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The beginning of this series of articles was a list of the worst mistakes people make when they start working on improving their health. Now I’d like to cover each one of those items in detail, starting with #1, fad diets.

Fad diet is a term I use for a wide variety of eating plans. These include a wide variety of things, from Atkins to North Beach, from fruitarian to fasting. In fact, the diet blog recently ran a good article about the signs of a fad diet which can be found here. However, the real question is, what makes these diets really bad? What is it that makes them more than simply useless and turns them into a true mistake?

First, fad diets do nothing to educate people about eating habits. For the most part, fad diets simply tell you what to do instead of why you should be doing it. To me, this is one of the worst mistakes you can make. I greatly value education and knowledge so when I see a diet that simply lays down some rules rather than telling you why those rules exist, I see a mistake. You’re not going to learn how to eat healthy following this diet. You’re not going to learn about nutrition or the value of different kinds of food. You’re just going to learn the rules of this one specific diet. Now what happens if you are unable to follow that diet for a day? Maybe you’re out with family or perhaps you’re eating dinner with a customer. What do you do? If you actually learned about nutrition and health, you can almost always find a healthy meal, but if all you did was blindly follow a fad diet, then you know nothing and can’t really decide for yourself what is healthy and what isn’t.

Second, fad diets are by nature temporary. In fact, most fad diets will actually have a time limit as part of the diet. They’ll say things like “go on this diet for just 8 weeks” or “follow our eating plan for 12 weeks to see amazing results.” Yah, ok, and then what? What happens when the fad diet is done and you’re back to eating normally? All that weight comes right back on. True weight loss isn’t temporary and it’s not a result of temporary diets. True weight loss and good health come from permanent changes to your life. Unless you’re going to follow that fad diet for the rest of your life, you might as well not even start it.

Third, fad diets make you believe they’re the only thing you need. What I mean by this is that fad diets make the dieter believe that exercise, active lifestyle and all the other components of a healthy life are unnecessary. They do this by focusing on weightloss and little else. Unfortunately, weight loss is not the same thing as being healthy. Yep, you heard that right, losing weight is not the same thing as being healthy. Sure, for most people losing some weight will probably result in a health improvement. However, pure weight loss is not always healthy. For example, an athlete can lose weight by losing muscle mass. Is this healthy? Absolutely not, but a fad diet will make you think that all you need to do is follow the diet, lose some weight and your life will be perfect.

Finally, most fad diets will follow some odd eating habit that actually causes the dieter to eat in an unhealthy and unenjoyable manner. They will focus on only specific types of food or on a specific way of preparing the food. They will have you fasting, detoxifying, pureeing and eating nothing but frozen kidney beans. In other words, they will destroy any semblance you have of a healthy diet you can enjoy. To me, food is something to be celebrated and enjoyed. Healthy food can be wonderful, and even the occasional unhealthy snack (kept to a reasonable level) is a part of a life I love to live. I’d much slowly lose weight on a healthy, well rounded diet I can enjoy than eat a crazy diet of nothing but Asai berry smoothies in order to lose twenty lbs over the next three weeks.

Personal Experience

All that said, I actually tried a few of these diets when I first started to get healthy. I tried Atkins but stopped when I learned that some carbs are good and some proteins are not, something Atkins didn’t try to educate me on. I tried some of the meal replacement shakes, but stopped when meal time became a chore rather than a pleasure. I even tried a strict low fat diet, which seemed to work, but the weight came right back as soon as I stopped. I never once found a diet that was possible to follow long term, healthy and provided good results.

So I started reading about nutrition. I talked to my doctor about exercise and eating plans. I researched and learned and then researched some more. In fact, I’m still researching and I’m still learning and I hope to never run out of new things to learn. Eventually, I started understanding what I ate. I knew when something was bad or what meals were healthy and I was able to decide on my own what to eat and when. These days I don’t have a strict eating plan of what I can or cannot eat. I simply choose healthy, tasty food every meal and enjoy my life. That’s the diet I’m still on and plan to remain on for the rest of my days. Maybe I should name it something catchy like “Galometrics Diet” and write a book.

Summary

Fad diets are just that, fads. They’re things that are here today and gone tomorrow. Some of them might last longer, like Atkins, but that doesn’t make them any better. Do yourself a favor, educate yourself about nutrition and healthy eating habits. You’ll come up with a healthier and more enjoyable lifestyle than any of these plans.

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60 in 3’s last series of articles dealt with the most effective things people can do when they first try to lose weight and get healthy. Now, I’d like to cover the opposite topic. What are some of the least effective steps people take when they try to turn their life around? What are some of the things that seem helpful but may actually be harmful to your health and to your efforts to improve it? Just as with the last list, this one will consist of an initial post with the topics and some general information about each, and then follow up posts with more information on each item. So without further ado, here’s the list of things not to do when you’re trying to lose weight, get in shape and be healthy.

1. Fad Diets - You’ve heard of them, you might have even tried them. The diet with nothing but fruit, the diet with nothing but bacon, the Atkins diet, the North Beach diet, the diet with nothing but shrimp or even the diet where you fast for three days to detoxify. All of these are fad diets. They might show some initial weightloss but are difficult to maintain and, in some cases, bad for your health. You’re much better off living a better lifestyle with healthy eating habits than you are trying one of these fad diets.

2. Do no exercise - This is particularly bad among women. The belief here is that weightloss and health is something that is directly related to eating habits and nothing else. Exercise and physical activity is seen as unnecessary, which is why you often see women engaging in some diet but seeing little in the way of results. Yes, physical activity is absolutely necessary if you want to be healthy and lose weight.

3. Do no research - And before the men get too cocky, here’s the common failing of most men. Rather than do research, they simply do what they think is right, what their friend Bob the mechanic thinks is right, what they remember from that show they saw on the Discovery Channel two years ago and what they think that girl they dated two years ago did to lose weight. Many men will do absolutely no research before engaging in life changing projects.

4. Cardio too soon - While cardio is a vital part of any healthy life, try it too soon, when you’re still overweight and out of shape, and you’ll find yourself out of breath, demoralized and discouraged. Even worse, you could actually damage your health by pushing cardio too fast and too hard before you’re ready for it. Take it easy. It took you years to get your body into the doughy shape it’s in now and it will take some time to fix that damage. So start out slow and work your way up.

5. Weight training too hard - This is another one for the guys. We tend to work out too hard when we first get to the gym, especially when it comes to weights. It’s as though we think the whole world is judging us and laughing at the fact that we can’t bench press more than 50lbs. So we try too hard and we lift too much and two days later we’re in the most intense pain of our lives. And sometimes, this makes us never come back to the gym. Start out slow and with a low weight, then work your way up.

6. Treat little setback as complete failures - This one is common to both men and women and it’s one I wrestled with when I first started recovering from my health meltdown. It’s the tendency to blow up any little setback into a major failure and then self destruct. You wake up in the morning and the scale tells you something you don’t want to hear, so you get frustrated and spend the whole day binging on chocolate. You try to walk up two flights of stairs but are out of breath by the second one, so you get demoralized and stop walking altogether. You give in to temptation and eat a donut in the morning and then you beat yourself up and binge on steak and cheesecake in the evening. We tend to think that one small failure means all our efforts mean nothing. Even worse, we use that one small setback as an excuse to leap headlong into failure. After all, if we already had one little failure, then the rest of the day’s worth of major failures doesn’t count, right? Wrong. It all counts. Stop using your little failures as justifications for bigger ones. So you made a mistake, so what? It’s not the end of the world.

7. Do it yourself, with no support - Human beings are social creatures. What we do and how we act depends in large part on the people around us. Our eating habits and physical activities are reflections of our upbringing, family, social circle and professional life. A change of health and fitness involves changing all of these things. Therefore, it’s much easier to do if you don’t try to do it alone. Get your family engaged in your project, get your friends involved. At the very least, keep people informed so they know what you’re trying to do and why. You’ll find that your family and friends can be very supportive of your efforts to live a healthier life and you’ll find that your health can greatly benefit from their support.

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A bit of a late post today. I just arrived at an airport hotel near JFK in NYC after a long day of work. Should be back to normal posting schedule tomorrow.

As for today, I wanted to spend a bit of time to an email a reader sent me following yesterday’s post. I won’t quote the entire email here but it was essentially asking me my opinion of the Atkins diet. This was in response to yesterday’s post in which I recommended that people cut down on meat consumption. This reader understood the post to mean that I disagree with the Atkins diet. This is both true and untrue.

What the Atkins diet does right

The Atkins diet gets one thing very right. It encourage people to eat less junk carbs. These junk carbs can be found in almost every food we eat these days. The white bread in your sandwich, the chips you ate with your burrito, the chocolate bar you snacked on and the soda you drank with your dinner all contain a large amount of calories from junk carbs. I call these junk carbs because they contain very little nutritional value for the amount of calories they pack. In fact, the only thing your body uses them for is energy, but since they’re so energy dense, you can eat a lot of them before you feel full. So you eat more and more until you overeat and gain weight. So if the Atkins diet does one thing right, it is this, it gets you to eat less of these junk carbs.

What the Atkins diet does wrong

First, most people on the Atkins diet assume that all carbs are the same. This is not true. Carbs from fruits and vegetables are healthy and very low on energy density. This means that they pack quite the nutritional punch. They’re full of vitamins, minerals and fiber, which your body needs to remain healthy. And they do this while being relatively low in calories due to their high water content. unfortunately, many people on the Atkins diet do not distinguish between good carbs and bad carbs. They simply eliminate all carbs.

Second, the Atkins diet emphasizes protein and fat but does not emphasize healthy sources for these items. I often see people on the Atkins diet boast about the amount of bacon, sausage and hamburger they’re eating. Well guess what, you’re still being unhealthy. These foods are packed with fats and protein that will increase your risk of heart disease and your blood pressure. If you want to focus on increasing your protein and fat intake, do it with healthy sources such as fish, turkey, lean beef and alternative meats like venison. Oh, and stay away from fast foods, there is nothing healthy about a Wendy’s burger, even if it is mostly protein and fat.

Finally and for some reason I still fail to understand, people on the Atkins diet often seem to believe that cutting out carbs is the only thing they need to do. They fail to pay attention to their caloric intake and they fail to add physical activity to their routine. They seem to believe that eating 5lbs of steak everyday and nothing else, will keep them healthy and slim. Guess what, the basic laws of biology still apply to you regardless of the diet you’re on. If you eat more calories than you spend you will still gain weight.

Summary

By all means, try to reduce the carb intake in your diet. Most people consume way too much unhealthy carbs. However, you should do so in an healthy manner, by switching to healthier sources of carbs like fruit and vegetables. And yes, protein and fat are both vital parts of a healthy diet, but you should get them from healthy sources and not at your local Kentucky Fried Chicken.

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One of my readers asked for a list of 10 steps to good health. I provided it, but now I want to break each of these items down and give you more useful details. So here’s step 6, living an active life.

I’ve said over and over that being healthy isn’t about temporary diets and month long workout plans.  Being healthy and fit is about lifestyle.  It’s about choosing to live your life in a healthy way.  A healthy lifestyle means more than just being unhealthy most of the time and then trying to fix things during specific meal times and gym visits.  It means every moment of every day you make the choice to be healthy.  It can be big things or it can be little ones, but you always make the healthy choice.

I realized how important this was about a year after my health meltdown.  Of all the things I learned, this is the only one that I implemented all at once rather than gradually.  Simply put, once I realized what a healthy lifestyle meant, I just couldn’t live it gradually.  In fact, this is the only piece of information that was a bit of sudden revelation instead of a gradual learning process.

Visions in the parking lot

It all happened one afternoon as I was arriving at the gym.  I usually prefer to workout around lunchtime but this particular day I was arriving right before dinner.  The gym parking lot was packed and there were very few spots.  I found a spot at the far end of the parking lot but I decided to move and search for a better spot.  That’s when it hit me.  Here I am going to the gym in order to exercise and I’m going to spend an extra few minutes driving around just so I could avoid a bit of walking.  Does that make sense?  I was actually going to waste time (looking for a closer spot would have taken longer than walking in from the farther one) and money (gas) just to save myself a 60 second walk when I had come here specifically for a workout!

That was the key realization for me.  It make me understand that if I wanted to be really healthy then I couldn’t just add a gym workout and change my eating habits a bit.  Being healthy meant living healthy and it meant making choices like walking the extra 60 seconds rather than driving around looking for a closer parking spot.

What does it mean? 

Living a healthy lifestyle and leading an active life means taking every opportunity to use your body.  If you can walk rather than drive, do so.  If you can take the stairs rather than the elevator, then do so.  If you can get up and go talk to someone rather than calling them on the phone, then do so.  If you’re sitting at your desk and you’re staring at your screen trying to figure out what else to write on your TPS report, why not pick up a water bottle and lift it a few times?  If your dog needs to go outside then how about you go out there with it and play with him or walk him rather than take him to the dog park and watch him run around?

We make hundreds of choices every day and most of us choose to be inactive.  We choose to spend money on gas and electricity rather than take the time and be healthy.  Why not make a different choice?  Every time you rely on a car, on an elevator, on an escalator or on a phone, remember that you are paying money in order to be unhealthy.  Make the right choice and be active.

There are of course some exceptions.  When we moved into our new apt. on the 4th floor, I certainly wasn’t going to try carrying the sofa up four flights of stairs.  In the morning, I ride my bike to the train station but then ride the train most of the way.  These are common sense to me.  Riding my bike to work would take too much time.  Carrying the sofa up the stairs would have been nearly impossible and carried a high risk of injury.  So yes, there are times when you should take the elevator.  But for every sofa that needs to go up to the 4th floor there is also someone driving around in the gym parking lot trying to save himself a sixty second walk on the way to his workout.  That’s the choice that needs to change.

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One of my readers asked for a list of 10 steps to good health. I provided it, but now I want to break each of these items down and give you more useful details. So here’s step 4, weight training.

Most people don’t think of weight training when they think of general fitness. They prefer to believe that it’s something reserved for athletes and hard core body builders. However, weight training can be one of the most effective things you do as a beginner. In fact, I started with weight training before cardio.

You see, I knew I needed some form of exercise. I was walking every day but I didn’t think that was enough. I had tried various cardio exercises but failed miserably. In fact, it was during one of these failed cardio trips to the gym that I first tried weights. I was wandering around the gym feeling depressed at having been unable to run yet again for more than 10 minutes. I somehow found myself in the free weight area where I observed the people working out. There were a few who had clearly been doing this for years, but I also saw many who were rather new to this. They were lifting a range of weights, some of them light enough that I thought even I could manage. Best of all, they were taking their time and being social while working out.

Yes, you’ll see some people in the weight and machine areas with iPods on, working out and ignoring the world around them, but you’ll see many more talking, working out with friends and joking with one another as they work through sets. Something about that appealed to me and so I decided to give it a try. I went over, lifted some weights and wonder of wonders, I didn’t have any problems at all. If there was something I wasn’t quite good at, which was pretty much everything back then, I simply lowered the weight. If there was something I was unfamiliar with, I asked. In fact, by the second week, I asked one of the frequent gym goers there to help me build a workout tailored to my requirements. He was happy to help and I soon had a routine to follow. I’ve enjoyed weight training ever since.

Benefits of weight training

Fun - I find weight training to be a more social activity than cardio. You can talk without huffing and puffing. You can help each other out rather than simply run side by side. Plus, it’s easier to accommodate different levels of activity. If your workout partner is not quite as strong, you simply lower the weight for their sets. I’ve tried to workout with someone whenever I can. Even now, when I don’t have a regular workout partner, I’ll go out of my way to get people from the office to come workout with me. This is one of the reason I recommend weight training to beginners, because like walking, it teaches you that physical activity can be fun, social and interesting.

No failure - It’s hard to fail at weight training. It’s easy to fail at cardio. When you’re fat and out of shape you can’t just start running. You can’t get on a bike and get a good workout. You’ll find yourself out of breath in 5 minutes and unable to go on. With weight training, you can always set the bar a little lower and try less weight. So what if you’re just lifting the bar itself, at least you’re lifting something! As long as you get your sets done and slowly improve, you’re doing fine.

Weight loss - I didn’t realize this at first, but weight training was actually really good for weight loss. Muscle mass uses a tremendous amount of energy even when it’s not being used. So an extra lb or two of muscle could mean a significant difference in your daily calories burned, which translates directly into weight lost.

Health - And along with weight loss itself, weight training taught me that being healthy isn’t all about losing weight. This is probably the most important lesson I learned from this activity. After my first month of weight training, I weighed myself and found that I had only lost 1lb that month. Feeling a little disappointed, I got dressed for work when I noticed that my pants no longer fit me. They were simply too big and I had to cinch my belt another notch to keep them on. Yep, being healthy does not necessarily mean being thin. Your body actually need muscle mass to do its work and if all you do is diet and cardio, you will quickly lose that muscle mass. By starting out early with weight training, I managed to keep my muscle mass while still losing weight, if a bit more slowly.

How to get started

It’s easy. Either get a gym membership or buy a small set of weights. Then design your workout or use someone else’s prebuilt workout like this four day workout we discussed last week. Now start workout out. It’s that easy. Ladies, weight training is definitely for you too and no, it will not turn you into body builders. You need a lot more than 30 minutes for four days a week to grow bulging muscles. Weight training is a vital part of every healthy lifestyle.

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One of my readers asked for a list of 10 steps to good health. I provided it, but now I want to break each of these items down and give you more useful details. So here’s step 3, cutting out the sodas.

We’ve already talked about sodas a number of times on 60 in 3, but now I’d like to share with you my personal experience with them.  At the height of my health crisis, I was consuming about 5 to 7 cans of soda a day.  It sounds high when I think of it in cans, but the reality was different.  At a restaurant, I would get a soda and then couple of free refills.  With the average size of a restaurant soda glass, that meant about 3 or 4 cans right there.  At work I would drink 2 to 3 cans, typically of ice tea, along with my lunch and just as drinks through the day.

Let’s do some quick math there.  A can of Lipton Brisk ice tea has 120 calories in it.  A can of coke has 140 calories in it.  So I was easily consuming around 800 calories a day from sodas.  These calories had no nutritional value and they didn’t contribute at all towards satisfying hunger.  That’s not even counting the times in the evening when I would go to 7-11 and buy one of those gigantic cups full of coke.  Those cups might hold upwards of 1000 calories, all of it from processed sugars.

Saying goodbye to coke

While I recognized that I was consuming way too many calories through sodas, doing something about it proved to be harder.  Simply put, sodas, especially caffeinated ones, are addictive.  Your body gets used to the sugar and caffeine rushes and it craves them.  Once you’re addicted, it’s hard to put them down.  Try it yourself if you think all this talk about addiction doesn’t apply to you.  Try not drinking any caffeine at all for three days and see how you feel.

So I decided to split the problem and deal with it gradually, as I did with other bad habits.  I switched my consumption of soda to 50% diet soda and 50% fruit juices.  I figured this way, instead of getting both sugar and caffeine with every drink, I would only get sugar or caffeine.   The amount of calories I was consuming dropped because half my soda consumption went to diet coke, and the amount of caffeine I consumed dropped because half my soda consumption went to fruit juices.  Then, I slowly started reducing each half by replacing it with plain old water.

Hard lesson learned

In the end, I learned that addiction to caffeine is a fact and that I was not immune to it.  I managed to completely remove the fruit juices and drink water instead, but I was still drinking 3 to 4 cans of diet coke a day.  Still, I considered this a victory since at least my calorie consumption from liquids went to zero.  Eventually, I managed to quit the caffeine habit too, but that’s a post for another day.

It took me slightly over a year to go from 6 to 7 cans of regular soda to 3 to 4 cans of diet coke a day.  These days, almost four years later, I drink 1 to 2 diet, caffeine free cokes a day and I’m trying to get rid of that too.  So yes, the soda habit can be a difficult one to break.  Just try to eliminate it gradually and steadily from your day to day routine.  Find healthier substitutes if you must and then slowly eliminate those as well until you’re left with the best drink of all, water.

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I got an email yesterday from a reader of 60 in 3. They were reading the four day workout series of articles but they felt a bit lost. Here’s a quote from their email:

It sounds like a great workout, but I don’t even know where to begin. I’m 100lbs overweight and I don’t even feel like I can get on a treadmill and forget about the weight training. I don’t even know where to start. Is there a list of things I can do to start out with?

Well, I’m not a big fan of lists, they usually don’t provide enough information to be really useful, but I thought I would try something. I’m going to list out the ten biggest steps I did to turn my life around. I’ll start with the first step I took and end with the last. In today’s post, I’ll just list them and give a brief description, but over the next ten days I’ll go over each one in details. I’ll include details on why you should do it and also on how you should make the change. I hope that way I can give you the list but also make it useful.

So here are the biggest steps I think I made in my life to get fit, become healthy and lose weight. Number 1 is the first step I took and number 10 is the last. As I write the more detailed post, I’m linking them back to this list, so click on the specific items to see more information on each.

1. Walk - One walk every day. Doesn’t matter if it’s raining or blistering hot, I’m out there for at least 30 minutes.
2. Cut out the junk snacks - That means those corn dogs you ate before dinner, the chips you ate while watching TV and those pizza pockets you chomped down during the football game. They all have to go.
3. Cut out sodas - No need to drink your calories. If you really need the caffeine boost then switch to diet sodas. Otherwise, stick to water.
4. Weight training - That doesn’t necessarily mean going to the gym, it just means working out with some weights, and yes, this applies to women too.
5. Cardio - Yep, everyone needs to sweat a bit. Whether it’s on the treadmill or out on the dance floor.
6. Active life - Stop watching TV and start doing something active. That could mean walking instead of driving, taking the stairs instead of the elevator or going hiking instead of watching a movie. Choose to be active, not passive.
7. Healthy breakfast - It’s always a good idea to start out your day with a good breakfast. It will keep your energy levels high and your binging urges low.
8. Sleep - Regular sleep is a must. Get between 7 to 9 hours every day. Go to sleep at a regular hour and wake up at the same time every day if you can.
9. Smaller and more frequent meals - Don’t eat all your calories in one meal, split them up into smaller portions that you eat throughout the day. Like a healthy breakfast, this will keep your energy high and your binging low.
10. Cut down on the meat - No, you don’t need to become a vegetarian or a vegan, but you should eat less meat and especially less processed beef and pork.

There they are, the first ten steps to getting fit and losing weight. Tomorrow we start with the first one, walking.

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