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Home » Fitness » A Longtime Fitness Editor Does Some Soul Searching – Outside Magazine

We need to stop overthinking wellness.

Stories like Where Skinny People Sit in Restaurants or the 15 Ways to Eat Healthier Without Thinking are fun to write and even more enjoyable to read. But they distract all of us from the fundamentals to living a healthy life. Thats why news of a scandal at the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab may actually be a good thing, the shock we all need to return to the basics. In a piece published this week,Science of Usexplained that researchers at the lab, which has long been a leader in nutrition science,are coming under fire for publishing shockingly shoddy research. Outside, along with most major health and wellness publications, has reported on the labs made-for-web-headline-writing studies, like How to Navigate the Maze of Temptation That Is Your Local Grocery Store and Eat the Same Breakfast Every Day.

My first reaction was to write a piece declaring that everything we know about fitness is a lie. Thatd certainly get some traffic. Instead, the Cornell scandal led me to some soul searching. Wellness is fairly straightforward in theory, if not practice. We dont need catchy headlines or complicated formulas to stay healthy. Theres a reason Michael Pollan wrote a whole book on nutrition that can be condensed into seven words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That thinking isnt reserved for food science alone. In an email, Michael Joyner, a physiologist at the Mayo Clinic, told me that we overcomplicate everything when it comes to health. He then pointed me to an obituary in the New York Times of Lester Breslow, a researcher who, the Times reported, gave mathematical proof to the notion that people can live longer and healthier by changing habits like smoking, diet and sleep. Breslow identified seven key factors to living a healthy life:

Theres no arguing against Breslows habits for a healthy life. The difficulty is in figuring out how to live by them. As always, the devil is in the details. I knowIll ride for five hours on the mountain bike but follow it up with several margaritas and a large slice of key lime pie.If you only have time to ride on the weekends or cant afford to buy healthy ingredients for meals, Breslow's guidelines become less attainable. But for the average Outside reader, things really are shockingly simple:

Over the last half-decade, Ive written and edited hundreds of stories on health and fitness for multiple publications. No matter the study or advice we discuss in the newsroom, we almost always come back to the same conclusion: this stuff isnt all that complicated, its just really hard.

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A Longtime Fitness Editor Does Some Soul Searching - Outside Magazine

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Home » Fitness » A Longtime Fitness Editor Does Some Soul Searching – Outside Magazine