The fitness industry is full of misconceptions and myths as well as blatant scams and lies.
As Winston Churchill said, "A lie gets half way around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.
" If Churchill could only see the Internet today! If you don't become skeptical of fitness, weight loss and especially supplement claims, you're going to get taken to the cleaners.
Not only that, you'll waste a lot of precious time and you'll remain lost, confused and full of self-doubt, always second-guessing yourself.
The best thing you can do is to question everything until you've verified the original source.
Second hand information and even expert opinions are highly unreliable.
When you reconcile the peer reviewed research findings with your personal real world experience, you can come to the best conclusions about what really works.
On the other hand, it's easy to come to the wrong conclusions about how your own results were achieved.
You got results and that's what counts, but you may believe weird stuff about how you got those results.
A occurred, then B occurred, therefore you conclude that A caused B.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
For example, you take a fat burning pill and suddenly begin losing weight, therefore you think the pill caused your weight loss.
But your weight loss could have come from a dozen other things, like how about the nutrition and training program you started at the same time you started taking the pills? That's why you even have to question your own beliefs.
Admitting that you were wrong about something you believed can be one of the toughest things you'll ever do, but that's the mark of a great and expanding mind.
It's also important to learn how to interpret scientific research.
There are three good ways to start enhancing your ability to understand the sometimes complex nature of scientific research.
Number one is to develop an appreciation for science and to do some reading on the basic tenets of the scientific method.
Read some good books about science.
I recommend The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, by Carl Sagan.
Second, you should learn to appreciate and do some reading about critical thinking.
Also, learn about all the logical fallacies and learn how to form a coherent argument and to intelligently debate.
Third, read some books about skepticism.
Michael Shermer is a good place to start and Gilovich's How We Know What Isn't So is another good one.
I don't go too deep though, because I feel that skepticism can be taken so far that it begins to shut down your imagination, deter creative thinking and close you off to new possibilities.
I think skeptically when I need to, but I wouldn't say I'm a skeptic.
Once you've developed a scientific and critical thinking process, then it's easy to make sense of news, research and advertising.
When you see the media reports about the latest study, you can immediately see that in their eagerness to spin a good news story quickly, they usually do a pretty poor job of conveying what actually happened in the study.
You start to easily see through the lies and manipulation of research statistics that's constantly being used in fitness infomercials and supplement advertisements.
Incidentally, most people will stop their research as soon as their beliefs are verified - confirmation bias is what they call it.
If you want to really understand a subject, it's important to immerse yourself in completely, understand both sides of an argument and see the whole body of research.
You can't claim to be truly scientific if you just pick and choose bits and pieces of the data to support your personal point of view.