I’m not saying that self-help and fitness authors aren’t adding value by virtue of their various packaged systems and interpretations of research, I’m just saying that they are contributing to the confusion by having to differentiate themselves from the consensus rather than explain and interpret it because it is their business if they sell information in some form.

I know this because as a consultant I face the same tension myself, how much of my valuable knowledge to share and how much to incorporate into proprietary services. It’s tension because I don’t really have many secrets, I have mostly skills and experience for applying what is freely available knowledge. The same goes for trainers and fitness authors, they have experience and skills in most cases, but they aren’t getting paid to tell people the consensus view of the technical material. So they don’t. And when every “expert” tells a slightly different story in order to differentiate themselves, you get a “choice from confusion” rather than an education in the core technical principles. It isn’t neccessarily that there is no scientific consensus (although there are a few areas where that is still true). It is often that trainers need to focus on their differentiator by the very nature of competing in a marketplace of information, money, and attention.

There are some authors who provide good programs that follow solid, simple, principles, but they generally don’t share or don’t even really know the real principles for why their programs work from what I can tell.

It is still possible, although difficult, to get a good sense of the technical fields. A handful of popular authors are also either legitimate technical experts as well as trainers, or are researchers who are better than average at communicating the findings of their field in simple terms.

When you find a real expert, it is like finally having a satisfying meal rather than a bunch of fast food snacks. I have a couple in mind but I’m not posting here to advertise anyone or put anyone down, I just want to offer my solution to the confusion: either go for a simple program and refine it so it works for you, and don’t worry about the principles, or if you really care about the deeper underlying principles rather than just the rules of the program, learn to distinguish fast food authors and popular gurus branding their own systems from deep technical experts who explain the consensus science, and have the patience and self-responsibility to reflect on and apply what you learn from them. Programs very often work but due to different reasons than the author claims. Unless they have discovered some true scientific anomaly, which is often claimed but very rarely the case, their system probably works by known consensus scientific principles of psychology and physiology. We know a lot about how appetite works, how metabolism works, and so on, and we also know a fair amount about how different factors interact in real life programs.

The knowledge accumulates slowly, but it does accumulate, while the trainers and popular authors have to market themselves quickly and furiously, so they tend to run a bit ahead of the accumulation of knowledge and differentiate themselves by making up new branded principles rather than explaining and applying known scientific ones.

We all need to support organic farming and push for legislation that supports it!