Episode 10: Are You Overwhelmed by Diet Information Overload Syndrome (DIOS)?
Update: 2013-01-23
Description
Welcome to Episode 10 of Escape from Caloriegate!
It's time to address a HUGELY critical topic that no one seems to be blogging about in the diet/health world. I call it "Diet Information Overload Syndrome." You probably don't have a name for it, but you'll know instantly what I'm talking about.
You're passionate about eating "right," exercising "right," and staying healthy. You want to live longer, lose the belly fat, avoid cancer and other diseases, etc. So what should you do? What should you stop doing? And how should you make those changes simply, cheaply and safely, while maximizing your results?
United States
It's time to address a HUGELY critical topic that no one seems to be blogging about in the diet/health world. I call it "Diet Information Overload Syndrome." You probably don't have a name for it, but you'll know instantly what I'm talking about.
You're passionate about eating "right," exercising "right," and staying healthy. You want to live longer, lose the belly fat, avoid cancer and other diseases, etc. So what should you do? What should you stop doing? And how should you make those changes simply, cheaply and safely, while maximizing your results?
- Ask twenty people those questions, you'll get two hundred answers.
- Confusion abounds at both the macro and micro levels
- Our most trusted filterers of advice about diet can't even agree on the fundamentals (Michael Pollan; Dean Ornish; Gary Taubes and Dr. Peter Attia; Stephan Guyenet; the USDA and AHA; etc etc.)
- So much confusion. So much contradiction.
- It's even harder for people on low carb/paleo who go "against the grain"
- Mockery and discouragement from mainstream health advisors; Trouble keeping track of all the do's and don'ts; Frustration because the low carb and paleo "gurus" disagree on so much, strongly and often angrily; etc
- We have access to so MUCH information. BBC news article says "average US citizen on an average day... consumes 100,500 words"
- How do we filter “signal from noise” with so much "signal" coming at us all the time?
- Another confounding factor! Different diets may work for different folks at different times. Obesity, for instance, likely does not lend itself to one-size-fits-all solutions.
- One blogger I respect asserts that "post-obese people are metabolically not the same as undieted people of the same weight, the biological drive to regain is and always will be there" and that "obesity is a permanent endocrine disorder and it cannot be cured through diet alone or through any other currently clinically available means, not even stomach mutilation surgery."
- I believe she may just be right, or possibly right. That's kinda depressing.
- Furthermore, if it's true that obesity is a chronic problem of poorly regulated fat tissue, we're all making a huge mistake by treating it as a short term problem that can be vanquished in short order with a 17 day diet.
- The chasm between what we can say for sure about diets is a yawning gap -- spawned the rise of health and diet guru-ism.
- We think more choices and more information will lead to better decisions. Not necessarily true!
- Maybe you can reach a point in your research where you start to miss the forest for the trees.
- I see this phenomenon at work all the time in the low carb and Paleo diet world. Crazy fads emerge, like the potato diet. Preposterous!
- As human beings, we need order and simplicity. Unfortunately, nature is decisively complex.
- The info overload, combined with the confounding factors, stokes powerful emotions: Overwhelm; Hypochondria; Anger; Depression; Mania, etc.
- What to do? 8 typical solutions we try
- 1. We look to a diet and/or diet guru for advice. But you may have metabolic quirkyness that renders guru strategies irrelevant or maybe even dangerous.
- 2. We find a diet "sub-cult." Same caveats apply.
- 3. We switch endlessly between diets.
- 4. We default to the conventional wisdom. This is the easiest route, but it could be less than ideal. If your body metabolically cannot tolerate much carbohydrate, for instance, you're going to have problems on the USDA Food Pyramid diet or the potato diet, etc.
- 5. We do obsessive N=1 experiments. I'm all for (safe) self-experimentation, but you must be careful to avoid over-extrapolating.
- 6. We endlessly quest to find “the answer” (or “the answers”) It's easy to become neurotic about our little medical mysteries. The "endless quest for diet truth" can lead to a certain madness.
- 7. We settle for “good enough.” It's often far, far easier (and sensible) to choose the "good enough" solution over the "ideal" one. But not ALWAYS, and there's the rub…
- 8. We say “screw it.” We often just tune out. Enough! Who cares!
- Beyond the conventional approaches: a ninth strategy that virtually no one discusses. In our next podcast, we'll dive into it. It’s called "meta-thinking"-- i.e. thinking about how to think.
- Please leave your comments below about how YOU deal with Diet Information Overload Syndrome, and I'll include the best comments in an upcoming eBook on this topic.
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