It’s a funny world we live in these days. The ‘must have it now’ society. For example, we have microwaves to nuke food in minutes. We have ready meals for those microwaves. But this post isn’t about microwaves or ready meals! It’s about pills and powders.
The impatience that we’ve been instilled with has been taken to such extremes that we now have powdered food and pills that promise to speed up your results. It’s so bad in fact that today it’s a multi-billion pound industry!
Powdered food? What are we, babies?
Most health and fitness magazines that you pick up are either put out by supplement companies or heavily sponsored by them. Flick through one when you’re next out and count how many ads you see for pills and powders with some Adonis or Goddess holding up the bottle. It’s no wonder we think that to look like that, we need to take that product too.
The dirty little secret of course is that 9 times out of 10, the person holding the bottle’s never taken that product in their life!
Check this out. This is a great video explaining what it takes to produce the supplements you see on the shelves everyday. Although it’s American, the situation here is uncannily similar.
In fact if you look closely you’ll see a lot of products that are on the shelf in your local “Health food” store!
[youtube video=ThdFqGLq4QU maxw=800 style=”display: block; margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto;”]
That’s a scene from “Bigger, Stronger, Faster: A side effect of being American” which is well worth a look if you’re into keeping in shape.
So what supplements do I recommend when people ask?
A simple one-a-day multivitamin and mineral tablet.
If you’re training to lose weight, then you’ll be eating slightly less than your body needs so it can dip into your body-fat for energy. In this scenario, it can be useful to take a no-nonsense multi-vitamin tablet to make sure you’re not missing out on any key nutrients.
As someone said in my weight loss group, when they take their multivitamin, they don’t crave sugary food that day. Why? Because they’re getting everything their body needs from the get-go.
Understand, there is some merit to some other supplements, such as protein powders. However, if you can’t get the results you need without them, then you need to look at what’s wrong with your diet.
When your current diet and training programme is producing the results you want, then, and only then, should you look at if you want to incorporate some supplements into your diet. Note “want”, it’s never “need”! People were in phenomenal shape long, long before the birth of the supplement industry!