The 80–20 Principle for Healthy Living
The Pareto Principle states that 80% of results come from 20% of efforts.
Did you know that this applies to our health goals as well?
In this fast-paced world, we are often presented with new devices and diets that promise to burn belly fat and build muscle quickly. What the companies that sell these fitness fads don’t tell you is that to reach your goals you just need to follow basic principles.
There is a misconception that health is a complicated ordeal. Newspapers and articles stress the hottest trends, diets, and Hollywood workout routines. Grocery store yellow press articles overcomplicate health to market their products and routines.
They want to tell you that fitness is impossible without their products. They sell the myth of spot-reducing fat and rapid, yet permanent weight loss (which is always just your body losing its glycogen stores — not permanent nor preferable).
There’s a reason these papers are in a grocery store and not in a peer-reviewed journal. It’s because these papers with promises of results sell snake oil. Health goals are only achieved with consistency and perseverance.
We lose weight by eating less and being more active. We gain muscle through resistance training or high-stress forces. That’s all there is to it.
When someone’s dog is overweight, they don’t give it a shake-weight, raspberry ketones, or an at-home workout schedule that takes 12 hours a week. They walk it more and feed it less. Humans are the same way. We don’t need detox tea or a special seven-minute ab circuit.
Eating healthy, unprocessed foods and tracking your calories is more than enough to lose weight. Proper weight training (or calisthenics) is what we need for longevity and strength.
There are plenty of valid resources online which draw upon the data discovered by people in the field of kinesiology — the scientific study of human body movement. These are the people we should look to for advice. Not some general health doctor who doesn’t even exercise themselves. It just takes a few minutes of due diligence to distinguish the fad from the fact.
Let’s focus on the 20% of efforts that will lead us to most of our results.
A healthy diet and exercise will do more for your body than any detox, smoothie, or fat burner will ever do. It’s okay if you were misled — you were trying to improve. Those expensive routines, supplements, and fat burners may give marginal improvements, but they are sold in a way that implies they are the reason you have not made progress.
I have fallen for these fads before. After taking a step back and thinking about health logically, I understood that the easy way out isn’t the way to results.
Let’s remember to focus on the basics. Consistent daily, weekly, and yearly exercise and dietary habits give us healthy bodies — things newspapers can’t sell you.
The above article shows that increased physical activity drastically reduces the mortality rate.
This one shows a well-balanced, moderate diet is the best way to increase longevity and that fad diets may actually adversely affect health outcomes.
