This is from my weekly email newsletter but I republish it here for sharing and referencing. If you're not already a subscriber you can join below:
Happy Tuesday!
A lot of us feel like we should be doing more when it comes to our health and fitness.
Either you feel guilty for not doing what you think you're supposed to be doing or frustrated because the things you're trying aren't producing the results you want.
And there's no shortage of solutions out there. The more you learn, the more you discover how many of your normal habits and routines are suboptimal or just plain unhealthy. The deeper you go, the more you discover all the things you're not doing but apparently should be.
Every day loads of high quality content is published to help you do more and even if you're highly motivated it can sometimes feel overwhelming. To make things more complicated, it seems like a lot of information is contradictory.
Who do you believe? What should you do?
The truth is that for most people, most of the solutions aren't really relevant and most of the debates don't matter. There is a lot of great health and fitness information out there and most of it just isn't for you.
Everyone is going to be in a different place relative to their health and fitness goals. Similarly, everyone is going to have different goals based on what motivates them.
Most health and fitness content is targeted towards a specific person, with a specific goal, at a specific phase in their journey. If you're not that person, it can safely be ignored.
It's just not always obvious who that person is.
A good example of this is information around nutrition. It feels like everyone has an opinion about what you should or shouldn't be eating. They all have their own studies to back up their assertions and everything is clinically validated. And yet, they're all saying opposite things.
Keto? Carnivore? Paleo? Vegetarian? Low Calorie? Fasting? Eat more blueberries ...
The reality is that all of these nutritional approaches are effective in a given context, for a given population, with a specific goal.
The ketogenic diet, for example, has been in use for treating patients with epilepsy since the 1920s. It has a number of other benefits as well including improved fat metabolism and reducing the risk of developing certain types of cancers.
Another example is the carnivore diet which became known for its success with patients suffering from autoimmune disorders. Among other benefits, by eating only meat, carnivores reduce intake of inflammatory proteins in plants called lectins.
While both diets have benefits and tradeoffs, they have become popular because, among other things, they help dieters "feel better" and lose weight. For most people, this effect is not because they're optimal for weight loss but because they force dieters to substitute "unhelpful" dietary practices like eating lots of calorically dense foods and sugars.
See the problem?
Most people's baseline nutritional habits are so poor that ANY consistent deviation will generally produce SOME effect. For those people, keto and carnivore and fasting are all just different ways of eating fewer calories.
Extreme diets like keto and carnivore should be thought of as options for optimization to an already healthy diet.
This line of thinking can be applied to almost every domain in health and fitness whether it's exercise routines, sleep protocols, supplementation etc.
Improving your health and fitness, like improving anything else, is most effective when you can focus on a small number of high impact activities.
What's going to have the biggest impact depends on where you are now. For most people that's doing the basics. Everything else is just optimization and therefore a distraction.
And there's a LOT of ways to optimize and get distracted.
Most products and companies selling health and fitness solutions are selling optimizations. This doesn't mean they don't work, it just means they will only work if you're already doing the basics.
Unfortunately, while doing the basics may sometimes seem harder compared to buying optimizations, it's usually the difference between getting some result (however humble) than wasting time and money for no results.
Figure out what the basics are for your goals. Focus, focus, focus. Then look for optimizations.
Have a great week!
Nick