First Posted: 12/29/2014
An athletic and healthy year in review.
The goal: Fitness
The problem: Countless ways of achieving this that it is overwhelming.
Every year they change and by the end of the year, only a few are left. What’s worse is that this time of year everyone tries to sell you the latest fitness gadgets that don’t live up to their hype and within a couple of months these gadgets wind up in your closet, under your bed or broken.
These people are “promised” results by the marketing pitch and are sadly disappointed with the outcome.
Every year the ACSM (American College of Sports Medicine) puts out a list of fitness trends that they predict will be hot in the upcoming year.
For 2015, the results are:
1. Body Weight Training
2. High Intensity Interval Training
3. Educated and Experienced Fitness Professionals
4. Strength Training
5. Personal Training
6. Group Personal Training
In addition to the “what’s in” list, here are a couple of things you can ditch in 2015.
1. Paleo Diet
The Paleo (short for Paleolithic) diet is based on the somewhat bizarre notion that humans of this day and age should be eating like our most far-flung ancestors, the cavemen, to maintain optimal health and fitness—the way we were “meant to eat.” While there are some aspects of the diet that are perfectly fine, the overriding theme is that not only is eating Paleo too restrictive to maintain, but that our ancestors weren’t all that healthy, anyway, and tended to suffer from atherosclerosis, the hardening of the arteries, likely from their meat-based diets.
2. Raw food diet
The foundational belief of the raw food-only diet is that cooking zaps the natural enzymes and nutrients from food, while uncooked foods retain all of their nutritional value. You’re all but guaranteed to lose weight on a raw food diet, solely because you’ll be restricted to consuming primarily fruits and vegetables, but as for the benefits of an entirely raw diet? Questionable. Certain foods have actually been shown to be more nutritious when cooked, and plus, the digestion process breaks up many of the enzymes in food anyway. Furthermore, a raw food diet can deprive the body of essential nutrients, leading to more easily broken bones and osteoporosis.
