It’s clear that exercise is good for us, so why is sticking to a workout routine one of the biggest challenges many of us face? Have you ever wondered why it's so difficult to stay motivated when it comes to physical activity? The answer may lie in the way our brains are wired.

Our brain contains specialized neural circuits, particularly in the insula cortex, designed to weigh the effort required for any given action against the potential rewards. This innate mechanism helped our ancestors avoid wasting precious energy on fruitless pursuits during times of scarcity.

Regular exercise requires a constant and significant expenditure of energy for gradual progress and seemingly uncertain long-term benefits. This combination of high energy expenditure and uncertain long term payoff is the exact scenario our brain's weighing mechanism is designed to scrutinize.

When our brain's cost/benefit calculators detect an activity requiring considerable and sustained effort, but the rewards are delayed, alarms tend to go off. "Is all this worth it?" our brains seem to ask, driven by that innate tendency to prefer activities providing maximum, immediate rewards for minimum effort. Our intuition prefers the “low-hanging fruit” and in a society where all fruits hang low, this previously beneficial instinct now works against us.

To make matters worse, our brains also tend to prioritize evaluating risks and required effort over potential future rewards when making decisions. This hard-wired risk aversion makes us even more reluctant to take on physically demanding tasks like a daily exercise routine.

While this intuitive and ingrained way of making choices may have helped our ancestors survive, it works against us today when we're trying to motivate ourselves for the purpose of health and fitness. Here are 4 tips for staying dedicated and motivated:

1. Track your progress.
   Our brains are wired to seek evidence that our efforts are paying off. By closely tracking fitness metrics like weight, body measurements, strength gains, etc., you provide your rational mind with tangible proof that your hard work is leading to real results. Analyzing the data can help convince your brain that the struggle is indeed worthwhile.
   
2. Set micro and macro goals
   In addition to long-term goals, set a series of incremental, achievable short-term goals. Hitting these short-term milestones provides a frequent sense of accomplishment that can propel you through plateaus and moments of wavering motivation when the big-picture payoff still seems far away.
   
3. Surround yourself with like-minded and supportive people. 
   Humans are greatly influenced by social forces. Surrounding yourself with others who prioritize health and fitness can normalize an active lifestyle and provide mutual support and accountability. Finding your tribe of fellow fitness enthusiasts makes it easier to stay on track.
   
4. Trust an experienced Coach. 
   Having knowledgeable guidance can be invaluable, especially when motivation dips. A good coach can provide expert programming, tips for overcoming obstacles, encouragement through rough patches, and the objectivity to push you when you may be tempted to slack off. Their belief in your potential can help override your brain's doubts.

Although our brain's archaic framework may make embracing exercise a constant challenge, using smart strategies like tracking, goal-setting, socializing, and trusting a qualified Coach can help keep you motivated while outmaneuvering our prehistoric hard-wiring. Understanding the inner workings of our brain's cost/benefit algorithms can help shed light on why we struggle so much to stick to a workout plan. With awareness of our natural inclinations, we can set ourselves up to overcome our brain's hesitancy and make moves toward better health and fitness.

There is never a shortage of questions when it comes to nutrition and the best practices around what we eat and how to optimize health with diet. We know that the standard American diet consisting primarily of processed foods and fast foods is not ideal and has led to an alarming 40% obesity rate in the United States. This has also led to a constantly evolving narrative and never-ending arguments on what exactly is BEST. In the early 2000s, the Atkins diet was widely adopted, and guess what? IT WORKED! Since then there have been countless claims to the best diets from Keto, to Intermittent Fasting, Low Carb, High Carb, and now a massive push for Vegan and Carnivore diets. It seems we always swing to the extremes and with the massive amounts of misinformation, there’s no wonder why.

In 2019, just before the pandemic, a documentary on Netflix called “The Game Changers” went viral as we all sat isolated in our homes searching for something new to watch. This documentary seemed to be a multi-part promotional advertisement for the vegan diet, criticized for its selective information, cherry-picking, and controversial funding sources. Luckily, despite the popularity of “The Game Changers,” the vast majority of viewers saw through the biases and with an onslaught of doctors and experts coming forward shedding light on the topic, we’ve been able to move forward with an eye roll after that, an extremely biased documentary aired and left us hungry to finally get a truly unbiased view.

Now, as we enter 2024, the talk around diet and what we should and shouldn’t eat has been covered in a new and very interesting docuseries called “You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment”. In this experiment, the researchers aim to compare a vegan diet to a ‘health-conscious’ omnivore diet using sets of identical twins. Initially, this caught my attention as the basis of this study seemed like a great way to get some understandable information to the masses. The impact of the vegan diet as well as many others has been extensively researched and published. However, for the general population, reading medical journal articles and peer-reviewed studies is less than entertaining. An unbiased and understandable documentary series would be the perfect method to spread great information to the masses. Unfortunately, like “The Game Changers,” this new show is NOT that.

Right off the bat as an avid researcher, I had to find the sources of funding and directing. Not to my surprise, the funding sources are entirely made up of vegan agenda-pushing organizations. One notable funding source is The Vogt Foundation owned by millionaire tech entrepreneur and famous vegan Kyle Vogt who also funded “The Game Changers.” Vogt also acted as the executive director for the series. Another notable funding source is the Oceanic Preservation Society which is funded by … you guessed it, The Vogt Foundation. The Oceanic Preservation Society is a non-profit an organization that ‘promotes global conservation by exposing threats to our oceans and planet’. The founder of OPS is Louie Psihoyos who…wait for it…is the DIRECTOR of “You Are What You Eat.” This information is mostly hidden from the general viewer and sheds light on the lack of integrity in this series right off the bat.

Regardless of the shady funding, the first episode is promising as it bases the whole show on a Stanford Study led by Christopher Gardner who is the ‘Director of Nutrition Studies’ at the Stanford Prevention Research Center. This coupled with the never-before studied comparison of identical twins kept me engaged through the beginning of this series. As the series continued, it became very obvious that there was an extreme bias towards the vegan diet without much, if any, sound evidence other than the fact that the standard American diet is suboptimal. This bias led to more digging, this time into who Christopher Gardner was. Turns out, Professor Gardner is also the director for the Stanford ‘Plant-Based Diet Initiative’ that is financially supported by “Beyond Meat, Inc.” the leading producer of plant-based meat products globally.

Now that we know this series is funded by hardcore anti-meat vegan organizations, directed by famously vocal vegans who run those same organizations, AND spearheaded by a researcher who has a clear plant-based agenda and is financially supported by the leading producer of plant-based meats, we can finally dive in and appropriately sift through the misinformation, cherry-picking, fear-mongering, and heavy bias of the show.

As I reluctantly continued watching this series, there are a few key takeaways that we can gain from their coverage. First of all, eating whole foods and adding exercise does improve overall health as seen in all but one participant. The conclusion itself was littered with excuses and blaming the participants for not finding what they wanted. But in the background of all that, each participant lost weight and felt better. In all re-tests, the vegan participants lost a significant amount of body fat. Alarmingly, all but one of those vegan participants also lost a significant amount of muscle mass. Similarly, the omnivorous participants also lost a significant amount of fat. The difference was that all but one omnivorous subject also gained a significant amount of muscle mass over the 8-week study. There are extensive studies showing that with sarcopenia (muscle loss), there is an increased risk of all-cause mortality, while an increase in skeletal muscle mass is associated with a significantly decreased risk of all-cause mortality. This finding was quickly overlooked as they attempted to close by distracting us with a claim that the vegan diet will increase the quality of sex by increasing arousal.

A second positive takeaway is the global adoption of mass, inhumane farming practices. With a heavy vegan agenda, this show highlighted the nastiest parts of meat production, specifically ‘concentrated animal feeding operations’ (CAFOs). These operations maximize profits by treating animals as production units rather than living creatures. There’s no argument that these operations are disgusting and fueled by greed. But is the inhumane, Earth-shattering devastation limited to just meat production? Interestingly enough, it’s not the production of meats and meat products that is the problem, it’s modern farming as a whole. The docuseries begins this push, as most do with statistics concerning methane production. A greenhouse gas that has been publicized as contributing to global warming. The producers lean heavily into methane-emitting cattle and the massive cattle industry across multiple continents today. The show compares the total methane production of the cattle industry to the methane produced by motor vehicles. While this may seem alarming, the dangers of motor vehicles is linked to carbon emissions and not methane. However, the total contribution to annual methane emissions by cattle farming is just 4% whereas rice farming contributes 12% and the largest contributor to global methane emissions is our ‘wetlands’ which contributes a whopping 78% of total methane gas emitted into the atmosphere. Human-impacted emissions, in total, break down to this; agriculture as a whole, livestock, and crop production contribute 37% to the total methane emission, where energy production contributes 40% and the remaining comes from various other sources.

The series continues to pull on heartstrings by diving into the deforestation of rainforests and tropics. A topic that has been highlighted throughout our childhoods in the '90s & 2000s. We can agree that deforestation and the practice of ‘Slash and Burn’ farming is devastating. This practice is where a forest is cleared and burned to the ground in order to create more rich farmland. While watching this series, the producers suggest that every time you bite into a burger you should visualize the Amazon going up in smoke. Is the meat industry the driving force in this deforestation? As it turns out, 59% of deforestation is clearing land for products such as vegetable & seed oils, cropland, sugar production, and forestry farming for paper and lumber. This makes the majority of deforestation vegan! The mass meat industry does contribute to 41% of the demise of our rainforest, which is a major problem. Just not quite the devil that this docuseries paints it out to be.

There’s no question that we have a food problem globally and that problem stems primarily from the demand in America as the number one importer of food products worldwide. The problem however is not that we humans consume meat products. The problem, like most, is greed and the push to increase profits at the expense of the animals, crops, and eventually our health. The agriculture industry as a whole today is the leading source of pollution in the world, with the majority of that pollution coming from pesticides, fertilizers, and waste products. The agriculture sector utilizes 69% of our planet's freshwater, further degrading the water quality and adversely impacting freshwater supplies worldwide. The W.H.O. also states that we are facing an onslaught of antibiotic-resistant illnesses caused by the massive misuse and overuse of antimicrobials in humans, animals, and plants. The food industry is a problem and a BIG problem not only in the United States but across the globe.

While many attempt to capitalize on the problem with simple fixes, documentaries, fake meat, and diet culture, don’t be distracted from the real problem. Rather than avoiding certain food groups, avoid the inhumane practice of mass farming and genetic alteration of our food that degrades the quality and slowly destroys us from the inside out. The way to fix this isn’t by creating another food group that is also designed to be produced in massive quantities. It’s by valuing the farmers doing things the right way - supporting small businesses and families who love the land, love their animals, and work the land themselves. Search out locally sourced or homegrown meats and produce that may cost more but will drastically improve your health and quality of life. If you can’t find it nearby, grow produce yourself. Once you taste a tomato you grew and harvested yourself at home, you’ll understand!