"There is no free lunch in biology."
Imagine that you have a burning desire to jump higher. Maybe you love basketball, and it's your longtime dream to dunk a ball. Problem is you're not especially tall.
So you start working really hard on jumping higher. You perform regular strength training and plyometrics to improve the strength and number of your fast-twitch muscle fibers. You work diligently on improving your jumping mechanics to create the most efficient jumping motion, and so on.
Then one day you learn of a new invention: Jumpy Shoes!
With Jumpy Shoes on, you just press a button and... voila, the shoes launch you to your desired height.
No brainer.
You buy a pair and, overnight, your dunking dreams have come true.
It turns out these shoes don't just help with jumping. They even walk for you! Just turn them on "walk mode" and they'll propel your legs forward in perfect rhythm. Zero effort required.
Six months pass and one morning you wake up, put your feet on the ground and crumple to the floor in a pitiful heap. The batteries have died in your jumpy shoes.
And you can't get up.
Over those six months, unbeknownst to you, your hip and leg muscles have atrophied away, and your pelvis and leg bones reduced to twigs.
When it comes to decisions about our health, it seems many times we're confronted with a decision: adopt a slow and methodical approach that, slowly but surely, makes us a little more capable and resilient each and every day.
Or adopt a quick fix that allows us to solve a problem or achieve a goal quickly, but leaves us less capable and less resilient as a result.
In other words, do we select the option that improves our own ability to maintain health and resilience, or do we outsource the solution?
With an example like Jumpy Shoes, it's obvious that there are trade-offs to the outsourcing option. And yet, if you stop and look around, you'll find these kinds of shortcuts are everywhere.
Especially in the world of health, fitness, and medicine - drugs, supplements, devices, etc. And they are widely adopted with little to no consideration - or even awareness of - the tradeoffs of doing so.
But I'd contend that this is one of these single most important distinctions to keep in mind when making health decisions of any kind.
For me, one of the single most important questions I now ask when evaluating any potential health solution is:
Is this something that's helping me get better at this problem, or am I outsourcing the solution to something else?
In other words, will this strengthen my health and resilience, or am I buying a pair of Jumpy Shoes?