Advice is Great, But You Need to Experiment For Yourself

Here’s something you’ve hopefully noticed by now: there’s a lot of contradictory advice out there.

For a health diet, make sure to avoid fat. Wait, sorry, just saturated fat. Hang on, these guys say carbs. Oh, I guess it doesn’t matter what we eat as long as we watch our calories. But stay away from Omega-6’s.

There are a couple of reasons why this happens.

The first is that some advice will always be a matter of opinion. Take the buy/rent debate of personal finance. You can argue until you’re blue in the face about which one is the better financial choice (The New York Times has an absurdly comprehensive calculator for that), but you would be overlooking the fact that having their own say in their choice of where to live means more to some people than ending up with slightly more money sometime in the future.

The other reason why there is so much contradictory advice is because the truth is so dang hard to pin down.

I’m a big fan of the scientific method, but let’s stop for a second to appreciate how brutally difficult it is to apply to an area like nutrition. Here is a simple version of the scientific method:

• Make an observation.
• Conduct research.
• Form hypothesis.
• Test hypothesis.
• Record data.
• Draw conclusion.
• Replicate.

There are two key points here that are really difficult. The first is testing your hypothesis. It’s easy to get to this point, but hard to conduct a worthwhile study.

Think of it like this: a perfect study would be conducted in such a way that every single variable would be controlled for and the only thing that would change is the one you are looking to study.

So if you wanted to see the effect of carbs on a diet, you would get two groups of participants and give them the same diets, changing nothing but the carbs.

Already you are running into several problems. If you take carbs away, you are also taking calories away. So are you results due to the carbs or the calories? You could replace the carbs with something, but now you don’t know if your results are due to the reduction in carbs or the addition of whatever you substituted in.

Oh, and by the way, you have next to no shot at actually controlling what people eat and do anyway. It’s not like you’re going to keep people locked in a lab for 20 years, controlling their diet and caloric expenditure as you try to figure out the dietary habits that lead to heart disease.

So, what mostly ends up happening is that studies don’t do any sort of intervention whatsoever, they follow people over time and give them periodic food questionnaires to see what they ate. Quick, what did you have for breakfast, lunch, and dinner last Tuesday?

These studies are still worthwhile, the problem is that they are only at the first and second level of the scientific method, the level of observation and research.

Sometimes scientists do try to control what people eat, but due to logistical limitations these studies are often quite short. That’s obviously a problem when you are studying something like obesity, diabetes, or heart disease that take years to develop (despite the fact that we believe that poor diets are the main causal reason for heart disease, age is still the biggest risk factor for atherosclerosis).

There’s also the problem of replication. Just because you do a study, doesn’t mean someone will try to replicate it. And if they try, they often won’t be successful.

I’m not saying these things to undermine the science of nutrition, I think our efforts in this field are going to pay off. All that I’m pointing out is that there are inherent problems that keep the science from advancing smoothly. We’ll get the right answers, but we’ll hit lots of bumps in the road. Hence the reason why people still debate whether a certain will save you or kill you.

Where to Go From Here

If you want to get healthy, grow your business, or just level up in your personal life in general, advice alone won’t be enough.

I’m not saying to ignore all the experts and I’m not saying to turn your back on the science. I’m saying that when you do your research you should be prepared to encounter mixed messages, and you should have a plan for how to deal with that.

The human default is usually just to side with the first person that makes a strong case. Maybe if you are an especially critical thinker you listen to the best both sides have to offer and weigh the evidence.

In reality, neither of these is usually sufficient. There might not be enough quality evidence out there to settle an issue. Usually, the fastest way forward is to conduct your own experiments…on yourself.

Identifying Your Metrics

When conducting an experiment, one of the most important things is deciding on what metrics are meaningful to track. We live in a fortunate time with the ability to amass tons of data, but not all of it is useful.

If you are trying to decide if it’s worth doing Facebook marketing, your metric might be the number of views or shares or maybe the click-through rate.

For evaluating a diet, your weight is a popular metric, but not one that I particularly care for. Weight is meaningful the more extreme that you get, but it gives you too fuzzy of a picture of what is really happening.

I recommend evaluating a diet by tracking the measurements used in evaluating metabolic syndrome. Metabolic syndrome is a precursor to a whole host of diseases such as diabetes and heart disease. You have metabolic syndrome if you have three of the following:

• Abdominal obesity (Waist circumference of greater than 40 inches in men, and greater than 35 inches in women)
• Triglyceride level of 150 milligrams per deciliter of blood (mg/dL) or greater
• HDL cholesterol of less than 40 mg/dL in men or less than 50 mg/dL in women
• Systolic blood pressure (top number) of 130 millimeters of mercury (mm Hg) or greater, or diastolic blood pressure (bottom number) of 85 mm Hg or greater
• Fasting glucose of 100 mg/dL or greate

Those should be your goals in healthy eating: lower waist circumference, lower triglycerides, higher HDL, lower blood pressure, lower fasting glucose.

Last year I went on the first diet of my life: The Slow-Carb diet from Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Body. I didn’t measure triglycerides, but I saw and improvement in each of the other four areas.

I was especially happy to go from having nearly outgrown a size 32 waist to having my new size 30 pants be extremely loose (I should have waited longer before buying new pants).

My weight did go down from 195 to 160 (it got as low as 157 and right now usually fluctuates around 160), but that’s not as important to me. With enough muscle, 195 could be a healthy weight for me. By itself, weight doesn’t give you a complete enough picture.

Isolating Your Variables

I’ve mentioned that in science, you want to do your best to isolate just one variable at a time.

This is still true with self-experimentation, but I recommend not leading with this approach.

First, find something that seems to work. For me, the Slow-Carb diet, which represented lots of changes to my diet, clearly worked.

Once you find something that works, make individual changes to try to break it. For instance, once I had been on the diet for about a year, I added fruit back in. The diet calls for you to restrict all sweet fruits for cheat day, but I wanted to see what happen when I started eating fruit again. Nothing happened. Great, fruit is back.

Be Open to Correction

Things may have worked for you, but they might not work for others. Things may have worked for you, but maybe not for the reasons that you thought.

Don’t get a big head. You don’t know more than anyone else, you just have an effective approach to problem solving.

Why did my diet work? Is it because carbs are bad? Maybe. Is it because certain kinds of carbs like sugar are bad? Maybe. Is it because it tricked me into eating less calories? Maybe. Is it because it tricked me into eating less junk food? Maybe.

I used to think I had the answers when it comes to diet. I don’t. I was all aboard the low-carb bandwagon, but I’ve backed off slightly. My current thoughts are that diets high in both low-quality carbs (e.g. sugar and all its equivalents like High Fructose Corn Syrup) and low-quality fats (e.g. vegetable oil, hydrogenated oils, etc.) are pretty bad. I’m actually slightly confident about this, but I was confident before, and that didn’t stop me from changing my opinion as I learned more.

It’s okay to be a work in progress indefinitely.

Conclusion

Listen to everyone, learn from everyone, but don’t be afraid to try stuff out for yourself.

As long as you’re not doing anything dangerous, there’s little downside and tremendous upside to self-experimentation.

This is the twentieth in a series based on my article 30 Lessons About Life You Should Learn Before Turning 30. Shoutout to Dr. Christine Bradstreet 🌴 for the idea to turn the post into an in-depth series.