I’ve been trying to educate my friends, family and co-workers about how to eat better and lead a healthy life for many years now. Most of it are topics you have seen here on such as why you won’t lose weight through cardio and how to get started with healthy eating. It’s been quite frustrating though as people seem not to understand or accept what I’m explaining. Finally I learned the reason: the backfire effect

Misconception vs. Reality

Our general assumption is that if you back up your position with facts, figures etc. that the other person will understand and change their mind.

That might work with some shallow beliefs that don’t matter that much to us. But reality unfortunately is that if someone challenges our core beliefs even with facts and figures, our beliefs actually get stronger.

The Misconception: When your beliefs are challenged with facts, you alter your opinions and incorporate the new information into your thinking.

The Truth: When your deepest convictions are challenged by contradictory evidence, your beliefs get stronger. – youarenotsosmart.com

Turns out that you process information that is in line with your beliefs very quickly. Everything that goes against that takes much longer for you to progress and can stay in your head for days. When you are confronted with information contrary to your beliefs you start looking for confirmation of your own opinion instead of open-mindedly accepting new information. One of my favorite topics is if you need carbohydrates to survive or not. Reality is you don’t and reducing your carbohydrate intake can even help with issues such as insulin resistance. However, this goes against mainstream beliefs so much that 99% of the people I talk to simply reject it despite all the evidence.

 

Why This Is A Bigger Challenge than Before

We all spend a lot of time on social media these days and have theoretically access to more information. Unfortunately it’s become actually more difficult to access new information though and to accept them in the end if you actually find them. Facebook and other social networks filter what they show us to make sure we like it and spend more time on their site. For example, if you are vegetarian, you’ll probably find tons of posts about why not eating meat is the only healthy option. If you are into low carb, you’ll find more and more info about that. If you happen to come across an article supporting the other camp, you’ll reject it and move on. Most likely your belief that your way of thinking is right or better.

 

Confirmation Bias

As if the backfire effect wasn’t enough, it usually goes hand in hand with confirmation bias. Confirmation bias “is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one’s preexisting beliefs or hypotheses, while giving disproportionately less consideration to alternative possibilities” (wikipedia).

Not only do you reject contrary beliefs, you actually go and search for information to support your own beliefs leading to an even enforced position.

Over the year I was trying to learn more about how to eat healthy. It was really interesting because regardless of which option I looked at all of them have supporting evidence.

My Own Eye Opening Experience

I was looking for ways to eat healthy, get more muscular and drop body fat and my beliefs were always:

carbs don’t matter, complex carbs are good, fat is bad etc.

I followed that path for many years and was getting frustrated because I didn’t see the results I was looking for. That was until one day a good friend of mine told me about a special ultra-low carb diet (Carb Backloading and Carb Nite Solution by Kiefer). The diet was completely against everything I believed up to that point. In short

• reduce your carb intake to 30 grams per day
• eat high fat and high protein
• binge eat one afternoon per week to lose fat

That whole concept sounded absurd and ludicrous! However, I read a bit more about it and gave it a shot. My results were great! I was leaner than ever before, felt stronger, no afternoon slump and good energy levels. I wouldn’t recommend this diet to everyone (mostly because of the binge eating), but it definitely changed my beliefs about what healthy eating means. It also showed me that there is more than only one way.

 

What You Can Do About It

So now you hopefully know that there is a high risk that you simply reject contrary beliefs – unless you reject this concept too – but what can you do about it?

1. Keep an open mind: Read about things that are against your belief and do a little research.
2. Play Devil’s advocate: see how you can actually support your position and how you would argue if you were on the other side
3. Give it a try: if it is for example about how to work out or how to eat healthy, give it a shot and see if it works for you.

 

 

Closing Remarks

Most of what I write is most likely against what you learned over the last years or even decades. It’s quite easy to simply reject it and go back to your old beliefs. Do yourself a favor and don’t do that. I don’t have the perfect answer for everything, I am still learning and keeping an open mind is extremely important to me for that reason. I hope this article helps you understand yourself better too and allows you to read my other articles more open-mindedly too.