The Information Diet

The New Year season is full of resolutions to diet for weight loss. It’s also one of the most fruitful seasons for merchants who produce weight-loss products to add to their bottom line. They’re easy to find and getting more and more clever with each passing year. They’re on Google Ads, banner ads, Facebook, Twitter, youTube, and infiltrate virtually every other on-line media you use on a daily basis.

This easily leads to information overload, as well as fear-based marketing: How do you choose from all of the products available? How do you sift through the inundating assault of those massively lengthy webpages that have PARAGRAPHS of text and testimonials? And worse yet, how do you know that one of those products isn’t better than the one you’re going to buy? Read More...

Defending yourself against decision overload

It’s 2011, and a new year for the ongoing onslaught of infomercials, internet promises and magazine gimmicks competing for your attention.

A friend of mine once told me, “The most expensive clothes you’ll ever buy are the ones you never wear.” The same goes for diet programs, online e-books, and new (or just re-branded) products. Most people don’t buy new clothes thinking they’ll never wear them. Likewise, most people don’t buy new fitness products thinking they’ll never use them. Read More...

Belief shouldn’t be part of why something works (unless it’s curing cancer)

There are a lot of things you should believe in: the resilience of the human spirit, your own resolve to achieve what you want to get out of life, and perhaps that we will be able to sort ourselves out ultimately without destroying ourselves in the process as a species.

But supplements, diets and workout programs shouldn’t be things that require your belief. Read More...

Fear of loss: How the fitness claims get you

All through my undergraduate “career”, I worked in labs. Just as there are gym rats, I was a lab rat. Great experience for me. Okay pay for a student. But when I finished my undergrad, I already knew I was going to start my Masters in the fall. And at the time, I also felt that I had never really earned an honest dollar. I had never set foot outside the Ivory Tower and so I wanted to experience what a “joe job” might be like. My first choice was to be a waiter–pretty social, they seem to have a lot of fun for the most part, and the pay was probably better than my lab stipends. But in Toronto, getting a job as a waiter is tough competition. In the end, I lucked out, but there was a period of a month or so where I hadn’t found that job.

So what’s a 23 year old, freshly graduated biology major to do? Hit the want ads, of course. What happened next is a story unto itself, but the crux of the story is that I ended up doing a short stint as a door-to-door salesman with a franchise of one of the largest direct sales companies in the world. Read More...

Death by sand–when do fine details matter?

There are many iterations to the famous story about some guy who fills a large jar with big rocks and asks other people if they think the jar is full. They inevitably say, “Yes” and then he puts pebbles into the jar that fall in the spaces between the rocks and asks the same question for the same answer. He then pours sand into the jar that fills all the space between the pebbles and the rocks. Same question, same answer. And then he pours a liquid (water or beer) into the jar, the moral of the story in my favorite version being, “No matter how full your life is, there’s always room for a beer.”

The very fact that you are reading this means that you are a person who is looking to improve yourself. Maybe you’re not quite started yet, or maybe you’ve been well on your way for many years; or maybe you’re trying to help other people. Read More...

Beta-alanine revisited: Failing to plan, or planning to fail?

In the past 2.5 years, a few more studies on beta-alanine have emerged. As I’ve written before, my goal isn’t to become the anti-beta-alanine blogger, but I do feel that watching this supplement develop from its relative inception to its current state does provide an interesting prototype for how similar products develop a strong following despite the limitations on the research available to support (or not support) its use. Read More...

The most successful people aren’t necessarily the ones you want to listen to

I recently joined Twitter. Mostly, because I wanted to see what the fuss was about and it seemed like a neat way to tap into yet another network. The interesting thing about Twitter early on, is that (for those of us who have attention spans of gnats) that Twitter feed page doesn’t change very often unless you start following people’s Twitter feeds (I’m sorry, but “tweeps”? Seriously, no.) So I started searching for names of people I thought would be interesting to follow and whether they had feeds to follow or not. And on my journey through Google, I stumbled on this excerpt from someone I would consider to be one of the most impressive physique models in the world. I’ve broken them down, point by point instead of the entire crammed-in paragraph. but they are sequential (and I don’t think they’re taken out of context): Read More...

Are your fitness decisions fully informed?

Everything we do shapes our opinion of effectiveness. The opinions of others also shapes our ideas of effectiveness. And while your own recall of what works and what doesn’t work likely falls on the side of the majority of the time (if you prescribed intervals vs steady-state cardio for a bunch of clients, and most of them lost more fat on intervals, chances are your recall bias is unlikely to think that steady-state cardio is the way to go), it is nonetheless, biased, because you are also less and less prone to prescribing other things when you think you’ve found the thing that actually works. And sometimes you remember the dramatic cases preferentially, when it’s the other thing that works most of the time. Read More...

Why I’m not writing about beta-alanine lately

I’ve had a more than a few requests to write more reviews on beta-alanine, since it seems to be all the rage. It is so much the rage lately, that I get more hits on my reviews of the three beta-alanine studies than anything else, by a very large margin. The reviews have been linked by so many people that this blog is on the third page of a Google search for the term “beta alanine” (and this search includes hits from ALL of the supplement sites that SELL beta-alanine), and the FIRST hit when you search Google for “beta alanine studies”. The. First. Hit. Holy. Crap. Read More...

Isolation is the key

Just like in CSI, evidence comes after the crime has been committed. Read More...