The Answer is Starring you Right in the Face

For some reason people continually try to make the answer to most of life’s questions incredibly complex and painfully difficult to understand. In reality the answer is usually very straight forward and logical as long as you have all or most of the known facts surrounding your question. There is a simple principle called Occam’s Razor that you should use as your guide to tell if the answer someone is giving you is a load of BS or not.

Occam’s Razor is a principle that states:

“The explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory.” (Wikipedia)

This gets simplified to the statement “all other things being equal, the simplest solution is probably the best”.

Let’s apply Occam’s Razor to the very simple question: “How do I lose weight?”

Based on the principle of Occam’s Razor the answer must be: “Eat Less”

This answer requires the fewest other assumptions to be true. Even though you can add exercise to help aid in weight loss it is not REQUIRED. Therefore based on Occam’s Razor “Eat Less” is the simplest and the correct answer.

Let’s try another question: “How do I lose body fat only?”

Answer: “Eat less and workout with weights”

There is a second level of complexity here because although eating less will assuredly help you lose bodyweight, over time it can also contribute to some muscle loss if you are not working out. Therefore one extra assumption has to be made here about working out to maintain muscle mass.

In the fitness and nutrition industry the answers to these simple questions gets far too complicated, when in reality the solutions are straight forward. Useless unnecessary information can only bog your life down instead of streamlining it for greater success.

With that said you can save yourself a lot of time and effort by deferring to experts for the answers to any question you have (that you aren’t already an expert in). After all you cannot be an expert in everything.

Instead you should become an expert at finding experts. This way you will have the best chance at getting the right answer to any question in the least amount of time possible.