In Episode 10: Trying to Get Something for Nothing, Geof and Todd discuss how the health & wellness industry is all too eager to sell you tips, tricks, and hacks to not only help you maximize the health of your diet and your workout efficiency but to get more than you proverbially paid for (put in the work for) by “tricking” your physiology.  More often than not these hacks do not work and if they do work in the short term tend to have very little translational benefit in long-term health.  For example, just because you burn more fat during a workout performed in the fasted state (you haven’t eaten), doesn’t mean that you burned more fat during the other 23 hours of the day, the week, the month or the year.  Fat burning during a workout actually has very little to do with the amount of fat you burn over a 24 hour period and more to do with energy balance and carbohydrate consumption.

Eating healthy and staying/getting fit takes work and it takes effort.  There are no short-cuts.  You have to put in the work.  Nothing in life is free and neither is healthy eating or staying/getting fit.  Instead of trying to “hack” your physiology, Geof and Todd recommend redoubling your efforts to focus on what works: the fundamentals of health and wellness (i.e. eating fruits and veggies, exercising 30 – 60 minutes/day, eating at energy balance).  This advice may sound cliché, worn out, and ineffective but it works, provided you find a way to implement it into your life.  Instead of trying to “hack” our physiologies and get something for nothing, try focusing on making it easier to execute your health & wellness fundamentals on a day-to-day basis.