fit2fat2fit

By now I am sure many of you, like I, am following fit2fat2fit.com. If you haven't been, it's a blog by a NASM-certified personal trainer who was obsessed with fitness and wanted to better understand his clients journey's, so he chose to spend six months eating crap, and a lot of it, and not working out, and then, starting next month, he will spend six months losing the weight.

I am wondering what others' thoughts are.

This reminds me of a much more minor thing that a new trainer at the gym was telling me. That he had tried hydroxycut in the past, largely because he knew clients would ask him about it and he wanted to have first-hand knowledge. Oy!

I get the premise of fit to fat to fit, I really do.

I think my experience with anorexia has made me better suited to help others (be it anorexics, recovering anorexics, those needing help with nutrition or wanting to seethe impact and importance of weight lifting, and just people trying to be well and healthy in general). However, does that mean I would ever purposefully have an eating disorder? Of course not. Nor do I think it is necessary to have gone through the experience in order to have enough knowledge and understanding to help. You can learn through what your clients tell you, their experiences, what you have witnessed, and what you have read and studied.

While not starting out overweight or unhealthy, it takes a lot mentally and physically to go from average to where he was in the beginning. His thinking, training and eating must have all made a leap. You don't come out of the womb with such passion, drive and focus.

Further, he had the addiction from the other end (he says he was "obsessed"), so I think that puts him in a better position to help than he realizes.

He also even says he has had great success with his clients (he says meal planning and training, so I really hope he has some sort of nutrition degree or certification), making this all the more unnecessary.

His goal is a good one: "to inspire people to get fit, teach them how to do it and give them hope that it IS possible to get fit and stay fit. [He] want[s] to share [his] comprehensive fitness knowledge with [his] followers so that they can know how to lose weight successfully, even though for many it’s going to be a struggle. People that are overweight have to overcome both physical and emotional barriers when it comes to losing weight."

He sounds like a good guy, assuming he's not doing it for the media attention he has received. He sounds sincere. But the whole plan also sounds so dangerous.

First, if you're going to gain all this fat, you can eat at a more reasonable surplus (and gain less) or at least on foods that nourish your body. You can eat at a surplus on healthy foods and still pack on the pounds. You don't need to stuff yourself with tons of unprocessed crap and have Man v Food style challenges. He would still gain the fat he's looking to gain, but would at least protect his health some. But, as I've read through the blog, he has developed certain cravings, and I guess if he really wants to experience what overweight people experience, he would need to do this in order to 'suffer' more when trying to get the weight off.

But it also seems pointless because he really still is obsessed with being fit, not to mention he gave himself a time limit, so he's approaching weight loss and exercise at a totally different level than any of his clients would be.

70 lbs in 23 weeks.

randi morse, randi.morse@gmail.com, newton, ma