Fact of the Day .CA » Fitness Myth Monday

5/10/2010: Stupid old ladies who say “Oh, just wait until you’re older.” (2 Comments)

Tycco — Mon, 10 May 2010 20:11:44 +0000

Old Lady

I probably hear this the most of any objection when I try to get people started exercising by giving them my testimony as a former fatass who lost 60 pounds in about 6 months. When people say, “Oh, just wait until you’re older, ” I hear, “I’m looking for things to blame for my lack of initiative, and my peers’ collective lack of initiative is an easy target.” The problem is, obesity is an peidemic that knows no age barriers. 2/3 of American adults 18 and above are overweight. It’s not age, it’s attitude.

It’s true that older people tend to have more responsibilities than younger people do, and thus less time to get out. But to quote the 95-year-old fitness guru and juicer-hawker Jack LaLanne, “It’s not that tough. If you can’t afford a half hour, two or three times a week, to take care of the most important person in the world, yourself, you gotta be sick.”

If you want to be overweight, that’s your decision. I’ve learned in my professional tenure that you can’t change people’s lives unless they want them to be changed. But don’t blame your low fitness level on your age. There’s at least one trainer at every gym I go to who’s in their 50′s. And 19 year old kids who get winded going up and down our stairs. My own grandma remains mobile and mentally acute at the age of 88. Everyone can be as fit as they choose to be, by living like a fit person, through actions and not just words. Citing nonexistant age-induced decreases in fitness level to a) justify your own laziness and b)downplay the achievements of others is just uncalled for.

4/26/2010 Reflexology (2 Comments)

Tycco — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 18:41:31 +0000

Reflexology

Reflexology is the massaging of feet to diagnose and cure disease.

That last sentence should be all you need to know how stupid it is, but I’ll continue anyway.

In 1917, Dr. William Fitzgerald wrote a book called Zone Therapy in which he said that the body has 10 “energy zones” and that disharmony of these are what cause illness and affliction. In the 1930′s Eunice Ingham said that Dr. Fitzgerald was wrong. She should have stopped there, but instead she decided to take the batcrapness an extra step by saying that each part of the foot is a “mirror site” to a certain part of the body. The big toe, for example, is considered a reflex area for the head. Reflexology maps the body with the feet, the right foot corresponding to the right side of the body and the left foot corresponding to the left side of the body. Because the whole body is represented in the feet, reflexologists consider themselves to be not just podiatrists, but actual health practitioners.

Reflexologists claim that they can cure a variety of aches and pains by massaging the correct reflex points on the foot, I guess if you’re just going to make stuff up without verifying it, you can kind of just say whatever you want, because other reflexologists claim the ability to cure migraine headaches, relieve sinus problems, restore harmony to hormonal imbalances, cure breathing disorders, correct digestive problems, and restore your circulatory system’s natural harmony.. If you have a back problem, a massage on the right spot on the right foot (which might be the left foot in some cases?!?!) can alleviate your suffering. All from massaging your feet.

To illustrate how completely inane this idea is, imagine you calling someone to fix your plumbing. Instead of a plumber coming to your house, you get a “house reflexologist”. He assures you that he can fix your problem through some mystical power you can’t possible understand, the propmptly begins hitting your ceiling fan with a wrench. When you tell him that’s not where the plumbing problem is, he says they’re connected (meaning they’re in the same house) and that you just need to relax and let house reflexology work.

A recent study, published in The Medical Journal of Australia, searched medical databases for 18 medical studies that met scientific crtieria. In the studies, 12 failed to prove any effect at all, positive or negative.

Foot massages feel awesome, yes, but don’t mistake it for actual medical care, because it’s not. And perpetuating the belief that it is may cause people to look to it to cure their ailments instead of an actual, tested, effective treatment. That’s the real tragedy with any alternative medicine. It’s exploiting people’s health concerns for a cheap buck, at best doing nothing and at worst suspending their recovery. Don’t let the do it to you.

4/19/10 Muscle Milk (No Comments)

Tycco — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 21:45:14 +0000

Muscle Milk

Muscle Milk is one of the best-selling products at the gym I work at. It sells like crazy, and I believe that most of the motivation to purchase it is based on misinformation.

Muscle Milk is a protein supplement which has been carefully patterned after a mother’s breast milk, and is said to include the same healthy anabolic properties. Yes – you heard that right, a mother’s breast milk. The idea being, a growing bodybuilder can also benefit from the same anabolic properties of breast milk. “You know, babies grow really fast, so if I, a grown adult, drink it, then I will grow really fast. Actually collecting breast milk would probably get me arrested, so I’ll just buy Muscle Milk.”

One thing I will give Muscle Milk: It tastes AMAZING!!! But, as is often the case, it owes itsrich, creamy taste to the fact that it has lots of fat. More fat in fact, than a double-dipped waffle cone at Ben and Jerry’s, which probably tastes a lot better. Needless to say, anyone looking for muscle definition should steer clear

There’s also the issue of how much protein it has. 32 grams in the average serving. Do you know how much protein your body actually needs? About .12-.18% of your body weight. For someone who’s 200 pounds like me, it maxes out at 80 grams. Because you don’t need much protein, your body isn’t equipped to process much at any given time, any amount over about 25 grams just goes right through your system exactly as it came in.

What it is good for is people (like me) trying to gain both muscle and body fat, and if its advertisers were honest about that instead of marketing it to people with goals for just musclebuilding, I would have no problem with it. But it’s marketing makes promises that the product doesn’t live up to, and the company has propelled itself into the area of fitness myth propogation just to make more money. It’s sad, because Cytosport have a good product, just not good for everyone, in fact not good for 90% of the people who buy it.

4/12/10 The Grapefruit Diet (3 Comments)

Tycco — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 19:20:20 +0000

Grapefruit Diets

The Grapefruit Diet falls into the same category as the shake-weight. It baffles me that people think it would work. At first, I thought it was just created by an excellent spin doctor. Know who claims ownership of the plan? NOBODY!! Ok, so that’s not a good sign, but surely there must be something behind this diet. I mean, it’s been around for decades. Surely something that stupid wouldn’t stand the test of scrutiny? Of course it wouldn’t, but the trick is getting overweight and desperate people to scrutinize it. Whcih they generally don’t. What this diet DOES have going for it is it’s the first entry on this site that Weird Al wrote a song about. So that’s something, I guess.

The premise of the Grapefruit Diet is based on a magical ingredient (seriously) in grapefruits, that, when eaten with protein, triggers fat burning. The diet is designed to promote fast weight loss. And because grapefruits are MAGICAL, you can eat pretty much whatever you want. Bacon, french fries, and UNLIMITED MEAT(!!) are actually recommended in some of their meal plans. And as long as you eat half a grapefruit after every meal, you’ll lose 10 pounds in 12 days.

A few problems with a diet:

1) Grapefruits are disgusting. They taste like rancid oranges.

2) Grapefruits are also not magic.

3)The diet is so dumb that nobody has even tried to take credit for it. Which, if you consider the dumb diets that people do take credit for, is pretty mind-boggling.

4)You’ll gain back all the weight as soon as you stop, and the plan only allows for 12 days of the diet. It’s that bad for you.

So, in short, this diet is 12 days of gorging on a limited variety of foods, getting bored and overcaffeinated, and having all your friends hate you because you smell like a rotten orange mixed with bacon grease.

4/5/10 Magnet Therapy (10 Comments)

Tycco — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 19:52:07 +0000

Magnet Therapy

Magnet therapy is a type of alternative medicine which centers around the claim that magnetic fields have healing powers, and exposing your body to magnetic fields can treat and prevent virtually any illness or ailment. Magnetic cures have been attracting gullible patrons since the early 1770s, when Anton Mesmer, a Viennese physician met a Jesuit priest and healer with the ironically awesome name of Maximillian Hell. Mr. Hell claimed that he cured people with a magnetic steel plate. He knew this therapy worked because people told him so. Mesmer stole the idea and decided that it works because there is a very subtle magnetic fluid flowing through everything, which sometimes gets disturbed and needs to be restored to its proper flow. Hell, Mesmer theorized, was unblocking the flow of this magnetic fluid with his magnets. Mesmer then discovered that he got the same results without the magnets, and the therapy was probably just bodies healing their own ailments (which bodies to often) with the magnets adding nothing useful to the process at all. But, once again, alternative medicine practitioners had found a money vein, and they weren’t going to let something as silly as the facts ruin it for them.

(By the way, Mesmer also is a creator of hypnotic healing (hence the term mesmerizing, and we all know how well that works.)

And, despite NO hard evidence that it actually works, the ball is still rolling more than 200 years later. A cottage industry has sprouted and is generating about $150 million a year producing magnetic insoles, bracelets, knee braces, and even magnets, all claiming miraculous healing powers. The most commonly cited reason is that magnets are attracted to the iron in your blood, and you can draw blood to any part of your body to speed the healing process. Which brings us to the interactive portion of today’s blog. Follow these directions below to participate

1)Prick your finger and place a drop of your blood next to a magnet.

2)Watch your blood not react at all.

There simply aren’t enough iron atoms in your red blood cells to form a magnetic surface. To put it simply, magnets don’t affect our bodies because we’re not made of magnetic stuff. The only benefit magnet therapy has is increasing the wealth of the people who choose to perpetuate the myth. You might as well just burn a pile of money in a ritual sacrifice to cure your pain. It least that would look kind of awesome. That’s more than I can say for magnetic bracelets.

3/29/10 The Hallelujah Diet (2 Comments)

Tycco — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 19:40:55 +0000

Hallelujah Diet

When you start writing a blog about ventures that extract copious amounts of money from people in exchange for false promises and exaggerated claims, you know that at least one fanatically religious nutjob will get a mention sooner or later. And diets don’t come any more religiously fanatically packaged than the Hallelujah Diet.

It all started in 1976, when Reverend George Malkmus was diagnosed with colon cancer. You see, his mom had died from colon cancer, and he decided it wasn’t the cancer’s fault. It was the insipid doctors, and all their science based treatments and medicines that caused his mother’s death. So no more critical thinking for this guy. Ever.

After realizing, much to his surprise, that talking to his imaginary friend didn’t cure cancer either, he decided that the only practical solution was to eat only the kind of food that grew in the Garden of Eden from the Bible. I mean, you have 2 whole people there, and, as far as we know, neither of them got cancer, so it’s 100% effective, right? After his own cancer went into remission by itself (which cancers sometimes do), he devoted his life to promoting what is essentially a raw-vegan diet, telling people that people don’t need to get sick and that his diet can prevent and cure any affliction under the sun.

Of course, eating nothing but fruits, vegetables, and whole grains will almost inevitably lead to weight loss, due to the scarcity of calories, but diets such as this can be very unhealthy for the following reasons.

No Vitamin B-12, which makes DNA, protects the nervous system, and makes blood cells.
No Vitamin D, which allows transport of calcium to your bones
Deficient in 7 other micronutrients

Don’t worry, the always altruistic George Malkmus has a solution for that: supplements that cost upwards of $2,000 a year.

And besides, no energy, osteoporosis, and a faulty nervous system are a small price to pay to know that you’re never going to get cancer, right? I mean, if you go through all the other stuff, and then get cancer, that’s just beyond horrible. Well, guess where humans get most of their carcinogens. FRUITS, VEGETABLES AND GRAINS! That’s right! This diet that causes all kinds of horrible health deficiencies doesn’t even do the one good thing the diet’s creator says it does. In fact, it does the exact opposite. And it costs a lot, too! There’s absolutely nothing good about this diet, and all the wishful thinking in the world won’t change that at all.

3/22/10 The Shake-Weight (1 Comment)

Tycco — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 22:55:47 +0000

Shake Weight

The people who shill bogus exercise equipment are not dumb people, so I like to think. A lot of their devices don’t work, certainly most don’t work as advertised, but lots of them seem like they MIGHT work. I can see where someone without biomechanics training would go wrong. But, every once in a while, something comes around that makes me think, “How in the world did someone think this would work? Who had the guts to market this thing? People aren’t really desperate and poorly educated enough to buy this, right?”

It makes me question my hope for humanity’s future when THIS sells more than about 3 units

Hilarious Shake Weight Exercise for Women

This ridiculous and less-than-subtly suggestive ad was seen on many TV shows, most notably Ellen, and tens of thousands of these devices have been sold! Which must mean that it works, right? Nobody would carry a device like that around unless it actually lived up to the claims made by its manufacturer, right?

THE CLAIMS MADE BY ITS MANUFACTURER

The Shake Weight works with a method called Dynamic Inertia in which you work your muscles by shaking the weight instead of lifting it. (Dynamic inertia is an oxymoron.)
A scientific study showed that this product is more effective than regular weight training in many aspects. (I tried to find reference to the study on their website, to know what aspects were tested, but couldn’t so I don’t know who conducted this research and what the exact findings were. As I’ve stated before, if results of a study are hard to find, it’s usually not because they’re good.)
That you can get terrific results in just 6 minutes a day. (If you believe that, then you deserve to walk around looking like a callgirl for The Invisible Man)
The Shake Weight can help women get that long muscle growth instead of the bulky growth which men prefer. Traditional weight training machines and dumbbells is what causes bulky muscle growth. (The real cause is genetics. Women generally don’t have enough testosterone to get really bulky muscles.) (There’s also one for men. It’s the exact same product, except now it suddenly STIMULATES bulky muscle growth instead of preventing it.)

There is absolutely no evidence of any kind that using this machine is any more stimulating than waving your arms in front of you. This is one of those products that proves how easy it is to delude people into buying pretty much anything.

3/15/10 Spot Reduction (3 Comments)

Tycco — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 23:35:09 +0000

Spot Reduction

So far on this blog, I’ve been pretty safe. I’ve kind of been attacking things on the fringe. You may have learned some new information, but deep, down, you probably knew those things were nonsense before I even started. Today that changes. Today I go after one of the most widely believed and profitable myths in the fitness industry: Spot reduction.

Various devices, exercises, and supplements are marketed to target your body fat in a certain area: your hips, your underarms, your thighs, wherever. Because most people will believe anything that someone athletic-looking in athletic attire says, these all sell like hotcakes. And, if they work as intended, it is by pure chance. Your body’s personal fat distribution is determined from the day you’re born, and if you want to attack fat, you have to attack it all.

“But why the stomach?’ You might ask. The answer is simple; that’s where your internal organs are. Early in human history, leading scientists say, people with fat distribution to their stomach were able to keep their organs warmer and more resistant to impact, and thus were able to survive longer and produce more offspring. It’s only very recently in human history that we in the civilized world have enough food to eat and don’t fight wars with swords and shields. Thus, we’re genetically programmed to store fat efficiently and to store it in our abdominal areas. Spot reduction is a physiological impossibility, and anyone who says different is lying.

Within your genetically determined body type however, there are a multitude of ways to make yourself look and feel better. Probably not as good or as fast as you want, but deal with it. And keep in mine, the people selling these false hopes and outrageous claims are the same mesomorphic meatheads who made fun of you (and me) for being fat in high school. Don’t let them lie to you again.

3/8/2010: Blood Type Diets. (No Comments)

Tycco — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 19:26:16 +0000

Blood Type Diets

One of the beautiful things about working for a gym is the hefty influx of diets that get brought to my attention. Some of them help me learn somerthing useful. Most of them are just good for fine-tuning my brain’s nonsense detector. One such example was someone who told me they’re going on something called a blood type diet. I couldn’t come up with a more comically absurd way to describe it if I tried, so I now defer to Peter D’Adamo, author of Eat Right 4 Your Type. Don’t let his inane babble throw you off, he’s a hip guy, as evidenced by the use of the number in his book title.

“Blood type is the key to the body’s ability to differentiate self from non-self.”

See what I mean? Inane babble. Blood type is based on the presence or absence of antigens on the surface of red blood cells. The antigens can be made of pretty miuch anything, depending on the blood group system. And it is in no way in control of or affected by your diet. Your diet should be determined by your caloric and nutritional needs, with compensations for any dietary limitations imposed by your body or your own choice.

The real explanation is pretty boring, huh? Let’s go back to the crazy guy.

Blood group O is the hunter, the earliest human blood group. The diet recommends that this blood group eat a higher protein diet. O blood type was the first blood type, originating 30,000 years ago. (Yeah, and 30,000 years ago, people also lived a maximum of about 30 years, in large part because their diets were awful.)
Blood group A the cultivator , a more recently evolved blood type, dating back from the dawn of agriculture, 20,000 years ago. The diet recommends that individuals of blood group A eat a diet emphasizing vegetables and free of red meat, a more vegetarian food intake. (Get it? People started growing food around this time, so your antegens need more vegetables today.)
Blood group B is the nomad, associated with a strong immune system and a flexible digestive system. The blood type diet claims that people of blood type B are the only ones who can thrive on dairy products and estimates blood type B arrived 10,000 years ago.
Blood group AB, according to D’Adamo, the enigma, the most recently evolved type, arriving less than 1,000 years ago. In terms of dietary needs, his blood type diet treats this group as an intermediate between blood types A and B. (So do you eat dairy or don’t you? Peter D’Adamo doesn’t say)

We (me) here at Fitness Myth Monday, try to be objective. So let’s look at the D’Adamo’s clinical trial record for his blood type diets.

In his book, he mentions being in the 8th year of a 10 year study. The book came out in 1997, and the results of the study were never published.
In his other book, about curing arthritis with blood type diets (?!?!?!), he assured us that a clinical trial was pending, and he just couldn’t wait for his claims to be backed up by fact before subjecting all of us to them. The results have never been published.
A self-reported internet survey with 6627 respondants conducted by D’Adamo’s website reported that people following the Blood Type Diet for a period of one month or more, in 71-78% of cases, had improvement in a variety of health conditions. The most common reported improvement was with weight. These results are self-reported and there’s no reference to how this information was gathered. And, in a 1990 Gallup poll, 67% of Americans said they’ve been able to use ESP.

Here’s the purpose of all those bullet points. If your diet is actually working and effective, you’re getting those results published immedeately. You’re not mentioning studies and then not telling people how they ended. A withholding of results is an indication thart he doesn’t want them to be seen.

This diet preys on a weak point that is the carcass to the fad diet’s vutlure; something that people have heard of but actually know nothing about. Everyone knows their blood type, but very few know what it actually means. And the answer to how different it makes people is, not much. And the answer to how it relates to what you should and shouldn’t eat is, not at all.

3/1/2010: De-Toxing and the Master Cleanse (No Comments)

Tycco — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 20:30:19 +0000

Master Cleanse

In the developed world, most people have more money than self discipline. In the last century, physical fitness has moved to the forefront of our consciousness, and entrepreneurs have cashed in our hopeful, trusting, and lazy natures and shilled a menagerie of devices, diets, workouts that promised us perfect health and physiques, instantly, no genetic base or work required. Those will all get their due time on this blog, but they share a common flaw, they’re competing for the same market. What snake oil was there to shill to people in good shape? Thankfully, in 1941, an enterprising young schmuck named Stanley Burroughs found just the thing; detoxes. Neither Burroughs’ brainchild, The Master Cleanse, nor any of the various spin-offs and deviations thereof, have been empirically proven to do any cleansing of any kind, but people like Burroughs and Peter Glickman, the equally enterprising, but slightly less creative schmuck who picked up the fallen Master Cleanse flag in the 1990′s, aren’t going to let anything as trivial as SCIENTIFIC DATA get in the way of their crusade to sell what is essentially a fancy crash diet.

First, before we rip it a new one, let’s humor the practitioners by explaining how The Master Cleanse is supposed to work. Apparently, our bodies are full of TOXINS (the video on the web site doesn’t name names, making it conveniently hard to test). And, what’s more, our bodies, which have been calmly and efficiently destroying illnesses and viruses for millions of years, have NO IDEA how to deal with them. Thankfully, Mr. Burroughs, the guy who made up the problem, also made up a solution; drink a mixture of water, lemon juice, maple syrup, and cayenne pepper 6-12 times a day, while eating nothing for at least 10 days. At the end, you’ll be lighter (duh), but also purged of all those nefarious TOXINS!!! Who knows what those TOXINS would have done to you?! (answer:nobody)

A few problems with this approach:

#1: Most of our foodborne toxins come from plants, like, for example, lemons, cayenne peppers, and maple trees.

#2 It’s never been tested to do anything beyond helping people lose weight (the not eating for 10 days part might help that along just a little)

There you have it. A double whammy of impracticality (consuming toxins in a toxin purge) and ineffectiveness. And a sextuple whammy (huh huh) of essential nutrient deficiencies; protein, carbohydrates, vitamin, minerals, fats, and water. Actually, you do get enough water, but pentuple whammy isn’t as fun to type. They should add another event to the pentathlon.

. The Master Cleanse does nothing it claims to, either in theory or in practice. But, to be honest, coming out of the cleanse with no effect whatsoever is actually the best case scenario. You see, our bodies don’t really like being starved for extended periods of time, and has been reported to have the following responses to the master cleanse: headaches, constipation, lethargy, vomiting, severe weakness, fainting, ketosis (chronic starvation), loss of muscle mass, loss of bone mass, and death.

That’s a small price to pay for the self assurance that your body is cleansed and back to the way nature intended it to be, and that you’ve according to Mr. Burroughs, prevented “all kinds of disorders” and “every kind of disease”. Of course, it’s a huge price to pay if it’s just something a guy made up 70 years ago and hasn’t changed since. Which it is.

But, just when all hope of removing those evil TOXINS from your body is gone, your body comes through, the same way it has since the dawn of human history. You see, your body has its own detoxing system; your liver, kidneys, intestines, and skin. You just have to let it work ;no detox has ever been tested to cleanse your body better than water and a good night’s sleep. Sure, “Just Let Your Body Do What it Does and Keep Your Fat Hands Out of It” doesn’t look good on a book cover, but it works. No frills, nothingto buy, and no hideous side effects.

And, in response to the thousand e-mails I’m sure to get saying, “But Tycco, wuT abOut teh waYt lOzz efct ROFL”, I say this. If you go on a crash diet, wieght loss is pretty much inevitably going to come off, and just as likely will come right back when you go off of it. And for the love of god, if you must go on a starvation diet, even though it’s a horrible idea for so many reasons, don’t pay someone else to teach you how.