So basically the author used a couple of examples of athletes Phelps and Armstrong, and said that because they have a terrible diet their training compensates for that. So whats wrong with this idea? You train hard and it'll make up for the junk in your system, right? Calories in vs. calories out. If your expenditure is more than your income you'll always be at a loss - which is exactly what losing weight is about. Why is the author wrong in putting it forward like this?
We could be here all day as the reasons are so many and come from so many different directions. The whole idea represents a gross misunderstanding between the average person "losing weight" or staying thin and top level human performance. The two do not belong in the same conversation and it is a complete lapse in reason to try to bridge them.
One thing that is wrong with it is the idea of 'bad versus good diets'. Again, here we have the attempted medicalization of food and diet. For someone who is obese or severely overweight, this may be appropriate and a properly planned diet may represent a health intervention. Even so this person has become a patient or someone in need of something akin to "therapy" and a diet, by these terms, by taking out certain components and putting in others for the purposes of specific effects could be "medical" in a way. This person would be assumed to be in poor health and much danger of complications from his or her state of obesity.
Then you have the average person who is somewhat overweight. While certain health parameters could be assumed to be improved by that person getting "fit" there is no need to glide to that person being "sick" or to medicalize his or her pursuit of fitness. Certainly people engage in such a pursuit for many reasons, not all of them specifically health related. They could be cultural reason, performance or lifestyle reasons but we do not need to turn them into a patient for them to successfully pursue those goals.
Now, we have someone taking elite high performance athletes and not only that but athletes who could be classified as endurance or ultra-endurance and imagining that they are working off a diet of junk. Even the statement that "Phelps eats junk" is suspect. They eat TO perform. Their diets coincide with their caloric needs AND their needs for carbohydrates. They are not patients they are athletes.
The other problem is calling up two people as representative of some general concept with no idea of what represents a baseline for them. Much the same problem was inherent in Morgan Spurlocks "Super Size Me" experiment and follow up "experiments" by other people. How much would Lance Armstrong weigh if he did not train? How much would Michael Phelps weigh? What would be the "baseline" they tended towards? Likewise there seems to be an unspoken assumption that they would both be eating like pigs and if it weren't for training they'd be fat. Not likely. Again..their eating reflects their performance needs. They don't train to work off their diet and even if they did what they do has not bearing on a general population.
Even if there is something to be gained from this they are "case studies". You cannot extrapolate that to a general population.
We have so many subjective things coming into play rather than objective analyses of the specific circumstances. We have universal assumptions. About what is a "bad diet". What is "a lot of mass".
Instead of illogical and irrational arguments built on wishful thinking and the obvious need to sell your tiny little box to a big audience, one might actually look at some data. Upon which time one might find that diet is, time and time again, shown to be the most important criteria for weight loss with exercise being a very important support to that but NOT the key by any means. Most people fail to "work off their diets".
Of course it is easy to see that most of the things on that site are contradictory and are simple regurgitations of regurgitations. Here in discussing it I have made it much more important than it is because the notions are quite absurd. That is why I chose to do a hatchet job and ridicule it in the first place, lol.
This is a bunch of incompetent nonsense. Incompetent does not know itself, unfortunately, so there is nothing to be done but keep fighting the good fight against superficially plausible BS from wholly incompetent sources. This is something that I've mentioned to you guys time and time again..when you construct arguments such as this Armstrong and Phelps thing..most people will not question it. They will not reflect on it. They will not be skeptical of it. They will assume that the very existence of such an argument means that it must be logical.
Let's just fix the language of the other post:
To gain weight, it’s generally recommended to aim for 5000 calories per day. Start there (or work your way up to it) and then eat more if you’re not gaining fast enough. For us naturally skinny people, our appetite usually sucks. Mine still does to this day! So here are my rules to bulk up:
Goes to:
To get fat, it is usually recommended to pick some arbitrary huge number of calories. Then, if you are not getting fat fast enough, eat more. For us naturally skinny people, our appetite usually sucks. So here are my rules to get fat and bloated so you can be like your Aunt Emma and do the yo-yo:
