Every day, I go around the city for various reasons: getting food, getting coffee, paying bills, meeting friends, etc. And every day, I’m both amazed and disappointed at the same time. The reason for this is in the glossy magazines and TV ads that assault us like an enraged teacher with a new ruler. Countless ads telling me I can get “ripped abs in six weeks,” “lose 5kg in 7 days,” or “get big biceps in ten minutes a day.” These are all quick fixes and they’re all the same in that they apply one of these two formulas:

Get  +  _______________ + in  +  _________________ = $$$
                (insert desirable thing)   (insert short time period)                                                                

OR
Lose  +  _____________________ + in  +  ___________________ = $$$
(insert undesirable thing)             (insert short time period)

​I’m pretty sure they actually use those formulas in the marketing office. By the way, if you’re wondering who gets the money, it’s not you.

Do some of these quick fixes work? Sure. There are two problems, though. First, almost all of them are completely unsustainable. If you think you can live on two cups of low-fat yogurt and a few pieces of fruit a day for the rest of your life, you obviously haven’t tried it. 

Second, most of these quick fixes ignore a very important question: what do you do after the advertised period ends? Most people either try to do the quick fix again (if it worked), find a different quick fix (if it didn’t), or just go back to what they were doing before. In the first two cases, they rarely get the results they want. In the last one, they end up back where they started.

There’s a saying in business, “It’s not how much you make; it’s how much you keep that matters.” The same is true for fitness: it’s not how much fat you lose; it’s how much you keep off that matters. For that to happen, you need to change your lifestyle. You ate junk food and sat around watching TV all day, then did a 10 day diet. You lost 5kg! Then you go back to eating junk food and sitting around watching TV all day. What do you think will happen? I’ll give you a hint, you gain the 5kg back. Make the necessary lifestyle changes: take the stairs instead of the lift; eat more vegetables and less sugary, fatty crap; do some form of exercise a couple of times a week. There’s a reason that doesn’t get advertised on TV and in magazines: it’s not fashionable and doesn’t make somebody else rich.