Stop Giving Unsolicited Fitness Advice
By: Shagun Sharma
Tags: Self, Health, Nutrition, Fitness, Empathy

First, ask how they feel

This simple question can take you and your friend, relative, or student ten steps ahead into a more comfortable and decent conversation.

“Hey, sorry for intruding. I’m wondering if you’re open to discussing health in general? “Okay, I guess.” “Thanks! First things first, I think you are great just the way you are. If there’s anything you would like to discuss in detail, let me know because I happen to know a thing or two about health, nutrition and exercise.”

Then, pause to let the other person respond and go by their cues.

This might not be the perfect way. But it’s a good way to start a conversation around one of the most sensitive topics for an individual.

For me, this elicited a sweet smile from my sister. She acknowledged the honesty, openness, and option of my question.

She comfortably mentioned that yes, she is not perfectly happy being very slim and of small build compared with her average college peers. She has been frequently mistaken to be a school student whenever she went to teach high school students.

“All right, got it, perfect. So now do this and that and you will be…”

Stop. Hold your horses. Use your informed knowledge to guide better.

Get to know if they “understand” health

Still keeping my focus, I asked her if she feels that her small body stature is unhealthy.

Often times, people “think” that having a body structure which is not the norm around them simply implies that they are not doing enough to be healthy. Probably they are eating less, probably they are working out inadequately, or anything else which they are doing which is keeping them away from becoming the norm.

Something must be wrong, right?

It is a far more common notion than we’d like it to be. I suffered from this in high school. Come to think of it, at times in college too. It’s something you would have definitely thought of at points in your lives, isn’t it?

Jump to today, if you follow the topic “health” using even Quora, you know that body type is a very, very complex equation, and defining “healthy” for these different body types is even more so.

Slim people have been found to live longer than average people. Short people have been found to live much longer. Celebrating all bulky or muscle-ly does not seem to be statistically significant anymore. So is our present knowledge about the definition of health all wrong?

The point in consideration is that it is too naive to tag a person unhealthy based on his/ her body type “just because” it doesn’t fit the norm. Take for example a well-established study by the European Heart Journal, which stated: “Overweight and obese people were found to be at no greater risk of developing or dying from heart disease or cancer, compared with normal-weight people, as long as they were metabolically fit despite their excess weight.”

My cousin smiled again, and said, yes, she knows this (bummer) and she understands that her health is not detrimental by any angle right now. But, it can get tricky with less muscle and fat at a later stage of her life.

Which I completely agreed to (and appreciated her knowledge of.) She would like to gain some muscle — that’s her goal.

“Well then, start eating blah blah, start exercising blah blah …”

Nope. Not yet.

What have you been doing so far?

Okay, funnily enough, this article seems like a typical nutritionist interview.

Photo by Jopwell from Pexels

But probably not this question.

In my fitness journey, I felt the biggest gap was to not being asked about my ongoing approach with whoever I was taking advice from.

I always wanted to discuss my current plan, and why it should work or was not working, or anything which ensured that I remained consistent with plans until their realization time. But no. Never happened.

This led to me running from one person’s advice to another’s without following through the first ones fully, eventually doomed to quit the second ones to fall for a third’s advice!

And it was sometime before I learned the art of being consistent, analyzing, improving and improvising personal strategies with focused external feedback. Therefore, always first listen to what they have been doing so far, before advising on what they should be doing from here.

My sister took a carb intensive diet, with meals broken into parts throughout the day. But she exercised quite less.

She believed, as so many of us slim people do, that bulking up on carbs would somehow, increase the fat and muscle content and make them at least look fuller. Lean muscles can come later.

She already checked some boxes I was going to advise on, so very well this step:

Skipped the conversation of “Oh I already do this exercise, eat these kinds of food, supplements (nothing new you said Shagun, huh)” I didn’t come out as a crappy suggestion box uncle Showed my genuine interest in her health

Your time to shine is now

When I got to know the holistic picture of her goals and her journey so far, I was of course in a better place to share my insights on how she could reach them.

I knew she wanted to noticeable weight gain and her body responds negligibly to carbs intake. It seemed what she was missing was the bodybuilding requirement.

Amidst her growing up, her metabolism was already evolved to balance the “intake vs requirement” see-saw. If she continued her excessive carb spree, it would only be a matter of time before she was gaining the wrong kinds of fats or starting to suffer from under-the-layers deficiencies or problems.

Therefore, I suggested she take up strength training and increase her healthy protein consumption. I gave her actionable and easy-to-follow practical steps. I forewarned, that it will be a slow journey, but it should be an effective one.

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels

Takeaway summary