The Walking Dead

• People on diets (well, crap diets)
• People who live in ‘health food’ shops eating bird seed and other crap that they pretend is nice.
• Vegans and vegetarians that don’t know what they are doing
• People that do too much cardio and not enough training…

People on diets are the biggest culprits. I’m not talking about people who are following a program and actually know what they are doing…I’m talking about people who are on a diet so they eat ‘less’ but also eat really poor quality food that is only based on restricting calories and following a ‘point’ or ‘sin’ scheme.

Imagine you took you cars petrol or oil and diluted it, threw a load of crap into it that your car can’t use as fuel and then went driving in it… If it didn’t just break down immediately, it’s performance would be greatly reduced and eventually wear and tear would get to it and it would come to a screeching halt. That is what happens when you eat crap quality food, with intention of just cutting calories without eating quality food, all the time – you get tired, irritable and eventually piss everyone or yourself off so much that you give up on this crap excuse for a ‘diet’. (example: You’ve 12 points or sins left today and the chocolate bar is 12 instead of the chicken and vegetables which is 6… and you still go for the chocolate bar, shame on you)

The same is true for people that think they are ‘eating healthy’ all the time. They won’t eat anything with more than 2 ingredients and spend their whole time preaching to everyone how bad all of their food is…sorry but you look like you’re about to fall over, I’m not listening to you.

Vegetarianism can be a perfectly healthy way of living. Even vegans can get all their nutrients from plant-based foods if they play their cards right. Any vegetarian that has done their homework and aren’t some sort of weird conspiracy theorist about meat being bad for you knows that in order to be a vegan you have to make sacrifices and you need to know your shit. You need to vary your protein sources, you need to get your fats from a varied source and keep your essential fat intake separate to your regular fat intake. It’s a hassle and it’s a lifestyle that needs to be taken seriously, not something you decide to do one day because you think it sounds cool or you are jumping on some bandwagon of some goon online that doesn’t know their arse from their elbow. Do that and you will end up looking and feeling like a malnourished zombie.

**disclaimer… If vegan or vegetarianism is a moral choice, I have no problem with that. It is people that think it’s,

1. Easy to do and/or 2. Automatically better for you with no scientific backing, that annoy the piss out of me.

This next bit is a sensitive subject for some people but I don’t care.

I have given out about cardio/running/anything that takes like 3 hours to do, just to burn some calories.

 

Cardio is fine if you:

1. Have the time to waste 3 hours just to burn a couple of hundred calories per week.

2. Have excellent joint integrity and are not prone to injury.

3. Have an excellent technique in whatever mode of cardio you are participating in.

or..

4. If you enjoy it, which I don’t understand, but each to their own.

Think about a few things for a moment. Resistance training with a little mix of interval training is a lot more economical use of your time/has a much higher return of interest than flapping around on a treadmill for hours every week. You burn more kcal’s and you improve your overall shape too…Win-Win.

If you are shit at whatever mode of cardio you choose to do then you are going to injure yourself, bottom line. Even if you are ‘fit’, if your technique is crap you are going to be performing thousands if not tens of thousands of repetitions with poor form every time you do cardio… what effect do you think this has on your joints?
If you enjoy cardio, that’s great… I’m not about to say that it is all bad. If you have some sort of strength program in which you do some muscle and joint strengthening exercises, then cardio is fine, if not beneficial. Here is the pecking order of the effect of different types of exercise just in case you want a summary.

Last place/ you’re fucked – Do nothing, eat crap and feel like shit all the time.

5th place – Walk the dog, keep ‘active’ and eat crap that you think is good, but it isn’t.

4th place – Cardio training, no resistance training, eat crap the weekend, feel guilty, and compensate by undereating during the week and lose muscle.

3rd place – Resistance training, no cardio, eat crap the weekend, feel guilty, and compensate by undereating during the week but maintain muscle and most likely lose fat as a result of the resistance training.

2nd place – Resistance training, no cardio, eat healthy nutritious food most of the time with an odd cheat here and there to ensure consistency and lose fat, build muscle and probably look and feel great.

1st place – Resistance training, interval training, moderate cardio, eat healthy nutritious food most of the time with an odd cheat here and there to ensure consistency and definitely look and feel great.