Nagarjuna, the 2nd-century Buddhist logician, spent his career demonstrating that most disagreements are not about facts — they're about what counts as a ground for a claim at all. His method, called prasanga — drawing out the hidden commitments inside a position until they collapse under their own weight — was less about winning arguments and more about exposing what someone is actually betting on when they say something is true. This matters for fitness tips specifically, because almost every tip that fails does so at the level of hidden assumptions, not effort. 'Eat less, move more' fails not because people don't try it, but because it bets on willpower being a renewable resource — a wager the tip never announces. When you strip a tip down to its implied bets, you can evaluate whether those bets hold for your actual life, not some averaged-out version of it. The practical move: before adopting any new training or nutrition strategy, write down the one thing it silently requires to be true about you. If that thing isn't true, the tip was never going to work — and no amount of discipline was going to save it.

What is the unspoken assumption inside the fitness or health approach you're currently not following through on?

Drawing from Madhyamaka Buddhist logic — Nagarjuna (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, c. 2nd century CE)