Less is More: The Concept of Addition by Subtraction
You have more than likely heard the term “less is more” at some point in your life. In this blog article, I want to organize my thoughts on the idea of “less is more” in the context of health and fitness and hopefully open your eyes to how we can get more out of our efforts by adjusting what we are focusing on.
We live in an age where we are constantly berated by advertisements for new products that are rolling out daily, all in some way promising to make our lives easier. There is a new fad diet that comes along promising better results with less effort every year. Not only that, but you can go online with whatever confirmation bias you have and find confirmatory research to back up your beliefs on any subject you can think of. What I’m saying is that with the combination of these factors, it’s becoming increasingly hard to discern what works and what doesn’t work in the realm of health and fitness. My proposal is that we take a step back, look at health and fitness holistically, and introduce the concept of addition by subtraction.
Before I continue, I want to emphasize that I don’t think all fitness and health products are useless, nor do I think there aren’t useful principles that may be extrapolated from some popular diets. The point of this article is more to encourage everybody to stop worrying about trying to change the oil if your drive shaft fell out and you're missing a tire and focus on the big picture.
The health pyramid I’ve attached below is a basic representation of where I believe we should put the most focus concerning our health and wellness. I’m sure I’ll get some eye rolls because we’ve heard it all before, but focusing on the basics is truly what is going to make the biggest difference in our long-term health and wellness.
The base of the pyramid starts with our behaviors, or what I would place under the envelope of lifestyle choices. Put simply, this is the way we live our lives. Our lifestyle is made up of our day-to-day habits, behaviors, and functions. It includes everything from stress management to breathing, hygiene, sleep quality and quantity, general activity level, and much more. Our lifestyle and behaviors make up the foundation of our health and wellness. These are all areas that we need to be actively attempting to improve or maintain. It’s hard to maintain great health and high levels of fitness if your lifestyle is built on sand; you’re better off moving 10 yards to the left and building on solid ground. Start with a solid foundation and work upward.
On the next tier, we have nutrition and movement, which I am going to categorize together for simplicity. Arguments can be made for which is more important, but I think if we have to decide between one or the other, we’re confounding the point. Both are essential for our health and are large pieces of the puzzle. Again, try not to overthink these sections. Eat whole, nutritious foods and move your body often. Focus on high-variety foods and be conscious of your micronutrient intake. Resistance train at least a couple times per week and get some sort of movement daily.
Lastly, we have supplementation and drugs. I have no business diving too far into this, as I am not a medical doctor. For some people, drugs are an essential part of life. Just make sure you are focusing on the other parts of the pyramid as well! No supplement or vitamin is going to be able to substitute for a well-rounded diet. I tell many of my clients that I like to use multivitamins as insurance. They cannot make up for a poor diet, but they can help fill in the gaps if you happen to be missing certain vitamins and minerals in your diet without knowing it.
I want to include some applicable advice in this article because concepts are great but sometimes hard to implement. One of my favorite quotes is, “In theory, there is no difference between practice and theory, but in practice there is.” Although I can’t give specific advice to whoever is reading this right now because I don’t know your exact situation, I can hopefully simplify your approach to health and fitness.
We’ve just learned that lifestyle, nutrition, and movement are the biggest factors that are going to influence our health, and that our habits and behaviors are the factors that make up our lifestyle. The easiest way to improve your nutrition and movement habits is to integrate them into your lifestyle.
Decisions are costly, and they take a lot of energy. Therefore, I want to make as few choices around health and fitness as necessary. Personally, I want to be on autopilot mode so that I can use my energy to make other important decisions and minimize decision fatigue. This means preparing my meals ahead of time, planning my workout times, and scheduling my days in advance. This approach works for me, but it may mean something different for you. Regardless, I believe having a plan in place for each week can be a major game changer when it comes to consistency.
Before I conclude this article, I want to return to the idea of addition by subtraction. The idea is that something of value can be gained by losing something of negative value. In the context of health and fitness, I think that instead of trying to worry about putting every small piece of the puzzle together at once, we’d be better off focusing on the bigger picture that I just outlined. In doing so, we are losing something of negative value (overthinking, stressing too much about the little details or things that aren’t going to move the needle) and gaining something of value (results). This will simplify the process of improving our health and fitness, which ends up compounding our results because we are focusing all our attention on the things that make the biggest difference. We can see more results from applying the same effort because now we are applying effort to the correct things.
I hope that this article helps you ask better questions and possibly reevaluate your approaches to health and wellness. My true goal in this article was to show you that, for most people, there is no need to overcomplicate things. It should be a big weight lifted off your shoulders to know that you don’t have to nail every small detail every single day. Instead, focus on moving daily, creating healthy habits, and eating well most of the time, and you’re well on your way.
In health and fitness,
Luke