There’s good news and bad news when it comes to getting on a treadmill to burn off those weekend drinks or that huge meal you ate last night. Or that chocolate bar after it.

The bad news is, it actually doesn’t really work like that but the good news is, at least you’re willing to do something about your bad habits. And yes, excessive food and alcohol intake are bad habits that left unchecked will literally be the downfall of your health.

The problem is you can’t balance out bad habits with good ones. Again, it doesn’t work like that. What we must do is work on the bad habits, this is essential for better health.

I am 56 years old, 12% bodyfat at 84kgs, can easily rep 120kgs on deadlifts, can sprint (well, not right now – see my last post on that) and play a decent game of tennis. Am I fit? Am I healthy? I eat minimally and have very little processed food in my diet, don’t eat meat, intermittent fast, get 8 hours of sleep every night and don’t drink much (alcohol, that is).

My health status is very good and I rarely even get the flu. My fitness is therefore having a direct, positive effect on my health.

You will note I said I eat minimally with very little processed food. I eat like this because I have determined that as a species we have completely lost the plot with food. Completely.

We look for foods we like to eat, which usually means they’re bad for us. We eat too much of these foods as we eat too much food, period. We eat based on what advertising and promotional materials tell us are healthy options and through history this has simply not worked. The “low” or “no fat” movement that happened in the 1990’s is a great example of a terrible piece of advice that got gobbled up (sorry) by the masses, much to their detriment. But there’s been plenty more even the good old, “breakfast is the most important meal of the day” and “eat 3 square meals a day”, both fallacies that create issues for us.

We’re always wanting to try the new restaurant, the new cafe, cocktail or we line up for some new fish-tasting crisps (you have to be in Asia for that one) hoping to find something new and unusual for our taste buds.

And as long as these things are treats not staples it’s all good. But quite often they’re not. As we’ve become more affluent, we’ve become lazy and prefer to eat out or have food delivered, having zero control over the origins of the food or it’s preparation and the general quality of it.

As I’ve often written, food is literally the building blocks of our human tissue regeneration. Our bodies are always regenerating and just like a building, if these blocks are of poor quality it will crumble and collapse and our bodies are exactly the same.

Feed your body haphazardly with little attention to quality and pay the price.

So eating (or drinking) badly and excessively thinking you can “burn it off” is almost infantile thinking and as I said, won’t work.

I’ve discussed the concept of the fat burn zone in previous posts and while the premise is somewhat accurate the issue is most people are eating too frequently to actually ever be able to burn fat this way. If you eat every few hours you are constantly processing food and therefore your body constantly has energy available to it. So thinking you can burn stored fat in this environment is simply not going to happen.

Your focus must be on food quality –

• Eat nutrient dense foods such as nuts, seeds, eggs, green leafy vegetables, berries and some oils (olive, coconut being 2).
• Buy as locally and as fresh as possible.
• Try to limit cooking, many foods do not need cooking to eat and cooking rarely enhances the quality of any food.
• Avoid cheap foods, it’s usually the case that cheap means low quality, sad but true and this is especially the case for bottled water.

In focussing on food quality you will not store excessive amounts of fat. And by deploying a good intermittent fasting strategy, you will use fat as a fuel for large parts of your day.

Finally, burning calories is the wrong mindset. The correct mindset is turning your body into a fat burning machine by training the right way and eliciting the hormonal response that benefits you best. I wrote about this in this post here.

This will result in you becoming leaner, stronger, fitter – I am prepared to guarantee it!