Actually, according to a CNN article around the matter…
The United States will not be escaping the obesity epidemic crisis anytime soon: Nearly 40% of adults and 19% of youth are obese, the highest rate the country has ever seen in all adults, according to research released Friday by the National Center for Health Statistics.
This is where the fitness industry continues to fail and I’m not happy about it, especially since I’m part of the fitness industry. With the rise of poshy and boutique fitness studios and more gyms, you’d think it’ll have some impact on the obesity rates but yet nothing.
Why is that?
Because people are more interested in the bells and whistles, and don’t want to think about the hard work and consistency it takes in order to create change in their lives to become healthier and stronger.
They are more interested in the decor, the vibes, and whether or not the cool kids are going there.
I get it.
People want a place that they can call their third home. A place where they feel they belong. I get it:
“Sometimes you want to go
Where everybody knows your name
And they’re always glad you came
You wanna be where you can see
Our troubles are all the same” – Cheers theme song
But wherever that place is, you have to make sure that they are more interested in the long game rather than the short game and the transaction.
It’s places that promote workouts that make you cringe in pain and have you crawling out the doors to your car is not promoting a healthy nor sustainable fitness lifestyle. When you have workouts that people get through in order to feel like they just achieved a badge of honor and bravery, you are not doing those people any good.
What you are teaching them, is that if you don’t annihilate yourself every training session then you didn’t do enough.
Which is complete absurdity.
Here’s Where Shit Goes Wrong
There is a huge division because of the flood of misguided information, misguided fitness “experts”, and misguided people.
On one side you have people who talk about being hardcore, getting after it every day, becoming a badass, saying your are lazy if you aren’t puking after a workout, and so on. Many of these people are seen as fitness “experts” because they post entertaining videos and posts on social media that grab people’s attention.
It’s much cooler to follow someone who is entertaining and gets you amped up on false motivation, rather than the person who is tell you to take it slow, follow a process, and be patient.
In today’s society where everything can come to us at an instant notice, who wants to be patient?
Then on the other side are those who look at the fitness people and those who are into eating healthy as people who don’t enjoy life. Or they are the ones who tried to go the whole fitness route but were either misinformed or misguided which led them to think it’ll never work for them.
Again, it’s much easier to fail and quit than failing and trying a different route.
The majority of the people are stuck in the extremes while there are those in the middle who are trying to find some middle ground between the two sides.
There’s no such thing as the middle ground, right? Wrong.
Sadly one side is winning at the expense of the other side.
According to statistics, while obesity is gaining more popularity because of it’s consistent increase, the fitness and health industry continues to profit showing no signs of making any change.
I’m sorry fitness industry. That just means – we suck.
So What Now?
Honestly, I don’t have an answer that’ll help with changing the direction of the obesity statistics.
But what I can tell you is that I’m going to keep telling saying that you must take responsibility of your health. Working on your fitness and health is going to take time and there will be failures.
It’s not going to be easy and you will want to cut the corners which will only bite you in the ass down the line.
You will be misguided because of the flood of the misinformed and misusage of powerful tools like social media.
On behalf of the fitness and health industry, I’m sorry that nothing is being done to solve the obesity epidemic.
