Newsflash: Your Body is a Caloric Cheapskate!

The global gym industry has an estimated worth of nearly $100 billion USD and it’s comprised mostly of people who want to lose weight and look better. The problem is we, as an industry, are still promoting some of the same weightless tactics from decades prior. The saying goes, “if your goal is to lose weight, do more cardio”. But if your goal is to bulk up, then “just lift weights, bro!” There are so many problems with this concept which we’ll get into later in this chapter but first let’s talk about how the body really works.

When it comes to caloric expenditure, your body is inherently frugal by design, burning the least amount of calories possible for any given task. It’s like that cheap friend we all have who would rather die than pay full price for anything. If you look back to our ancestors, there is good evolutionary reason for this as we adapted to get the greatest amount of yield for each calorie ingested. We know this is true because [insert research on caloric expenditure] This brings up an important question, if we know this about the human body, why is the fitness industry still perpetuating the dated concepts surrounding weightloss? 

Part of the problem is an economic one. Similar to the problems that arose in healthcare when large corporate interests entered the equation, the fitness industry suffers from a similar sickness. We have big box gyms who’ve invested incredible amounts of money in machines that are the human equivalent to a hamster wheel and a constant stream of advertisements on TV, social media and magazines that are on the perpetual quest for the next viral product. We won’t even get into the supplement industry whose impact on the US economy alone exceeds $159billion USD. 

It is heartbreaking to see people spinning their tires on mind numbing amounts of cardio when in reality the thing that will make them not only lose weight, but keep it off is to build more muscle which ironically may, depending on ones body composition, make them gain more weight when they step on the scale!