ON OPPORTUNITY COSTS

I am more than certain I’ve written about this topic, and, quite frankly, I may have written this very post before, since that’s what happens when you write once a week for a decade.  But since I keep running into this situation, it’s worth discussing again.  People like to be binary, primarily because black and white is FAR easier to understand than nuance.  The thing is: nuance is what MAKES us human.  And adult for that matter.  Children operate in black and white because they don’t have a fully formed pre-frontal cortex to be able to appreciate nuance and, as adults, we honestly prefer that they DON’T operate “in the grey” for a bit.  It’s easier to tell a kid “lying is wrong” vs explaining the intricacies of social interactions wherein sometimes we tell small lies as a matter of “social lubricant”.  I’m already getting so off-track here, but I bring all this up because people who operate in black and white when it comes to training and diet don’t quite appreciate that “in the grey” lay opportunity costs.

Were it not for those shades of grey, we'd never have the opportunity to enjoy this

Before I get any further: what the hell is an opportunity cost?  As the name implies, “opportunity cost” describes the phenomenon of how choosing to do one thing takes away your ability to choose another thing.  We only have so many opportunities, and whenever we capitalize on one, we shut off others.  I wrote about the board game “Life” recently, and that’s an excellent example in opportunity costs.  At the start of the game, you can go to college or start down your career path.  You quite literally pick between two paths and cannot go down 1 if you pick the other.  I suppose Robert Frost’s “road less traveled” would have been a more profound example, but I am but a simple barbarian.  Hey: DnD works there too: when you pick one character class/race to place, you cut off your opportunity to play the others.  Opportunity costs abound!

And herein we reconcile those above 2 paragraphs.  Trainees frequently ask if something is good or bad.  “Is IIFYM a good approach to nutrition?”  “Is it bad if I only eat beef and rice for gaining?”  “Is a 6x a week Push/Pull/Legs split good?”  Etc etc.  I tend to make few friends when I point out that ascribing morality to decisions related to eating and training is silly, but digging deeper: neither choice is good or bad, they simply represent an opportunity cost.  The question is: can you AFFORD this opportunity cost?

Some see a buffet, others: an existential crisis

Let’s talk nutrition.  Your stomach only has so much room in it, your intestines can only digest so much, and there are only so many hours in the day to cook and eat.  Everything you eat represents an opportunity cost.  Hell, V8 vegetable juice summed this up adequately with “You coulda had a V8!”  This is where nuance comes into play in the discussion.  Trainees like to ask “if I already covered my protein and essential fats, can I just eat junk food to get in my calories?”  Sure, you CAN…but at what cost?  Specifically, at what OPPORTUNITY cost?  It’s not that eating an Oreo actively detracts from your health (maybe it does, I don’t have the background to speak to that), but it represents an opportunity you had to eat ANYTHING else that may actually benefit you.  The obsession with macronutrients as a goal has made us forget about all the super cool micronutrients out there and the immense value they can provide.  Vitamins, minerals, fiber, antioxidants, etc etc.  To say nothing of us counting grams of fat but not factoring in which grams are polyunsaturated vs mono vs saturated vs trans, which ones are omega 3s vs 6s vs 9s, etc.  To say nothing of the fact that, try as we might to ignore it: we feel just plain BETTER when we’re not stuffed with junk.  Look at the average person: they live a junk food life and experience a junk food existence.  They’re sweating Crisco and just plain miserable.  The only “joy” they get is that moment the Oreo hits their lips: then they spend the rest of the day trying to digest it and feeling the anguish.  This represents an opportunity cost to NOT experience that.

Let’s talk training.  Why can’t I rest 8 minutes between sets?  You can: but you could have also done So much stuff in that 8 minutes.  That could have been 8 minutes of MORE sets of the same stuff, or some conditioning work, or a chance to work on mobility.  What’s wrong with doing a 6x a week weight training program?  Nothing is wrong with it…but when were you planning on getting in your conditioning?  Why can’t I add an arms day onto 5/3/1?  What do you take AWAY by doing that?  Once again: you only have so many hours of the day, your body can only recover from so much work, you can only put on so much  muscle, etc etc.  Every choice you make is not necessarily a choice that does harm BUT it IS a choice that takes away other choices.  

But this was a bad choice

And, of course, the opposite works too.  Choosing the “good” choice removes our ability to make bad decisions.  When I’m gaining weight, I have SO much “good” food to get through that I flat out don’t WANT to eat anything “off menu”.  I know that doing so is just going to put me behind the 8-ball as far as my eating for the day goes, and now I’ll need to catch up while also dealing with the increased fullness and feeling of awfulness that came with it.  My training is so full of “good” choices that I just flat out don’t have room to do a lot of silly things.  And this, in itself, represents an opportunity cost: if we fill all available space/make all possible choices, we no longer have room for more choices to be made.

When making decisions about your training and nutrition, don’t focus so much on “what does this decision do for me”, but instead, consider “what does this decision PREVENT me from doing”?