Don’t believe the Hype

Date: 19th November 2013

Twenty years ago I read Nathan Pritikin’s books on exercise and diet, as well as Covert Bailey’s, and decided that basically I was going to live on vegetables, rice, bread and tuna. I was trying to compete at a world-class level in sport climbing, where you hang off your fingers for long–or short if you can’t–periods of time. Pritikin and Bailey advised that fat made you fat, was bad for you, and the way forward was to avoid all but a few essential fats. The grocery store aisles were filling with “FAT FREE!” cookies, potato chips, etc. etc., and I believed the hype.

I did get thinner when I stopped eating all fat, red meat, etc. etc. My performance levels dropped, but I didn’t care, as I was thinner and that meant “better.” I completely lost focus on the fact that I was supposed to be a damn athlete, and not a hypoglycaemic stick figure. If I craved a stick of butter it was because I was weak, not that my body was screaming for what it needed. Eventually I realized that even if I was supposed to eat like a cow I didn’t like the way I felt, and I wasn’t getting better anymore so I basically quit competitive sport climbing and ate a more reasonable diet. Strangely, I had some of the best comp results ever competing while ten pounds heavier…

My point to this little story is this: Just because someone can make a half-convincing argument that eating or doing anything a certain way is “good” doesn’t mean it’s so. In fact, it may be total bullshit, or hype, and in the words of Public Enemy, “Don’t believe the hype.” Today we realize that maybe eggs, high-quality meat and even the odd hamburger isn’t a big deal, and may in fact help performance quite a lot. Now simple carbohydrates are the enemy… The paleo Cavemen are now saying to avoid exactly the diet that all the “science” and informed experts said was great for you 20 years ago. Both “diets” probably have some good ideas in them, but both are probably at least half hype. 20 years from now the best science/leading gurus will be saying something like, “Don’t eat any green stuff, it’s cancerous, live on coffee, vitamins and calf liver.” And that’ll be hype too.

The same goes with training. Twenty years ago circuit training was all the rage; every gym had to have a long row of weird piston-based equipment where you did movements to isolate muscle parts. This was hype, and idiocy from a function perspective. Having a gym with no equipment in it it but some de-tuned rings is likely also hype.

So, who to believe? Me, I don’t trust anyone who has something to sell based on converting me to “their” program. That’s where they’re coming from–selling you stuff. If someone lauds the “pale-ass gym diet” and sells bison pale snacks then they are selling bison snacks, full stop. Opinionated writers like me aren’t trying to sell you anything directly, but a lot of us are likely wrong.

So, how to filter out the hype, or at least not get too damaged by it? My answer is YOU, and the scoreboard of life. Here are some questions I like to ask:

Does it seem reasonable to you? Does it really help you succeed at your sport/life/WTF, or does it make you better at irrelevant things (thinner, bigger deadlift, etc etc)? Are the world’s best athletes kicking ass with the programming/diet/whatever at their sports/life/whatever? Does the person talking or writing to you actually do ANYTHING at a high level, or has he/she coached anyone who has been successful at a high level (and not a local amateur comp or something, the big leagues of whatever sport it is)? Does the “authority/guru” do a lot of whatever it is he or she says to do, with passion, commitment and integrity? If the answer to these questions is, “yes,” then likely the ideas are sort of maybe possibly valid, and maybe not totally full of hype. I might have avoided the Pritikin/Bailey hype if I’d noticed that neither one of them kicked ass at anything, their diet made me feel like shit, and that nobody who was kicking ass was following what they had to say. Oops, what a lot of wasted effort that was! And if I apply the lens of “me/scoreboard of life” to a lot athletic programming/nutrition/WTF around me then it vaporizes into the hype it is. I think I’m going to call my hype detection system “HYPE” and sell the system through DVDs and seminars, special price for you only today…

What works for the best in a sport will likely work for you if scaled appropriately. And that’s the next topic.

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