Spend a few seconds online and chances are you’ll see an advertisement, a Facebook or Instagram post or a Tweet concerning some “new breakthrough” in dietary supplements designed to burn fat, detox your body, make you ripped with muscles, or even grow certain parts of the body like a miracle, all without changing your diet or exercise regimen.
Product ads with phrases like “doctors HATE this product” attempt to dupe people into thinking, “well this must work so well that it’s putting doctors out of business”. But what it should make them think is, “OK, so this is not approved by the FDA and could probably harm me.” These products attempt to relate themselves to the “get fit” movement that has become so popular over the past few years.
The movement is split into several factions, some of which go the organic foods way, eating all natural products and exercising regularly, a way of life that is the most effective, but by far the most difficult. Others tend to try and take the easy way out, taking diet pills and supplements, drinking pre-mixed shakes spiked with protein (along with sugar) or products designed to “cleanse” your body of every bad element, all without spending a single minute in the gym.
While some of these products do have their place in living the healthy lifestyle, often times people find themselves using them instead of proper diet and exercise. This mentality of using unnatural measures (no matter how “natural” they claim to be) to magically transform yourself into a lean, mean, fat-burning machine, all while sitting on the couch all day, is simply wrong.
Take a look at diet pills. Sure, they tend to work when you first start them, but what happens to 90 percent of people when they stop taking them? They gain the weight back. Getting healthy and fit calls for a lifestyle change, and adding a new pill or supplement to a diet full of sugar and fat does not qualify. Diet pills are simply ineffective for long-term use, and that’s not even referencing all of the additional health risks that come with them.
The latest trend has become the idea of detoxing your body. These new products, advertised to “cleanse” the body, are making people believe that our bodies are full of toxins ready to kill us at any moment. It also tends to make people forget that we have livers and kidneys, which are there to detox naturally.
And it’s easy to be confused. When a pill promoted as a cleanser keeps you in the bathroom for hours on end, it’s easy to believe that it may be working. With that mentality, Ex-Lax falls in the same category as a detox supplement. Sure, you may drop a little weight at first, but soon enough you’ll realize that all that weight took your health with it, and suddenly you become more dehydrated than a mixed martial arts fighter on weigh-in day.
The point is we humans tend to try and take the easy way out. We want the miracle pill that will make all of our problems go away without putting forth any effort. And while that pill may one day become a reality, it’s just not something we can have today without the risk of becoming severely malnourished. In the end, the only way we can get that body mass index, blood pressure and muscle tone to where they need to be is by doing it the old-fashioned way.