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Health & Fitness

Resolution Solution: No Excuses in 2012: Accountability to a Comprehensive Program

Accountability and a Nutrition Prescription will help you go the distance in 2012.

 

When looking to resolve your health, fitness, and fat loss goals in 2012, consider whether your intervention includes a proper understanding and implementation of good nutrition, as well as a program that will hold you accountable to your goals. If it doesn’t, you’re likely to be among the 80 percent that will be staring back at the same resolutions in 2013.

Health Club Habits

People are willing to pay two percent of their annual expenditure for health and fitness needs. Most of which is actually wasted. According to some estimates, more than 60 percent of gym memberships go unused.

It’s no secret that most gyms want you to sign up to long-term contracts. It doesn’t matter to them whether you take advantage of the facilities. There is no accountability on either end of the transaction when the cost is relatively inexpensive and there is no personalized attention. In fact, for most gyms, their best customers are the majority that never show up, and never cancel, because tomorrow will be the day when they get back on track.

The explosion of $10-a-month gym memberships might be doing nothing to combat the obesity epidemic and the related diseases. It’s quite possible this structure is actually contributing to our health woes.

Even if you’re one of the minority who show up to your gym, you can’t exercise your way out of poor nutrition by the notion of burning more calories, writes Gary Taubes in a New York Magazine article:

More-strenuous exercise …. doesn’t help matters—because it works up an appetite. “Vigorous muscle exercise usually results in immediate demand for a large meal,” noted Hugo Rony of Northwestern University in his 1940 textbook, Obesity and Leanness. “Consistently high or low energy expenditures result in consistently high or low levels of appetite. Thus men doing heavy physical work spontaneously eat more than men engaged in sedentary occupations. Statistics show that the average daily caloric intake of lumberjacks is more than 5,000 calories, while that of tailors is only about 2,500 calories. Persons who change their occupation from light to heavy work or vice versa soon develop corresponding changes in their appetite.” If a tailor becomes a lumberjack and, by doing so, takes to eating like one, why assume that the same won’t happen, albeit on a lesser scale, to an overweight tailor who decides to work out like a lumberjack for an hour a day?

When gyms actually supply the poor nutrition in the form of bagels, candy, and pizza, one must question the motives and sincerity in helping members transform their health.

Resolution Solutions

"Four out of five people who make New Year’s resolutions will eventually break them," writes Tara Parker-Pope in The New York Times. "In fact, a third won’t even make it to the end of January."

So how can you be among the 20 percent who stick to their resolutions? Accountability, and a proper nutrition prescription in addition to exercise, argues Tony Ferrao, manager at in Winchester. "Accountability is key to battling so many obstacles that get in the way of the results people want. A lack of accountability coupled with a lack of nutrition based on research, leads to a person giving up on exercise," said Ferrao. "The average person believes that exercise is the key to weight loss and is independent of proper nutrition. When this approach inevitably doesn’t work, they get frustrated and quit."

In 2012, hold yourself accountable to your resolutions. Make sure that you follow a program that includes not only exercise, but proper nutrition as well.  A long-lasting plan includes being held accountable by someone other than yourself when the resolution motivation wears off.



Bob Kaplan holds advance degrees in exercise physiology and business, an undergraduate degree in nutrition, is a nationally certified personal trainer, and owns four Get In Shape For Women locations in Bedford, Wellesley, Westford, and Winchester.

For more information about Kaplan's services at Get in Shape For Women in Winchester, please call 781-729-8100 or visit at 564 Main Street, Winchester, MA  01890, or online at www.getinshapeforwomen.com for a free week trial. Call or visit to schedule a Resolution Accountability Consultation where we will hold you accountable to your 2012 resolutions.

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