Making and breaking New Year’s resolutions is a long-standing tradition of Western Culture. Starting with a clean slate is appealing because it allows us to erase errors of the past year and instill a sense of hope for the new one. Most New Year’s resolutions revolve around health and fitness, with “Doing more exercise,” “Losing weight,” and “Improving diet” consistently appearing in the top five. However, while 77 percent of people are “very confident” or “somewhat confident” that they’ll see their resolutions through to the following year, only 7 percent achieve it. In fact, there’s a huge 12 percent spike in health club memberships in January, with 50 percent of them being canceled within six months. Evidently, adhering to a long-term health strategy is more complex than it appears.

In this month’s column, Dr. Nick Tiller (exercise physiologist) and Dr. John Sullivan (clinical sport psychologist) explore the factors that impede the attainment of health and fitness resolutions. They also propose an alternative path to success that follows established components of critical thinking.

Making Better Health and Fitness Decisions

Failing to follow through on a New Year’s fitness goal can be due to many factors, but a principal one is that resolutions aren’t perceived as long-term processes that require ongoing assessment, evaluation, and feedback as knowledge is acquired.^1,2 To remedy this, the long-term goal should be punctuated with smaller, short-term milestones, each of which is pursued while considering the following question: “What barriers am I likely to face that might impede my progress or prevent me from achieving this milestone?”  Thereafter, we can use critical thinking to overcome many such barriers. 

Critical thinking has many definitions but is broadly considered the intellectually disciplined process of achieving a goal using logic and reason, and by skilfully conceptualizing, analyzing, and evaluating information. This mode of “metacognition” affords us a better appreciation of how to think rather than what to think. We spend an inordinate amount of time (and money) on ineffective health and fitness interventions, including fad diets, supplements, and gimmicky training programs. Using critical thinking, we can avoid bad advice and become less susceptible to marketing rhetoric. This type of “pre-mortem” planning^3,4 can help us maximize our chances of implementing successful strategies. The following four points should be integrated into any critical thinking program aimed at achieving health and fitness in 2022. 

1. Understand the Mechanics of Decision-Making

Marketing strategies for commercial products and interventions (e.g., diets, supplements, and exercise programs) depend on the fact that humans make most decisions with their emotions.^5,6 When the human brain was naturally selected, survival depended on our ability to make quick, reactive decisions that depended on emotional processing with little deliberation. Huge capital is invested by marketing companies to manipulate our emotions and our experiences of them. So, when beginning a health- or fitness-related decision-making process, it’s essential we manage our emotions by remaining calm. This way we can engage our cognitive abilities with greater effectiveness. Far from being a weak link in the chain, emotion plays an important role in our ability to improve and learn, working in harmony with our cognitive gifts.⁷ However, to paraphrase philosopher Bertrand Russel: Instinct is important, but it must be tempered by reason, directed by the powerful force of intellect. 

2. Know your Biases

Humans are conditioned for the “quick fix.” When faced with complex decisions, we tend to employ mental shortcuts called heuristics⁸ that lead to rapid but imperfect solutions, particularly in health and fitness.⁹ Marketing companies know our biases better than we do, and they design marketing strategies to exploit the biases in human reasoning.¹⁰ Greater awareness of our ingrained biases can help us reduce the frequency with which we commit them. Here are three common examples of cognitive biases (logical fallacies) exploited in health and fitness marketing: 

1. The appeal to nature asserts that something is “correct” or “better” because it’s naturally derived. Organic food is marketed partly on this fallacy, and it’s the basis of the erroneous anti-GMO movement.
2. The appeal to tradition asserts that something is correct because it correlates with some custom or practice. Barefoot running shoes and the paleo diet are both marketed, at least in part, on this fallacy. Ancient Chinese Medicine should not be considered effective purely because of its ancient categorization.
3. The exposure effect has the consumer erroneously equating the visibility/popularity of a product with quality: the two things are mutually exclusive. Famous brands of sports shoes or supplements often sponsor high-profile athletes and then use the ensuing exposure to sell products. However, this says nothing of the product’s effectiveness. 

3. Improve Your Science Literacy

When deciding on whether a fitness strategy is likely to lead to success, critical appraisal of the evidence-of-efficacy is the litmus test. No, this doesn’t mean doing “research: on YouTube. Reading books written by experts, completing accredited online courses, and reading scientific journal articles can all provide a better understanding of the operational mechanics of exercise, health, and fitness. However, not everyone has the skill to interpret scientific data, nor the time to pore over endless papers. Accordingly, another perfectly acceptable option is to defer to scientists who’ve made their careers on understanding the details and nuances of the subject. Choosing our experts is something we need to do better as a society because we’ve become accustomed to perceiving “authorities” based on their popularity rather than their education, supervised training, and licensure. This is especially important given the global upswing in misinformation, disinformation, and antiscience movements over the past decade.¹³ Remember, when following health and fitness advice, Twitter followers are not credentials.

4. Improve Your Media literacy

Although some media outlets faithfully report new scientific discoveries, others misreport and misrepresent the science for the sake of clicks, likes, and retweets. Sensationalist headlines garner readers but rarely reflect real-world discoveries that are usually incremental and mundane by comparison. In 2015, scientist John Bohannon (Director of the Institute of Diet and Health in Germany), published a journal article showing that eating a daily chocolate bar accelerated weight loss in healthy people. The headlines “Slim by Chocolate” appeared in print and on television in twenty countries and half a dozen languages until the “study” was revealed by Bohannon, actually a journalist, as a scam. Not only was the paper methodologically flawed with poor statistical methods, but his Institute of Diet and Health was nothing more than a website. The details of the sting were conceived by Bohannon to expose the media’s hunger for sensationalist headlines and their lax critical faculties.

Another important facet of media literacy is the ability to safely navigate social media, particularly as most U.S. citizens get their news from such online platforms.¹⁸ However, many social media users are naive to how content is generated to ensure ongoing engagement. Data on the user’s scrolling, clicking, and sharing habits are collected and fed into algorithms that create bespoke content based on the previous viewing history. Because users tend to evaluate information more favourably if it comes from within their social-media circle,¹⁴ a self-contained “echo chamber” of confirmation bias is created in which users are scarcely exposed to views that contradict their own. This is antithetical to the ethos of critical thinking and scientific skepticism. What’s more, continued competition for limited attention span on social media leads to the sharing of low-quality content,¹⁵ partly explaining why falsehoods and “fake news” diffuse significantly farther and faster than objective facts.¹⁶ A study of health and exercise advice disseminated on Instagram showed that “Influencers” with large numbers of followers tended have fewer educational qualifications,¹⁷ leading to low-quality advice and harmful misinformation.

Take Home Messages

One of the reasons we fail at our health-based New Year’s resolutions is that we’re conditioned to expect rapid outcomes, and we give up when they’re not achieved. Health and fitness goals must be pursued with long-term strategies, underpinned by intermediary, short-term milestones. In fact, to witness any meaningful changes in almost any health and/or fitness outcome will take timescales of at least several months. This is contrary to pervasive messaging in the commercial world. By understanding potential errors in decision making, recognizing and working to mitigate our biases, and developing scientific and media literacy, we become better critical thinkers. In doing so, we stand a better chance of making productive decisions; not just in health and fitness, but in all walks of life.

Endnotes

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2.     Ntoumanis N., Ng JYY, Prestwich A., et al. A meta-analysis of self-determination theory-informed intervention studies in the health domain: effects on motivation, health behavior, physical, and psychological health. Health Psychol Rev. 2021;15(2):214-244. doi:10.1080/17437199.2020.1718529

3.     Setting exercise and fitness goals: Dos and don’ts. – PsycNET. Available at https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0000124-022.

4.     Eckert T. The pre-mortem: An alternative method of predicting failure. In: 2015 IEEE Symposium on Product Compliance Engineering (ISPCE). ; 2015:1-4. doi:10.1109/ISPCE.2015.7138700

5.     Panksepp J., Lane R.D., Solms M., Smith R. Reconciling cognitive and affective neuroscience perspectives on the brain basis of emotional experience. Neurosci Biobehav Rev. 2017;76(Pt B):187-215. doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2016.09.010

6.     Functional connectivity gradients as a common neural architecture for predictive processing in the human brain | bioRxiv. Available at https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.01.456844v2.

7.     Degeneracy and complexity in biological systems | PNAS. Accessed January 10, 2022. Available at https://www.pnas.org/content/98/24/13763.

8.     Tversky A., Kahneman D.. Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Science. 1974;185(4157):1124-1131. doi:10.1126/science.185.4157.1124

9.     Maffetone P.B., Laursen P.B.. Decision-Making in Health and Fitness. Front Public Health. 2019;7:6. doi:10.3389/fpubh.2019.00006

10.     Laissue N., Kovic M.. Consuming Rationally: How Marketing Is Exploiting Our Cognitive Biases, and What We Can Do about It.; 2016.

11.     Croskerry P., Singhal G., Mamede S. Cognitive debiasing 2: impediments to and strategies for change. BMJ Qual Saf. 2013;22 Suppl 2: doi:10.1136/bmjqs-2012-001713

12.     Lewandowsky S., Ecker U.K.H., Seifert C.M., Schwarz N., Cook J. Misinformation and Its Correction: Continued Influence and Successful Debiasing. Psychol Sci Public Interest. 2012;13(3):106-131. doi:10.1177/1529100612451018

13.     Hotez P.J. Combating antiscience: Are we preparing for the 2020s? PLOS Biol. 2020;18(3):e3000683. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.3000683

14.     Schmidt A.L., Zollo F., Vicario M.D., et al. Anatomy of news consumption on Facebook. Proc Natl Acad Sci. 2017;114(12):3035-3039. doi:10.1073/pnas.1617052114

15.     Weng L., Flammini A., Vespignani A., Menczer F. Competition among memes in a world with limited attention. Sci Rep. 2012;2(1):335. doi:10.1038/srep00335

16.     Vosoughi S., Roy D., Aral S. The spread of true and false news online. Science. 2018;359(6380):1146-1151. doi:10.1126/science.aap9559

17.     Marocolo M, Meireles A, de Souza HLR, et al. Is Social Media Spreading Misinformation on Exercise and Health in Brazil? Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2021;18(22):11914. doi:10.3390/ijerph182211914

18.     Gottfried J, Shearer E. News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2016. Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project. Published May 26, 2016. https://www.journalism.org/2016/05/26/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2016/