The sudden realization that you have somehow become Jabba the Hutt comes to everyone differently. Maybe you're going through your closet and puzzling over why someone has replaced all your clothing with what is clearly a bunch of children's clothes. Maybe you wander past a mirror and are alarmed to see some fat stranger in your house. Wait a minute, you think, that fat stranger is me! And then, sobbing, you eat a wheelbarrow of ice cream sundaes.
It doesn't have to be this way. It doesn't even have to be hard for it not to be this way. Here's how to start getting in better shape with the least possible effort.
1. Pick any physical activity whatsoever that is fun.
Forget all the training montages you've ever seen. Exercise is not all running up the stairs of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in order to escape enthusiastic children. Anything that you find fun and that involves moving will work. Anything.
Play soccer; play golf; play hopscotch. Do yoga. Ride a bike. Duel your friends with cardboard tubes. Every single one of these options is excellent. We are actually telling you to sword fight with cardboard tubes if that's what it takes. This is the first and only time in history someone will offer such an idea as fitness advice.
2. Find some way to eat healthy food. The problem with phrases like "going on a diet" and "eating healthy" is that diets are usually a step-by-step plan for human misery, and asparagus tastes so awful it's like someone is actually killing you, in your mouth. Also "eating healthy" is grammatically incorrect, but that fact helps absolutely nobody.
Don't aim for asparagus and misery. Don't force or subtract anything at all. Just add to your diet some stuff that's better for you than other stuff. There are tons of lists of healthy alternatives out there, and many of them are not very helpful ("Instead of drinking whole milk... don't!") but all you've got to do is fill up on anything you can tolerate that is not a deep-friend waffle. Liberal use of zero-calorie condiments like hot sauce can make broccoli taste like... well, just painful broccoli, but still. Give it a shot.
3. Smash all your mirrors and incinerate all your scales. Okay, not really. But hear us out. If there's one reason diet and exercise programs fail, it's that most of them stink. But if there are two reasons, then the second is that most people give themselves about a week to suddenly look like a Greek deity, discover that they've lost exactly zero pounds, then give up and hook themselves directly to an IV of cake frosting. Your biology is designed to retain fat, in case tomorrow there is no more food somehow. Tricking your body into not doing that will take a while, so in the meantime, avoid constantly demoralizing yourself with your lack of progress. If you ever used to pretend that the floor was lava when you were a kid, well, apply the same principle here. The scale is lava.
4.) Literally do anything. Even if this list reads like a series of things you will never do, it's crucial that you just move around, at all.
If you take two identical groups of people—same exact diet, same genetics, no exercise whatsoever—you'll find that the group more prone to sitting gains a buttload of weight (figuratively), while the group that sits less doesn't. It's science. A science man says so.
The longer you sit motionless, going "BLUH, I AM WATCHING CRIMINAL MINDS," the more likely you are to become fat or dead. Prolonged lounging basically makes your body think "Welp, I guess I am a hibernating bear," whereupon it almost stops burning calories and doing all the other biological things that result in thin people. This is generally a bad thing, for those of you who are not bears.
So just do something; anything. Unless the thing you do is diving into a pile of Twinkies and then eating all the Twinkies and then dying of Twinkies. Do anything other than that. The fat stranger in the mirror will thank you for it.
How many times do you work out each week?
Related Post: Blogging My Workout
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