Health Is Not Binary: Everything Can Be Good (or Unhealthy) for You
As people striving for fitness, we are automatically accustomed to distinguishing between “healthy” and “unhealthy” activities. Taking the stairs instead of the elevator? Definitely great. Eating Oreos at the end of the day? Definitely unhealthy, right? Not so fast. This is why this kind of thinking can hinder your progress.
A primer on the concept of “return on investment in health”
All activities – such as climbing stairs instead of an elevator, limiting sodium intake, or running for twenty minutes – have a certain “return on investment” (or ROI for short) for health. This ROI depends on the individual context. Let’s look at two fictional examples from the life of a 300-pound man named Jack with diabetes and atherosclerosis.
Example 1: Jack wants to start losing weight by cutting down on his calorie intake. Since he doesn’t mind the taste of artificial sweeteners, he decides to switch to diet sodas instead of his four daily regular sodas. If all other factors in Jack’s diet and exercise remain the same, Jack will now automatically lose one pound per week with no other changes to his diet.
Example 2: Jack reads something about the “potential hazards of the chemicals in diet soda.” Jack’s personal preference is for some sugar alternative to satisfy his sugar cravings, but he wants to improve his health. This backfires; At the end of the day, Jack starts drinking regular soda, and due to the fact that “his diet is spoiled”, he then overeats.
In Example 1, Jack is solving his most important problem: the effect of his weight on his current health problems. He discovers that by simply eliminating regular soda, his weight falls off faster than that of the Game of Thrones characters. Although Jack sees amazing results, he doesn’t put much effort into his actions. This gives it a very high return on investment in health and fitness.
In Example 2, Jack could improve his health by avoiding artificial sweeteners. But how much does he improve his health in this regard? When it comes to diet, Jack is actually worse off because avoiding carbonated drinks made it difficult to stick to the diet. In Jack’s particular context, he was trying to optimize a second order problem when weight loss was his first order problem.
Health and fitness is a so-callednon –linear system . Your health benefits don’t necessarily depend on your efforts. The complexity of the system means that every action has a certain ROI, which can be large, small, or even negative.
Use ROI to your advantage
ROI is highly context sensitive. We’ve already talked about exercise, which can lead to a low ROI for purposes such as weight loss . However, if you really enjoy running, then your ROI will be much higher. There are no hard and fast rules for determining the ROI of a fitness activity. It’s just a framework that is a mixture of art and science.
When you think about health across the spectrum rather than in a binary sense, some of the conclusions may not be intuitive at all. For example, you may find that giving yourself a day off after dieting every week is “great” because you stick to your diet better the rest of the week. You may also find that you can eat an acceptable calorie deficit using only Chipotl throughout the week.
You will also find that everything you know about what should and should not be healthy fizzles out. Instead of following preconceived notions about health and fitness that are often wrong , you will find what works for you. And that’s what a healthy life should be.