What the Diet Industry Wants to Sell You

The professional dieting and fitness industry doesn’t really exist to get you in shape. If it existed to do that, it wouldn’t be so big, it would spend a lot less time pushing new products, and there’d be a lot less marketing about the whole situation.

Nope — the diet/fitness industry exists to sell products and solutions that might solve the very difficult issue of living a healthy lifestyle. Hell, I work in that same industry — I’m a personal trainer and I most definitely charge for my time (although not my website).

But there are some fundamental lines in the sand that exist between people who work day-in and day-out in gyms, getting their clients into the best shape of their lives, and people who continuously sell new dieting products or quick-fix fitness solutions that don’t really work.

I’m going to outline a few below.

They Want to Sell You A Fast, Unsustainable Solution

You’ve probably heard that old proverb — “give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish, you feed him for life.” My entire business philosophy is founded upon the latter — I want to teach my clients to be fit for life. If I take a client from being out-of-shape to being an absolute pro in the gym, easily in the best shape of their life, with a full-body transformation under their belt — I’m not disappointed when I’m no longer doing personal training for them. There are plenty of people who need my services more, who need direct intervention and instruction in their approach to fitness.

But the diet industry, and to a large extent, the “quick fix fitness” industry, wants to keep selling you fish. One year a specific diet plan is all the rage, and the next year, it’s another one. A lot of people working in these industries claim to want to see you in shape, and maybe it’s true — but their very business philosophy is founded on the notion that you probably won’t be in shape next year, and therefore still be back to buy another quick-fix, unsustainable, complete-transformation program that you’ll abandon within a few weeks.

Selling You An External Solution That Doesn’t Seem Like One

One of the main ways that you can get sucked into the never-ending cycle of the diet industry is by falling for some of the very strong motivational tools they use. There are some top marketing people working in that field, and they use every tactic of direct marketing to keep you interested and buying.

One of the most subtly powerful techniques is to sell you what looks like an internal, almost philosophical solution to your fitness problems — a framework or a plan that requires real mental effort by you in order to put into practice, but always, (somehow) involves an external hook that will keep you buying.

Why My Site Is Different

This is where the fitness industry and I part ways. My site is ad-supported, sure — it lets me cover server costs and allows me to produce all the free workout videos I bring you. But fundamentally, all my videos are just ways to do exercises, get motivated, and get yourself in shape. There’s no hidden product you need to buy, no expensive consultation you have to eventually pay for in order to get the final key to the solution — an ad-supported model lets me give this to you for free.

So technically, my own personal fitness solution is an external one, too — follow my workout videos and read my site and you too will get in the best shape of your life. But that’s as far as it goes — I’m not selling you a mental framework that’s really just a product in disguise, one that you have to buy, over and over again, without ever seeing results.

Too many fitness products are exactly that: they look like ways to change your thinking, but they’re really just ways to keep you buying, spending, hoping, and not really changing your life.

Why I’m Going to Keep Talking About This

One of the main reasons I’m gonna keep on writing about this subject is because so many myths get created as this stuff makes the rounds. In trying to sell you products, it’s necessary to create solutions to problems that aren’t as bad as they seem (no time to exercise, simple equipment isn’t good enough, gyms are intimidating, and so on).

So one of the things I want to do is keep busting those myths, while at the same time giving you workout videos that show you there is a better way, even if it takes a lot of hard work. Thanks for staying with me this far, and I hope you keep coming back — there’s lots more to talk about!