Wow.
A) I think it’s fantastic that T-mag is coming out with a fat loss program for the morbidly obese.
B) Too much of the “no matter what I do, I can’t lose weight” attitude is clearly, clearly negative–see the NAAFA site for a truly awful display of this attitude. One of the main problems is that the “I can’t do it” becomes “we can’t do it” and everyone keeps dragging each other down. Stupid metaphor: you don’t have to put lids on crab buckets, because the crabs will all pull each other down when one tries to climb out.
C) This, however, isn’t the attitude that people like Eric are displaying. They are trying to educate themselves and better themselves, but the learning curve is steep. Most T-Men/Vixens have been educating themselves about exercise and nutrition for quite some time. Personally, I’ve been lifting for 10 years, but it hasn’t been until the last 2-3 years that I’ve been following more “optimized” diet and training regimes. It took me that long to figure out what works! The morbidly obese aren’t going to take seven or eight years to figure that out.
D) The problem is that it’s hard to find a training program that is really effective for the morbidly obese. Most likely, they’ll try something that’s almost vegan, cut out all meats, and eat “low-fat” cookies and try to do a bunch of cardio. Because that’s the information that’s out there. Which, while it might work for a little while, is hard-to-impossible to stick to, and will short-circut progress after a while. And then, they’re back to the beginning, but more frustrated.
E) So say, instead, that they stumble upon T-mag, and they find this HUGE amount of information. Even with the FAQ and the search engine, they’re going to dig up a lot of stuff that’s going to be hard to sort through. And it’s just not going to gibe with 90% of the information that they’ve heard other places. If they’re crazy, or smart, or they have a friend who pointed the site out to them, they might actually try some of the stuff, but I bet that most of the people will just surf right on out.
F) People ask for my advice about training (I won’t say “all the time,” but it happens) and most of them want to know how to lose fat. Most of these people are obese. I would love to throw something like T-dawg at them, but it’s a hard curve to go from dietary chaos to all the guidelines (carb timing, more protein than they’ve ever eaten before, eating fat to lose fat, etc.) at once. It would be nice to have something like the bodybuilder’s hierarchy of needs, but with diet only, so that a MO person could start with the bottom of the pyramid and move up. Usually, I’ve started people with journaling (“everything that goes in your mouth goes on the pad”) and then I bump up their protein intake and cut back on carbs. That’s usually good enough for a few weeks.
G) But the MAIN problem that I’ve encountered with helping people that are extremely overfat is that it’s hard to find a workout/dietary combination that’s effective enough that they’ll want to stick to it, without being so hard that it just destroys their desire to work out. I’ve destroyed people’s desires both ways–too easy and too hard–to tell the truth. I think walking might be where it’s at for the MO. It burns more calories the more they weigh, and it gets them moving. It seems to “scale” pretty well. Of course, this has to move on to other work fairly soon.
F) The core/leg strength ideas are very true, as well. I’ve found that the MO can be really strong. If you can tap into this resevoir of strength, they might start viewing their bodies differently. They might start thinking of themselves as strong. Which is a big psychological break, and it might start to snowball from there.
G) All I have to say is that this is a great idea, and I hope that the program is a resounding success. It needs to be a combination of the best dieting ideas, best training ideas, and explain these ideas in a way that a complete newbie can understand. More than anything, every aspect needs to be scaled to a level that the MO can do, while being hard enough to get actual effects. Lastly, it needs to be both long and flexible enough (maybe it will come in parts) so that the MO can take the year, two years or more that it’s likely it’s going to take for them to lose all the weight.
H) And it wouldn’t hurt if Shugart wrote something to really kick people in the ass. I know he’s done that for me more than once.
I) This is really important stuff, and I know that the T-mag team are up to the challenge. People die from obesity every day: 300,000 deaths per year in the US (as compared to 400,000 from tobacco related deaths). This is sad because it’s completely preventable. The weapon that we, the T-nation can use against this? Information. So let’s drop some knowledge bombs and save some lives.
d/c