Moderation Doesn’t Work

It is the season of excess.

Everywhere you go there are high calorie, high fat, sugary snacks.

It is easy to stay up too late, skip workouts, and overindulge in just about everything, which brings me to the next instalment in The Top 12 Worst Things we are doing to our Health.

Moderation.

Moderation in all things is not particularly helpful when you want to stay fit, active and healthy.

Not that we should never eat anything unhealthy, skip a workout, spend a day lounging around on a beach, or on the couch, but that it should be a treat.

Moderation is not a treat, it implies a state of being.

Instead of moderation, we should aim for doing more healthy things and doing less of the unhealthy things. Moderation is somewhere in between. Although subtle, it might make all the difference to our desired outcome.

When I think about moderation and the key training principles; Specificity, Overload, Progression, Reversibility and Recovery. It doesn’t fit.

For example, if we look at these principles when training for a marathon you can see how they work. Even if you haven’t trained for a marathon I am sure that you can imagine it is a goal that requires some thought and planning. It is not unlike the goal of staying fit as you age, losing weight, or even being healthy. While these goals may not have the deadline that signing up for a marathon brings, the training principles do not change.

Principles of Training:

Specificity: to improve at a skill you must do that skill or train for that event. You can be very fit, but if you haven’t trained for that marathon it is not going to go well.

Overload: to get better, fitter or faster requires more physical stress than what you are currently used to for adaptations to occur. In the marathon example, you must gradually increase the stress on your muscles, tendons, bones, heart and lungs to adapt to the stress of running longer distances.

Progression: is the gradual and systematic increase in the training stress over time that results in fitness improvements. If you try to increase your running distances too quickly you will likely get injured and not progress.

Reversibility: Use it or lose it.A consequence of poorly executed progression, injuries or extended time away from exercise. It is critical to reduce the intensity and duration of your runs after a marathon, but take too much time off and you will lose all the benefits.

Recovery: to see the benefits of training and overloading the system, rest is required for adaptation to take place. If you were training for a marathon you would taper, or reduce your training load after hard training sessions, after hard periods of training and after the marathon to allow for recovery to occur.

These training principles are the same regardless of your fitness goal. If you want to stay fit, remain active, and be strong, then these are the basic foundations to build upon. Doing more of the healthy things and less of the unhealthy things may not seem like a big difference, but I think it makes a difference in the long run.

Moderation isn’t a training principle.

One of my problems with moderation is that we can push the deadline for healthy changes with moderation, we can trick ourselves into thinking we have more time, or we are doing a little, and that is better than nothing. When maybe we are simply maintaining the status quo.

Moderation doesn’t work when it comes to weight loss either as I have written about it in

Everything in Moderation

Moderation Never Works

Now it is your turn, what do you think about moderation in all things health and fitness?

Change your mind, change your health,

Shayla