I wanted to start this blog as a way to organize my thoughts and share what I have learned about health, nutrition and exercise over the past year or so. I have always been interested in nutrition and exercise, I even got a masters in biochemical and molecular nutrition. I'll wait while you're impressed for a second, I know that sounds super impressive. But to be honest (and as I'll explain later honesty will be a theme of this blog as you may have guessed from the title) I didn't feel like I had learned much about nutrition when I left graduate school. I learned a lot about biochemistry and I had been given facts about nutrition and looked at tons of conflicting studies that just left me confused.
About a year ago, thanks to Joe Rogan, I started listening to podcasts. I currently work as a lab tech in a research lab and there's a lot of repetitive pipetting which is a great time to listen to podcasts and learn a little something or maybe have a laugh. I knew I wanted to listen to podcasts related to health, nutrition and exercise since that's what I'm interested in but it seemed like all the top ranked nutrition podcasts were all paleo related. I had heard of the paleo diet before and I was like ""no thank you that's the dumbest diet I've ever heard." Eventually I gave in and started listening, albeit begrudgingly at first, to some of the paleo podcasts. After a few months of hearing a lot of the same messages over and over again and thinking through the concepts in the context of what I had learned in the past I knew there must be something to this whole paleo, ancestral approach to things.
This past September I moved into a new apartment and I decided to turn over a new leaf. I decided to start cooking the majority of my meals and even started bringing my lunch into work. After doing that, I decided to start eating a more paleo-like diet and experimenting with what made me feel good, look good and have more energy (these are three things I think we can all agree we'd like from a diet and a lifestyle, right?). In later posts I'll share what some of those things I learned and tried are but for now I just wanted to explain the title of this blog and my current philosophy about what it takes to take control of you health and become the best version of yourself you possibly can be. "Current" is the key word in that last sentence because as I learn new things I'm always changing and adjusting my views and game plans.
In science, we carry out experiments to help answer questions about the population on the whole. Since it's impossible to carry out a study on the entire population, we use a smaller subset of people in the experiment to make predictions about what that will mean for the population as a whole. The people participating in the study is known as the sample size or often abbreviated as n. In a drug study with 100 people, if half receive the drug being tested and the other half receive a placebo then the n=50 for each group. This is a way over simplification of study design but it's just to explain why I named the blog what I did. Generally speaking, in a study, the larger the n the stronger the power of the study which allows you to make better predictions about the population.
Why then would I call this blog honest N-of-one? Isn't an n=1 just about the worst you can do without having no experiment at all? Actually the answer is quite the opposite. At the end of the day, all the studies you hear are just averages and they can only give generalized information that may or may not apply to you. Ultimately, you have to take steps to take control of your health and decide what works best for you. There could be 100 studies saying a certain food is good for you, but if you eat it and it makes you throw up every time then it may not be a good idea to eat that food. People will always say "I could never eat that" or "I could never stop eating that" but the truth is you really never know until you try it. The second half of being an honest N-of-one beyond experimenting with yourself, is being honest with yourself. There are a lot of people, companies, organizations out there that will lie to you because they are pushing an agenda. Don't join them and start lying to yourself, do yourself a favor and be honest about what actually makes you feel good and helps you live a better life. The point behind honest N-of-one is to go out there and take control of your health constantly learning new things about yourself along the way. Your own personal N-of-one experiment (also known as life) is the most important experiment, by far, to living a happy and healthy life.
'Til Next Time,
-Devin
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