I think it is simply because a large number of adults in the US (as well as a lot of other countries) is struggling with this, at about 39% obesity rate and 71% overweight rate [0]. For comparison, only 1.5% of adults in the US are underweight [1].
While I agree that there is way more to "being healthy" than just not being overweight/underweight, I think it isn't a bad idea to approach this in the priority order. Solving the issue of being overweight is much simpler and much more impactful to the overall public health than trying to go after more rare and difficult problems.
I mean, you have two markets and one is about 47 times the size of the other.
If your goal is to minimize the total number of health problems in your country, it would make sense to throw more efforts at a problem that affects 47 times more people, given that everything else about the problems is about equal. We are not comparing cancer to heart disease here. We are comparing two problems that are two sides of the same coin.
I was a bean pole into my early twenties, and would have been 20 lbs skinnier still if not for cycling. I never gained any more weight until I dumped the classical advice and did my own thing.
Everyone tries to compress a workout into a single time interval in the day, where you do n sets of each exercise and then go home. To do three sets in three minutes, you're going to have to pick a very conservative goal. Doing 5 sets spread out over the entire day, I could lift more and saw results pretty much right away, and really for the first time. I'd exercise while waiting for things like the drier to ding or toast to pop up, a file to download, a commercial break or a cut scene to finish. But, I had to have exercises I could do at home, which takes some creativity (or a lot of money).
Your body is conserving resources. The whole point of 'exercise' is to trick your body into thinking that you are an active person who needs to spend the extra resources to build and maintain large muscles, cardiac or lung capacity, or all three. If you are actually active you don't have to 'work out'. Your life is work, and your body adapts.
Once I got past that initial roadblock, I got results even from the gym, but I was able to be more consistent doing it at home.
The trouble with putting on a lot of bulk though, is if you stop. Exercise burns a lot of calories. Persistent exercise therefore changes your notion of what a 'normal' amount of food is. If you stop, it probably due to some major life event, and adjusting your notion of 'normal eating' might get lost in the mix. Which is probably why a lot of pro athletes chunk up when they retire (or get retired). Going from 3-4000 calories a day to under 2500 is quite a lifestyle change.
> Doing 5 sets spread out over the entire day, I could lift more and saw results pretty much right away, and really for the first time. I'd exercise while waiting for things like the drier to ding or toast to pop up, a file to download, a commercial break or a cut scene to finish.
For anyone interested in learning more about this, it's called "greasing the groove". There are plenty of web articles about it, and it's also covered pretty thoroughly in the book _Overcoming Gravity_ by Steven Low.
What were the exercises you ended up doing at home spread out over the day? Given the current situation, seems like a unique time lots of us could try out that type of workout.
If you're trying to weave a workout into your day, isometric exercises are the quickest exercise. You just need floor space. A dumb-bell or two for the upper arms and torso, put somewhere that you won't stub your toe (you will stub your toe anyway)
Pullups are the trickiest. At the time there was a staircase with open treads near my apartment.
It's all in the terminology. You both say "weight", but they want to lose fat and you're looking to gain lean body mass. Many folks would like to do both, there's no contradiction.
This may be true in a statistical sense, but I think it's important to not "explain it away" and instead realize that it is an important societal issue. This doesn't really apply to the original post, but it's important for us as a society to support both health conditions, and not just the more common one.
Seconded almost as strongly as I possibly can, but with added caveats! I was a bean pole for my entire life, struggling to gain weight. The answer was simple: I wasn't giving my body the signal to gain muscle by lifting some HEAVY weights. I read Starting Strength and followed the program. I put on ~30lbs over 3-4 months, and got WAY strong. That's after having done crossfit for at least 5-6 years. I took my squat from 185lbs to 300lbs.
It took 2 months of rereading the squat chapter, filming myself, correcting myself, etc, before I finally got that one down. Now that I understand it, I can spot faults in others, but it took a while for it to click. Rereading the dbook helps, though a couple of Rippetoe's coaching cues set me on the wrong path. A starting strength specific coach can straighten you out in just a couple of sessions. DON'T think any other certification, personal trainer, or coach is a substitute, they are NOT.
Don't do starting strength for a year. (If it takes you that long to do the novice linear progression, you are definitely doing something wrong.) Rippetoe's advice for intermediates is pretty marginal IMO and you can't possibly stay a novice for a year doing the program.
Switch to Barbell Medicine's "the bridge" instead of resetting the weights a second time.
As a trainer, squats can be self-learned fairly easily, it's a pretty natural movement. Some guidance will help of course, but the general movement is usually there.
That said, I recommend against people teaching themselves deadlift, because it's not nearly as intuitive, has more potential for injury, etc.
My biggest concern about focus on weight loss as the metric instead of "healthy lifestyle" is that losing weight is easiest when you do it in an unhealthy way. Crash diets are a good example of unhealthy weight loss.
Another funfact is that you can literally go to bed for a few weeks, let muscle atrophy kick in, and lose more weight than any diet+exercise regime. Won't make you healthier, but you'll lose the weight. Yay metrics!
Despite all the lecturing, the research doesn't really agree. Crash(extreme) diets work just as well as slower diets and the people gain back weight at roughly the same rate.
Contestants on Alone loose like a lb a day. Loosing weight is so easy if you get used to feeling hungry and eat like a bird. Throw in cardio and you will end up looking cut. Gaining a pound a day of muscle, on the other hand, is probably impossible, even gaining a pound of any kind of mass a day is dubious and will lead to very unpleasant bowel movements at the very least.
It doesn't help that BMI is still used even though it is such a crude measure as to be useless. Stuff like body fat% measurements and waist measurements are more direct indicators of losing fat.
We use PI/CI (Ponderal Index AKA Corpulence Index) in my lab and it's a huge improvement over BMI. Especially for modern heights in men and women. Still crude, but easy to apply. Wide margins.
