Health and fitness are usually made to seem too complex.
If you read a lot of fitness magazines and blogs (as I often do), you’re told a confusing variety of complex advice. It makes your head spin.
You’re told that eggs, butter and meat are bad for you. Then another crowd will tell you those same things are actually good. Then you’ll hear running is good for you, and the bodybuilding and primal crowds will scoff at longer-distance running. You’ll hear that lifting weights is the best way to get into shape, and others will laugh at that. You’ll hear a million variations of the best workouts, of when to time your nutrition, of how to periodize your workouts, of how to measure fitness, of what supplements you need to take … ad nauseam.
It’s enough to make you want to give up.
Fortunately, fitness doesn’t have to be that complex.
In fact, you can boil it down to two simple rules:
- Get your body moving on a regular basis; and
- Eat a moderate amount of real, whole foods (with occasional indulgences).
I believe if you stuck to those two rules, and stuck with them for awhile, you’d get fit. Doing one but not the other will result in an improvement in health for many people (not all), but it would be an incomplete health. Do both most days of the week and you’re on your way to health and fitness.
But what about specific macronutrient ratios (fancy way of saying the breakdown of protein, carbs and fats)? What about meal frequency and timing? What about workout frequency, splits, timing, reps, and more? You could add all these types of rules and many more, but the truth is, all the complexities are usually a way of masking some simple truths: if you want to lose fat or weight, you have to have a calorie deficit, and if you want to build muscle, you’ve got to use exercise to get stronger. The other stuff is mostly guesswork, and while these complicated programs probably work, they usually work because they promote one or more of the principles in this post, not because of their complexities.
The two rules above are all you need, however, most of us need a little more detail, so here’s a more complete set of simple fitness rules. As always, remember that:
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