Average. Good job, 9-5 but sometimes more, mostly in meetings, in front of a computer or out with clients.
You played sports in college, you were a high school footballer and if anyone asked, you’d still be up for a game of soccer in the park.
Say you lift weights at the gym twice a week and play soccer on Saturday afternoons with friends.
Sounds healthy enough, but in most cases – you’re still fat by 28 and on a path to poor health by 35.
Eating and drinking normally is eating and drinking unhealthily.
Say you eat well. The occasional burger when you’re on the run, a dessert here and there when you’re out with friends. Otherwise, you just eat like most people. Toast for breakfast, sandwiches or pasta for lunch and maybe pizza or chicken curry for dinner.
You don’t’ over-eat, you just eat when you’re hungry, when you need it.
It’s a normal way of doing things. And the chances are that this ‘normal’ way of doing things is the reason you are unhealthy.
You’re social, you’ll have drinks with friends once or twice a week, maybe a dinner. You don’t smoke – you don’t drink to excess, just a few glasses of wine or a few beers while you’re grilling in the park on a Sunday afternoon.
Sadly, all these things will make you unhealthy.
Every little bit of un-health makes those around you unhealthier.
You are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with. That goes for your health, too.
At its heart, it’s an issue of default.
We eat what’s closest, what’s cheapest, what’s easiest to find, cook and serve. We eat what we see a lot of, what sits at eye level in supermarkets, what ‘most people’ buy.
We eat at McDonalds. We eat at Burger King. We drink Coke. We drink Sprite. We eat chips and dips, white bread, white rice, cheesy pizza and lasagne, salty curries, flavoured yoghurts and well-dressed salads. We spread peanut butter on sandwiches and mushroom sauce on steaks.
All of these normal, everyday, accepted things are making us fat and killing us early and often.
Something has to start changing.
Exercising does not equal not being fat.
We need to weaken the link between exercise and fat. These concepts are more removed from one another than we realise.
People who exercise burn more calories, so they get hungrier, so they eat more.
Exercising is actually about a different kind of health. Mental health. People who exercise feel better about themselves, they feel more awake during the day, they spend more time with other people who are likely to be more active and happy than non-exercisers.
And exercising, happy people tend to have a clearer, more balanced state of mind meaning they’re likely to make better choices overall, especially when it comes to eating.
So exercise does have an impact on how fat you are, but not for the reasons you assume.
The single most important thing we can do for our health is eat well. Even the busiest, most stressed, inactive people can maintain health through eating better.
Every bit of food you eat has a story. That story is often obfuscated, bent to some catchy marketing phrase, and not representative of the truth.
The real story of that food, is the reason you are fat.
Being unhealthy boils down to a single equation, the exact same equation that every diet book ever written is based on.
Unhealthy = more calories in than out.
As we exert less due to longer hours, more stress and more demands on our time, the food we eat gets worse, more processed, higher in sugar and calories.
When you do that, over time, you will move to a state of unhealth. Even if it’s just 20 calories too many per day. Health is a game of inches. And slowly, relentlessly, those inches are sending us to an early grave.
This is why you’re fat. It’s the easiest thing to be.