Blog Disclaimers

and other things to keep in mind while reading our posts and other content

At some point we will likely post a more detailed blog post going somewhat in depth and giving more information for each point, but for now here it is:

This information is educational only. It should not be taken alone or considered as medical or nutritional advice. A qualified practitioner should be consulted for individualized recommendations prior to making any changes based on the information provided on our website.
These Points Are to the Best of Our Knowledge and Subject to Revision if We Come Upon New Information: These notes are the best I can verify from all sources online. The majority of my content is based on a compilation of secondary sources that I have come to trust. It is no more and no less than that. If you have issues with anything we say or would like to dispute a point we make, please email us with respectful and constructive criticism at livefortodayfitness@gmail.com or on twitter @lftfitness and we would be happy to discuss further with you. We will also be doing follow up Q&A posts for many of our posts, so send any questions you have for that as well.
Nothing we say is absolute truth. I'll leave that up to others. If what I recommend doesn't work or doesn't seem credible, do more research and feel free to ignore it. I don't want you blindly following. I want to teach you how to independently verify and to question everything, no matter who the source is.
Think Critically, Think for Yourself and Always Keep an Open Mind: Do not take any of our tips as absolute rules. Everybody has different sensitivities, so some tips may have a larger effect on some people than others. While we have chosen the strategies we use because we believe in them, don’t just take our word for it. Ask questions, do research and do your own critical thinking and determine if they make sense. Most important of all, try it out and see if it works for you. Keep in mind that there will always be conflicting opinions, so the only truly trustworthy source is your own experience. At some point you have to pick a side and try it out.
Everyone Has Biases: Yes, even us! I admit it! We have bias!! This is why thinking critically and trying things out for yourself is SO important.My personal history and the sources that I receive my information from influence my views and how I evaluate and present the information I see. Read here for more on bias – it's quite interesting.
Don’t Assume That Everyone Will React the Same Way to the Same Thing: Different things have different impacts on different people. Some people are more or less sensitive to different things than others. There may be some general principles that apply, but there is absolutely a range where some people do better or worse with more of one thing and less of another and someone else may be the exact opposite. This may be the result of genetics or it may be the result of an individual’s lifestyle and activities.
Don’t Sweat the Minutiae: There are a million different programs and ideas out there. Your job is to avoid getting sucked into worrying about and micromanaging the tiny insignificant details that only help minimally if at all. We want the big factors. We use the 80-20 principle to find the critical few actions and behaviours that REALLY influence change. If you can find the common recommendations of almost everyone out there you have likely found the critical 20%. (i.e. Regardless of whether some internet guru thinks that it is absolutely necessary, virtually anyone and everyone with any credibility will insist that whole foods are critical to fat loss, so make that a priority.)
Unreferenced Blog Posts: We will not be making scientific references, or any references for that matter in our blog posts unless we are directly quoting someone or telling you to go read an article. If you want this level of detail, you can search out the facts for yourself to verify what we are saying. The time and effort that is required to search out references is simply more than we can handle. We will never be the first to write about something, so it is virtually guaranteed that someone else has written about it with references. For any opinion we hold, it is either logically obvious why we believe what we do or there is someone else out there who has written about it already and in more detail. Any content that would require references should simply be a prompting for further research and further thought on the topics we discuss. If you have a specific question about why we believe what we do on a certain topic we would be more than happy to discuss by email or on Twitter. You should be thinking critically anyways, so why would I give you the false faith that I am an expert worthy of relying on blindly by citing a whole list of research? Research can be twisted and cherry picked (read more here) so we'll rest on the logical consistency of our arguments and the n=1 experiences of our readers. If it doesn't work for you, first make sure that you are doing it right, but if it still doesn't work, don't do it!
We Are NOT Experts: We're not experts, gurus, or any thing of the sort and we don’t claim to be. We are simply taking the concepts that we have learned and used and distilling them down into the key actionable steps. There are the researchers, the popular research interpreters and then there is us. We attempt to critically analyze the blind spots of the research interpreters and find the areas of overlap with the end goal of finding the truth and the critical areas of overlapping actionable steps. We take what has already been simplified and simplify it further down to the critical 20% that will provide 80% of the results for the common person.
We Do Not Have Any Significant Formal Education in Nutrition: I like to think that I am a strong critical thinker, and I try to defer to others who do have qualifications whenever possible, however I personally do not have those qualifications. Denise Minger has a greatly worded discussion on her site of why formal education and qualifications are not the be-all end-all. They are valuable for sure, but there are issues with simply deferring to education. Education does not give you a monopoly on good information. There are Doctors, PhDs etc. who have opposing views with each other, so we can’t just use education as a determination of trustworthiness. If a formally educated professional is not responsible with ensuring that they keep up with current research, they may actually have less knowledge and information than someone who is self-educated but has time to read current research. As a result, the only way to discern the truth is to learn to be critical thinkers and to evaluate the evidence (or at least the expert’s analysis of the evidence) for yourself and decide what to believe from there.
We Will Not Be Allowing Comments on Our Posts. Due to the frequency of malicious and unnecessarily negative comments we have seen on other sites we have chosen not to allow comments on our site at this time. We want our site to be a place of positivity and are not interested in having our blog posts polluted by people who have nothing better to do with their time than post negative and malicious comments. If you do wish to make a comment please feel free to email us at livefortodayfitness@gmail.com or find us on twitter.