Why it can leave you spinning your wheels
to you
“I was wrong.”
Those are three words you’ll want to be comfortable with if you care about your health and quality of life.
If you’re never wrong, you’re never learning. And if you’re never learning, you’re never improving.
That’s even truer for health and wellness than in many other areas of life, and that’s because of the complexity of human physiology and how much of it we still don’t fully understand.
Following strong beliefs that are based on weak assumptions will often lead you down an unproductive, potentially even harmful path.
Are you really sure that’s the best way to do it? Is it even effective?
These are the types of questions you should be asking yourself.
As my brother-in-law – a high school teacher – tells his students, less certainty, more inquiry.
I love that.
Not only is it a basic and arguably essential quality among great scientists, but it’s also fundamental to being a good thinker and problem solver.
And we all know that life is full of problems to solve, including (of course) figuring out and actually adhering to the most reasonable lifestyle choices that will help you enjoy the best quality of life.
But questioning your own certainty is a lot easier said than done, especially with the relentless amount of misinformation most of us are regularly exposed to.
Every day, you encounter certainty. And you see even more of it online. It’s so easy to assume it’s right and go along for the ride.
Deriving certainty from commonality is human nature. It’s part of evolution. It kept us tight with our tribe. But in modern life, it gets us into trouble more often than not.
To make the best of this, you need to recognize unjustified certainty and question the assumptions it’s based on.
In the words of my brother-in-law, here are a few common health and wellness “certainties” that call for a lot more inquiry. Coach Kayla and I encounter each of them frequently.
I need to exercise more to lose weight
It’s not that simple. The calories you burn during exercise don’t always add to your total daily expenditure as neatly as you’d think. It’s often only a portion of those calories that are additive.
One way to think of it is your body managing energy expenditure like a budget. A lot of calories spent on exercise may mean fewer calories spent elsewhere.
Awareness of this began to grow over 10 years ago, when a landmark study led scientists to rethink the assumption that more physical activity equates to greater daily energy expenditure. (A great example of how questioning assumptions advances knowledge.)
The study, led by Herman Pontzer and published in 2012, measured the total daily energy expenditure of members of the Hadza tribe, who are one of the few remaining hunter-gatherer populations. Members of this tribe routinely walk upwards of 10 miles per day – which, depending on body size and terrain, would typically require ~500-1,000 kcal.
The scientists running the study expected total daily energy expenditure to be considerably higher than that of the typical American, and to have clear evidence confirming that the rest of us, living in modern society, need to exercise more.
To their surprise, total daily energy expenditure was similar to that of a sedentary American.
Even if that weren’t the case, the more aggressively you chase calories with exercise, the more likely you are to run yourself into the ground. Overtraining is real, and it can cause real symptoms, including injury, fatigue, and poor mood, to name a few.
Exercise provides many undeniably great health benefits, but it’s quite hard to lose weight and keep it off (and fully support your health) without improving your diet.
I already have a healthy diet
A majority of the US population thinks they eat well, and a majority of that same population is overweight or has one or more chronic, lifestyle-related diseases.
Both can’t be true without considerable overlap, which implies people think their diet is better than it is.
Many of our clients, after telling us how much better they feel from the changes we coached them through, also admit they initially didn't realize how much room for improvement there was in their diet.
Between the barrage of misinformation online and the limitations of population-level dietary guidelines, it’s an easy trap to fall into.
Let data be the test (unless, of course, it’s bad data). When data doesn’t support your belief, it’s time to question assumptions – about the data and about your belief.
For example, a body weight or waist circumference that exceeds the threshold for disease risk should be a compelling incentive to re-evaluate the potential benefits of dietary improvement.
Likewise, the potential for diet to influence health and wellness independently of body weight should also be considered.
I walk a lot and do yoga – that’s all I need
Yoga helps manage stress and, in the process, can enhance your range of motion. Walking has even more benefits. And both can be done in a social context.
These are all great things, but neither walking nor yoga provides a robust stimulus for two of the most significant predictors of health and longevity: strength and aerobic capacity.
And that’s not limited to fitness-related predictors – strength and aerobic capacity are two of the strongest health and longevity predictors among all types of predictors.
Yes, strength and aerobic capacity are that important. They help you maintain your physical independence later in life and your ability to keep doing the things you love. Aerobic exercise, in particular, can not only improve your physical health but also be very effective for decreasing your risk of lifestyle-related diseases.
Yoga and walking, as great as they are, aren’t going to move the needle nearly as much in these areas. You need a training plan that’s specifically designed to improve them.
But don’t let that push you too far in the opposite direction, which leads to the next “certainty.”
My bootcamp classes give me all the strength and aerobic adaptations I need
At the deepest level, the popularity of bootcamp-style training is driven by the first assumption I mentioned: more exercise = more calories = more weight loss.
Since this approach typically includes both strength and aerobic training, it’s easy to assume that you’re checking all the boxes and already doing the best things for your strength and aerobic fitness.
But simply doing the right things doesn’t mean you’re doing them the right way.
That’s an important distinction.
Lifting lighter weights for many sets of many reps with intentionally minimal rest certainly requires more calories, but at the expense of lessening the stimulus for strength enhancement.
And while high-intensity aerobic exercise is indeed a very effective way to enhance aerobic capacity, the intensity needs to be close to maximal, which is often not the case in most bootcamp classes.
(Near-maximal aerobic exercise is not appropriate for everyone – I’m mentioning its effectiveness here as an educational point rather than a suggestion that everyone should be doing it.)
In both cases, the pursuit of burning more calories incurs a significant recovery burden without the strength- or aerobic-enhancing stimulus to justify it.
And if you do this type of training at a frequency likely to exceed your recovery capacity, as many people do, you’ll be more susceptible to the overtraining symptoms I mentioned earlier.
Putting it all together
Today, we’re talking about doing the right things, the right way. But that depends on having the motivation and commitment to even try.
That starts with a compelling reason for wanting your desired outcome and a systematic approach for making it happen.
But no matter how compelling your why or how systematic and sustainable your approach, holding firm to flawed assumptions will likely lead to spinning your wheels with little progress to show for your effort.
Less certainty, more inquiry.
No, it’s not easy, but it’s a lot easier than the alternative.
Life doesn’t indiscriminately reward us for effort alone. It needs to be effort that’s well-aligned with an intended purpose. As in the name of this newsletter, Wellness with Purpose.
To questioning assumptions,
Dr. Vin
📧 Did someone forward you this newsletter? Subscribe here
🆘 If you’d like one-on-one guidance on doing the right things, the right way, to improve your health and wellness, schedule a free call with Coach Kayla to find out if our coaching is a good fit for you.