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Reality TV is doing a disservice to audiences

By Matt MacLeod

Today’s most popular exercise shows are sending out the wrong message about how to lose weight. Although I am a huge reality television show fan, how is it that shows like “The Biggest Loser and Celebrity Fit Club” are continuing to be on the air waves? Being that I am a fitness professional, shows like this continue to piss me off. They are sending the wrong message to the audience and are the biggest piece of crap in existence. Weight loss shows, in my not so humble opinion, are the reason that people remain fat!

Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look at the shows premise. Individuals or teams (in the case of CFC) do exercise, and they do diet, but what is the goal? For the contestants to lose weight. Now I can hear you telling me, I do want to lose 20 lbs. I hate how I look. In fact I can hear some of you asking, “Why, as a fitness professional, are you telling me that weight loss is a bad thing? I want to hire a trainer to help me lose weight. Matt, you’ve gone off the deep end”.

Let me stop you before I get you confused about what I am really saying. While I said the shows’ goal is to lose weight, I didn’t say that losing weight is a bad thing. The difference is more than semantics, the difference that a person’s focus should not be to lose x amount of pounds. If all they were meant to do was lose weight, they could sit in a sauna for 6 hrs and lose weight. What the show should emphasize is fat loss. However, this is not the case

Muscle weighs more than fat; water weighs more than fat. Fat takes up more space than either. In fact you can be doing a diet perfectly, exercising correctly, lose body fat and still gain weight. Often times I have seen people on these shows have an increase in weight and are confused as to how they gained weight. Then they are told that they must not be following the program correctly. Yet once you understand that muscle weighs more than fat, it is clearly easy to see how this happens.

There is something else that is often over looked in the race to lose weight. You need to gain weight to lose it. No, I am not talking about yo-yo dieting. It comes back to the premise that you need more muscle mass. Muscle mass is active tissue. To maintain more muscle mass, the body must continue to burn more calories, in essence speeding up your metabolism. Along with building muscle and in order to maintain it, one must learn to eat in such a way that the body builds muscle and releases fat. Weight loss has unfortunately become synonymous with dieting, or more so - calorie depravation.

Depriving the body of nutrients and calories will put the brakes on a person’s metabolism. Along with slowing down the metabolism your body will enter a starvation mode, read lost muscle and store fat. Which explains why when people come off a diet, they gain a lot of weight in a hurry. Your body has been thinking, “I’m starving, I must store food” which is fat.

Consider this for a second. Is losing weight really why you want to work out? When was the last time you woke up, jumped out of bed and said, “I can wait to lose 20lbs?” Think about it. Is it really the lower number on a scale you want? Or is it that you want to feel vital, alive, with a tight toned body? If you are really honest, isn’t it the later?

If these shows were actually going to benefit and inspire the audiences they cater to, they need to focus on fat loss, not weight loss.

About the Author:

Matt MacLeod is a certified personal trainer and martial artist located in Atlanta, GA. His website is www.BodyDynamic.org