The Failure of the Health/Fitness/Obesity Industry

There's alot of 'craptitioners' out there and, unfortunately, the desperate, unsuspecting public get caught in the hype, expensive useless products and programs, and the quackery.
There are no easy answers, but a good beginning is to make sure whoever you go to for any treatment is a fully qualified, properly accredited professional with experience and try to get client and peer reviews on them as much as possible.
Unfortunately, a BIG impediment to getting effective treatment by properly trained, accredited professionals is the lack of third-party reimbursement for their services. Hopefully, there will be improvements on this front as well as better ACCESS to best-treatment options for ALL. Why should only those who can afford it be privy to the best that's out there? And even then....
Getting fit is a combination of optimal diet, physical activity/exercise, stress management, and often emotional support that may involve counselling. Obesity is a multifactorial condition that has worsened over the past 25 years as the environment that we live in has become more obesinogenic -- on EVERY factor implicated in leading to its cause -- diet, pa/exercise,stress,family/friend dynamics and networks, etc.
Hopefully, things are changing toward less obesinogenic environments.
It's very hard to pinpoint the reason why a person fails to get and stay fit, lose weight and keep it off, etc.

Oh, do I feel your frustration...really. I have a theory. I think people have simply lost touch with their bodies. It starts from the minute a child is conceieved and the medical industry...yes "industry" starts treating pregnancy like a disease. Then it continues on in the delivery room...where women are taught to fear pain and a process that has been going on for eons, and intervention becomes the rule and not the exception. It continues when because there is no real support system, women opt for formula over breast-feeding (not because many of them don't want to, either and not because there is anything wrong with women who ultimately chose forumula). It lives on with the mass marketing of pre-packaged baby food and continues on from there.
People no longer trust their bodies because most of them are so completely out of touch with their bodies it is scary. The "system" is more than happy to facitiliate this separation from ourselves. Got an ache, take a pill. Get sick, take a pill. Healthy and want to be healthier...you got it, take a pill. Having a side effect from your pill...take another pill :-)
Eat when I'm hungry...what's hunger?
Eat real food...you mean corn flakes aren't real food?
Sleep when you're tired...hell I'll have plenty of time to sleep when I am dead?
Whose fault...ultimately I blame the "system". I recently starting writing on nutrition/health matters for an online magazine. Just did an article titled weight loss-eat more not less. Largest page views yet. People care, they really, really care. I would love to blame them, but I honestly don't think they realize how misled they have been.
I think that there are a lot of good health practitioners that feel paralyzed by managed care. As a physical therapist, I also worked as a trainer. Sad, when as a trainer, I got to spend 10 times as much time with people.
I think greed via big business and marketing are at the root of the problem. The good info is out there it just isn't shoved in our face everywhere we go...not like the mass marketing we get from everyone else.
Honestly, the health message hasn't changed substantially in the last few decades...but what has changed is the amount of marketing and the types of products being marketed to people. There is no balance in the messages and the crap keeps getting worse. How can we really expect people to succeed when they are constantly being bombarded with this *#&*...and people wonder why we have an obesity problem??
Great post.

A very important topic. And lots of gratitude to fitness experts who care to ask these questions. I can only say from personal experience that going to psychotherapy finally put an end to 1000s of dollars on trainers and unsuccessful diets. Also,weight loss isnt always a straight linear path. As long as the trend was more loss than gain, the hiccups in the middle (weeks when I gained), were lessons but not setbacks and not a reason to quit. Because of therapy I learned not to quit as soon as I gained a pound one week. Maybe it was about not feeling judged by my trainer, who explicitly said beforehand thatbi would never be judged for gains because he understood that I was working hard, or tying my self-worth into weight loss because I achieved personal growth regardless.

Obesity needs to be tackled from the diet front but also from the exercise front.
People needs to understand that just as much that cardio burns calories, lifting weight and increasing muscle size should increase metabolism. Muscle cells burns more calories than fat cells.

whoa, well this kind of story is old news. that's why usually a program of dieting have to followed by some larning around the topic, not just pure trust blindly an "expert". you can search in the internet for the info. So whose to blame? i guess both..the what so called 'expert" for exploiting this topic, and the victim for the careless for entering the program without knowledge.

Perhaps a bit of both, but it's hard to say how much your client is at fault without knowing her full story. I do think the person needs to take some responsibility and really ask herself if she has the right mindset of if she is self-sabotaging. I definitely have to say that diet industry infuriates me most of the time. It is all about selling a product and that "product" is beauty, thinness, and perhaps and unreal ideal. The industry promises something they cannot possibly guarantee and its customers are left feeling inadequate a large percentage of the time. It's a thought provoking question you ask in this post... and perhaps a bit of a paradox as well. Maybe one thing fuels the other... the diet industry plays off the woman's insecurities and faults and just plain human-ness, and the woman plays off the fact that she knows the industry cannot give her what it promises, so she feels content to fail and blame something other than herself... Such a crazy cycle. If I had to place my blame, I blame the industry. It's unnecessary. If a person wants to be healthy, they can achieve it with a support system and the right resources.

For me - I "knew" all the right things to do. I knew what I should be eating, that I shouldn't be sitting on the couch all day long, and that M&M's weren't dinner. But even with all my knowledge I still did all the wrong things.
I bought the books, tried the programs, and purchased exercise equipment to no avail. It wasn't until I decided in my own mind that I was going to change that it happened.
Whose fault is it? Mine. Did the diet industry contribute to my obesity? Probably.
Great post!

I was sortuf in the same boat before I found your blog Doug! I had the same feelings also, that maybe it was just me and that I couldn't achieve the weight loss. I had read everything I could about diet and so forth, but nothing ever seemed to work that well and everything conflicted. Eat carbs, don't eat carbs, eat fat, don't eat fat, calories don't matter, calories are the only thing that matter, etc... I also had to finally admit that I can't just exercise the weight off and eat whatever I want (but I tried!), it helps but diet is what sets weight loss in motion, and exercise is more of a limited throttle mechanism.
What I have finally come to realize is its a little of everything, and if you apply a little of ALL the knowledge intelligently rather then sticking to one item, you can make it work. Also along the way changing things up will keep everything going. At least so far that seems good, I was nearly 230lbs when I found your blog and had barely dropped below that with the diets and exercise I was using, I am now down to 204lbs atm and moving towards my ~185lb goal at a good click. It may or may not be a straight shot to my weight, but even if I stall I know what to do to get it going again.
Thanks again for being a beacon to help guide us Doug!
-Matt

I've been not listening to the experts, instead trying to learn to trust my body. It took a lot of training, trial and error, and effort to break some bad habits, but I'm down from BMI 33 to about 26 and still dropping. It's been slow but mostly steady, and now, since I'm close, it's slower, and I often have to tweak and adjust. However, I don't feel deprived, but I had to adjust my mind to live this lifestyle (regular exercise, reasonable eating) forever.

I am not surprised- the weightloss industry is just that- a business. The point of a business is to make money. If she loses the weight and keeps it off, she won't come back and spend her money! But even though I am not surprised I am still saddened.
We see so many strategies aimed at reducing obesity, but none seem to be working! Have you seen anything that have worked for many people?
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