Why our beliefs about food and exercise mean we're doomed to fail: Ed Ley at TEDxBristol

before we get started and there's something I'd just like to tell you really quickly when I came down here a couple of weeks ago to have a look at the hall I got chatting to a few of the guys that helped put this event together and I told them I was a personal trainer and the subject of my talk and they said well that's easy you just have to get up there and say you're all too fat you need to eat a little bit less and you need to move a little bit more you have to stop being so lazy and stop being so greedy I thought I was really interesting given what I had to say today I'd like to talk to you about a failure that I had a few years ago I'd like to talk to you about client I had named Angela Angela was a fairly common client for people in my business she'd gone from a size 12 to a size 16 and she wanted to lose a little bit of weight and she wanted my help so Angela and I sat down together and we had a look at her current activity levels and her food preferences and we put together a meal plan for her based on that I also introduced a little bit of exercise but largely focused on fun and learning new movement well after a couple of weeks Angela stopped coming she was never satisfied because the food I was amun-re well I was having re more than she was used to and the exercise I had to do wasn't punishing and it didn't push her to exhaustion or vomiting or any of the other things she was told to expect and I started to think about this I started to wonder why she even came to me in the first place I even asked a few of my clients and a pattern that began to emerge a pattern that suggested that what they really wanted was to be punished they wanted to be punished for their sins gluttony and sloth or sins eating too much not exercising being lazy these are sins they wanted someone that was going to give them structure someone that would be hard and be a disciplinarian and forced them to do the things they didn't want to do they needed to do these things in order to move back into a state of grace the state of grace in this case being the Beach Fit Body it's just really interesting to me one of the things they think about how we eat nowadays and how I have people eat differently is I actually have most of my clients eat more food I have them eat more food because most of them are mostly thing manufactured foods foods like grains and cereals and and ready meals that are very low in nutritional value but very high in salt and fat and sugar now if you think about humans not very long ago when we were eating a whole food diet when we thought out salt it was in fish and seaweed alongside a host of other minerals and when we thought a fad it was in meat along with protein a host of other nutrients and when we thought out sugar it was in fruit and vegetables alongside a host of other vitamins that we need for good health I began to realized that essentially we're starving we just don't realize it because we're still putting food into our mouths we're starving because we're eating food a very low nutritional value but all the markers of nutrition are there in the salt and the fat and the sugar we're living in a modern pharmacy environment I want to just tell you one more thing I think this is really interesting if you take an animal and you feed it badly one of the things that happens is not only does that animal get sick not only does that animals lifespan shorten but that animal stops being active if we look at the early zoos and monkeys they didn't play very much because we were feeding them crap when we started feeding them what they were actually meant to eat in their natural environment the monkeys just began to play obesity isn't caused by gluttony and sloth so when we attempt to reverse it by forced activity and restriction we're fighting against biology and we guaranteed to fail so if I think back to Angela what I should have done is I should have connected with her on a level of understanding that if she's in a really healthy way and she's enough food that she's got plenty of energy and she's feeling good then play will just begin to emerge and the weight will just start to drop off so if I think back to those guys that gave me their advice a few weeks ago I'm not going to give you their advice I'm gonna tell you that if you eat beautifully if you learn how to play then good health will just start to emerge

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 6,214

Rating: 4.775281 out of 5

Keywords: ted x, TEDx, Exercise, TEDxBristol, tedx, Health, United Kingdom (Country), tedx talks, ted talks, Lifestyle, ted talk, Food, tedx talk, ted, English Language (Human Language)

Id: 6CXwo6AC37Q

Length: 5min 2sec (302 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 03 2013