Right Fit Blog

January 23 2023

I guess I should clarify that I am not a medical professional, and everything said here is just one person’s opinion. 

But here is what my experience has taught me. There are three distinct categories of fitness: 

1. Health Training
2. Strength Training
3. Athletic Training 

Most information and blogs surrounding fitness and health culture get these three categories drastically confused, mostly because to an outside observer, they look and feel identical, particularly in a massive gym setting. This leads to a near-universally accepted lie: working out makes you lose weight. 

This is categorically untrue. 

HEALTH TRAINING

Most new trainees with a weight loss goal most often get placed in that first category, Health Training. This is maintenance training, low time intervals with high impact exercises designed to achieve maximum results with minimal time input, helpful for all takers, from your rushed suburban house spouse to your off-season college athlete to your alpha personality sunrise warrior. The issue is that most people wanting to lose weight don’t benefit from this training, because of the lie. Working out does not make you lose weight, and this is high impact training.

Health maintenance is for people who are already healthy. The issue is that most people with a weight loss goal are not when it comes to joints and muscle tension. So jumping into high impact training only simulates a heart attack for about 15 minutes, and makes your overburdened muscle groups regret any working out activity and any motivation to continue training. No real benefit other than higher injury risk and possibly overeating later (very counterproductive for any weight loss goal).

So health training is a bit of trap when it comes to weight loss, simply because of the nature of Health.

STRENGTH TRAINING

Now some more experienced trainees, the ones who have been down that long weight loss road with nothing to show for it, will look to the more advanced blogs and trainers that claim the only way to burn fat is by converting it to muscle. Strength Training. Nice, long workouts, long rests, low heart rate, and supportive gym environments with other lifters. But this is an even grander design on the lie. Strength training builds muscle. Muscle gains weight. Thus, working out does not make you lose weight. 

Strength Training can often be misleading, simply because everyone’s goal is different. Most people that became gym beasts did so from a healthy starting point. A rare few went from obesity to muscle definition, and those that did rarely did so unaided outside of the gym. Muscle has a different metabolic fuel than fat (since fat is a conversion of sugar, whereas muscle is a conversion of protein), leading to the lie that these can be exchanged like currency. If you eat pure protein, you will gain muscle… UNDER your fat. Thus weighing more. If you are eating at a caloric deficit, you will not gain any muscle anyway, and thus you are burning fuel in order to train harder, not lose weight, usually creating an eating disorder in those seeking to lose weight. 

No strength training for weight loss then. 

ATHLETIC TRAINING

“AHA! You got me!” you might be saying. “You are tricking me into athletic training, and going even harder, but I’ve seen this thing before! I’m not one to be tricked into motivation!” 

But no, sadly, your weight loss journey is doomed from the start here. Athletic Training is for one group: athletes. Are you training for a kickboxing competition? Are you having to hold a person over your head in your cheer meet? Do you need to carry a canoe or a bike or a small spacecraft over great distances? Do you have to be able to jump up to block a professional athlete at the rim? If you answered no, then don’t train like this. 

Athletic training is the same as Health Training, but you don’t stop after 20 minutes. Its hours at the gym, intense sessions designed to reach peak performance, or even outperform the competition at any cost. If you see a Steph Curry training regimen and want to use it to lose weight, it will do nothing other than burn you out, for two reasons. First, you aren’t Steph Curry, who, in his 15 year basketball career, has never had an overweight build. Second, you have no ultimate challenge to motivate yourself (no, not even that imaginary marathon that you were thinking of running when you got thin). 

THE TRUTH

So what are we supposed to do, us, the people of mass? 

To be honest, redefine the entirety of gym culture. All three camps want your money, want your memberships and promises of hope. Even the medical field will often turn to the cash, the medications, the subscription to HEALTH and FITNESS.

Working out does not make you lose weight.  BUT…

Ah, see, you knew there was a but. 

Mental Health 

Working out does three things. The first is the most important. 

The weight loss game is a monster. Every fat cell in your body craves sugar or salt on a given day, depending on how much water you drink. When you get these cravings, your mental health plummets, since your metabolism is usually shot at a high BMI. If you are Morbidly Obese, that means that without intervention, you are incapable (and I’ll say it louder) INCAPABLE OF LOSING WEIGHT ON YOUR OWN MENTAL STRENGTH. That means 40% or more of your body is screaming at you to eat the ONE thing that won’t let you lose weight. Simple math says that if even 10% of you agrees, you are eating that meal and gaining instead of losing. 

So how do you fight biology? From within. And that isn’t a cheesy poetic line to keep tucked away, that is scientific fact. Your mind and your stomach are linked. If you create an environment where your mind is freed from the stress of eating healthy, you are actually MORE capable of active listening, healthy sleep, critical thinking, and even, you guessed it, weight loss. In order to reverse the effects of your fat cells revolting against your mental fortitude, you can hit the gym. And the good news is that ANY light exercise does this. A walk. A downhill bike ride. Some situps. You don’t have to log 60 minutes of intense cardio or stairs to get the results. 

Joint Rehabilitation

Your body carries extra weight all the time, even if you shift left to right. It has an intense system in place, via muscles and joints, that leverages body mass to carry this weight. When you are overweight, your joints strain constantly. They tighten or even tear. This leads to scarring, en masse, and usually to compression, which causes lasting chronic pain over time. 

Fitness, such as stretching, yoga, dance, or targeted light weight training, can ease tension on those joints, and make your day-to-day life easier, and literally, make your burdens lighter. You may not lose weight, but you will carry that weight with more power, keeping your in check to do more things. The more you can do outside of the gym, the better your weight loss results will be. A sedentary lifestyle will always lead to fat being accumulated in your hips, stomach, and thighs, and this can ONLY be broken up and lost with a fantastic diet for several months, and daily motion in those areas. 

Community

The world of fitness is incredibly accepting, just as much as it can be predatory. For every voracious vlogger, there is a kind everyman on their own journey, looking for support. You get that support the more you engage. Ask your friends to come with you to get healthy. Have them enter into your workouts. Build friendship. Build trust. Get support. 

You are not alone on this journey. 

So can you, in fact, do any of the above training systems and still lose weight? 

No. But it IS hard to lose weight without being a person who can mentally and physically engage with gym training.

But you get a lot of other benefits from weight loss training, and it can get you started in the right direction mentally, which is more than 90% of the battle. 

What are your experiences with entering the fitness world? Are you an expert, brand new, or somewhere in between? Let me know your thoughts!