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Born to Rest

harvardmagazine.com

153 pointspaulpauper149 comments

Harvard "needs to reopen a discussion about…a physical-education requirement."

It's been said that "love is a better master than duty," and requiring college students to take a physical education course sounds like a duty.

If you want people to exercise without coercion for the rest of their lives, I think you have to tap into intrinsic motivation, i.e., the unique things that get you excited. Depending on your personality and life experience, that might be novelty, socializing, recognition, or competition.

Forcing college students to exercise will backfire, leading many of them to stop as soon as the course is over.

A good option here is to have a variety of wellness courses on offer.

E.g. some students want to get healthy. I'm in a 120 challenge course right now. I know I never would have taken it without the coercion, but now I'm glad I'm forced to do it.

Other students will want sports (tennis, soccer, etc. are options) while others want to pretend they're not just exercising (ninja training, humans vs zombies, Nerf gun battles, etc).

As the article points out, there is an innate laziness in most people. My natural tendency is laziness. Even the fit, athletic, body building people I talk to report really struggling to keep their motivation.

Even people who like exercise often have to force themselves to do it. As long as there are palatable options, the coercion here isn't going to make people any more likely to not exercise later in life because humans are already really bad at that. Ideally the coercion would help remind students of the value of exercise building lifelong habit. If that doesn't work out, at least they'll have exercised at all in their adult life.

> Forcing college students to exercise will backfire, leading many of them to stop as soon as the course is over.

Much of what we do started out by being forced to do it. We keep doing it out of habit, social pressure, and in many cases the belief that it is a good thing (brushing our teeth, eating healthy, etc.), but it's often force, habit, and social pressure ('ew, you don't shower regularly?') that got us there in the first place. Most of it is not default behavior.

Similarly, I think mandatory exercise could be very effective in normalizing exercise, which is a very important step in getting more people do do so.

Of course, the exact implementation matters a great deal. But stating that it will backfire strikes me as a unwarranted conclusion.

EDIT: also, exercise, unlike many other healthy things and unlike many things that we are forced to do, is actually fun and even addictive.

PE is mandatory in every high school in the US. Why don't we have a nation of fit, active people?

I think the real problem is exposure. I don't like running, soccer, or football -- so my years in PE were generally a waste. There are physical hobbies I enjoy but the odds of being exposed to them in high school were improbably slim.

True, but PE might have had a positive effect on many people other than you, both physically and in other ways, so at the very least it's more effective than doing nothing.

That said, I do hope of course that they offer more variety than they often do in high school. I was pretty lucky with my high school and definitely benefitted from being exposed to sports that I still engage in occasionally (rugby and ice skating).

Strange to see no one has mentioned this – just down the river, MIT has mandatory PE classes. They're not all "running around a track" though: sailing, pistols, archery, yoga, weightlifting, sailing, all sorts of really cool activities.

> Forcing college students to exercise will backfire, leading many of them to stop as soon as the course is over.

How is this backfiring, if those students would never have exercised at all without the mandatory courses? Plus, you're overlooking the cohort who had never previously been exposed to the benefits of physical activity (maybe this is more prevalent at MIT...) and end up sticking with it. Among my friendgroup the latter is more common than the former.

I loathed PE in school. If my university would have required it I probably would have gone elsewhere.

Yeah, I totally bet you would have turned down MIT because of a PE requirement /s

Well, at least Harvard has the swimming competence requirement to graduate, installed as a condition of the Widener Library family bequest (since their son Harry Widener died on the Titanic).

At least they did in 1976. ;-) I wonder if they still do?

Seems that the requirement being due to the Widener family donation is apocryphal[0], but still an interesting idea. Also, that source suggests that there was a swimming requirement for all students only from fall 1970 to spring 1975. It wouldn't surprise me to hear that it wasn't officially required in 1976 but was effectively compulsory for anyone without a "legitimate" dispension.

[0] http://asklib.hcl.harvard.edu/faq/81791

2012 grad here - the test has been abolished for many years.

>…that might be novelty, socializing, recognition, or competition

Your comment made me realize why I never liked sports. I don't really care for any of those things.

How about improved mental and emotional well being?

That would be nice, of course. I feel fine, but I guess you could always feel better. And get better sleep.

I never did enough sports or with enough regularity to get the famous serotonin/dopamine kick though.

Last time I tried running it was only pain, sweatiness and unachievement

Got to try it again, but it's hard to find motivation to do something that feels like torture.

That will only come if you're not perceiving it as an unpleasant task to get out of the way.

This isn't military boot camp level of exercise. Most universities (in the US) already offer a wide variety of fitness courses, so students have plenty of options to find something they like or want to explore. Add a requirement to take 1-3 of these courses during the undergrad period, and/or some method of exempting it (by being a collegiate athlete, or demonstrating a level of fitness on 1-3 occasions like an annual fitness test).

The coercion is to ensure that everyone at least tries something. I would bet that there is a significant percentage of people that would go in being unhappy about having to meet the requirement and come out being really happy that they did it. A well designed program will present a wide enough range of options that most people will find something of interest. And if it doesn't, then I'd say stopping as soon as the course is over is still better than not starting in the first place.

I don't think this is true, or at least not always true.

A good example is the armed forces, where recruits are forced into a very regimented routine.

My father was in the marines, and by his description they turned him from someone who lacked discipline and was not fit into the exact opposite.

When he retired, he kept up his routines: rising early, keeping fit. He's tried to instill the same discipline in his daughters - it's not as effective when it's not mandatory however.

I've never heard of a university having mandatory PE. Sounds ridiculous to me. University students are adults, they can decide for themselves if they want to exercise.

MIT has 4 mandatory quarters of PE, plus a swimming test (or a swim class).

Hmm, Soldiers are adults, but they usually have mandatory PE. But I suppose they are volunteers. If only our students weren't conscripted into their educations.

Obviously, the requirements of being a soldier are comparable to the requirements of being a student, so it makes perfect sense if both have mandatory PE. Or not.

The requirements for being a soldier are determined entirely by the institutions which select people to be soldiers. So you'd imagine that if a school required it's students to do PE, they'd have just as strong of requirements as soldiers do.

I'm a fan of bringing back physical education. It seems that more of my younger colleagues (~23-30 y.o.) are trying to be physically active/fit. But exercise is a habit. If you don't build it up when you're young, it can be hard to develop it later. And then there's the physical challenges of returning to a physically active life after years or decades of inactivity. Certain injuries are more likely (like back, knee, tendon injuries) which can be debilitating, leading to months of recovery and more sedentary behavior.

And schools can always give several options to accommodate different interests and capabilities.

> But exercise is a habit. If you don't build it up when you're young, it can be hard to develop it later.

That's not my observation. People over 40 I see practising regularly a sport activity are mostly newcomers who found there something they could find in their usual work and family life. Whereas those who practised as teens and young adults have often given up, because it is not compatible with their 'new' life; or because it is a symbol of their young days and they are done with it, they moved on; or because they cannot keep the same level of performance they had and they rather stop than underperform; or just because their sport activity broke them so that they are unable to practise it or any other form of sport any more, or they don't want to hear about it any more.

> And then there's the physical challenges of returning to a physically active life after years or decades of inactivity. Certain injuries are more likely (like back, knee, tendon injuries) which can be debilitating, leading to months of recovery and more sedentary behavior.

I have never seen an activity generating as many injuries as sport does (and especially school sport in my personal limited observations: more injuries in school sport session than in club training, and more injuries in club training than in actual matches. I find the latter surprising, but not the former.)

Bringing it back? Is it no longer offered?

Speaking specifically of college, I'm unfamiliar with current K-12 requirements in the US. Physical education is no longer required at most universities. Not even one or two semesters. It is offered. But so is going outside for a jog, or dropping to the floor and doing push-ups and sit-ups. The issue is one of motivation. If students (really, people) aren't feeling motivated to be active then they won't. Attaching a grade and a graduation requirement to it gives them an immediate motivator.

The hope, then, is that this pattern of physical activity remains with them throughout their life. Ideally also paired with courses on nutrition and diet.

Considering that gym class was hell on Earth for some of us fat people and we greatly looked forward to the liberation of college, I think the idea of mandatory PE is horrible.

PE is usually taught in a manner that's great if you're already fit, and atrocious if you're fat. It's hard on the joints and exemplifies how much weaker/slower/less valuable to society you are compared to the fit kids.

I know this because I WAS fat. Horribly so. I lost nearly 100 pounds in my mid 20's by doing something simple - ignoring the exercises I hated (running, any team sports, etc.) and doing what I loved (swimming and cycling, which no PE class had offered). Instead of agonizing knee pain I experienced the joy of cycling, and instead of being a dripping sweaty pig I was in a nice cool pool, where body heat was transferred away easily.

I also quit eating the poison that some call food on a college campus. Remember that at this time people thought margarine was comparatively healthy!

(Note - I use the word "fat" because I think it's an accurate descriptor. It has unfortunately taken on a lot of emotional overtones. But let's be honest, the simplest word that describes the experience I had is "fat").

High school and middle school PE were fucking miserable for me. I wasn't fat, but I was slow and in a group with very fit (naturally or by practice) guys. I was also uncoordinated as I had a massive growth spurt and, being extremely near sighted, wasn't active in any typical sport so my coordination lagged behind for years.

College PE is different. It's not (usually) a general class. You typically pick which one you want. Weight lifting, running, cycling, golf, swimming, etc. This means you're working on a physical activity that you enjoy or have some moderate interest in, unless you truly despise moving and can't even find one thing in the list that interests you (and somehow never fits into your schedule over the 4 years of college).

And all those options were at a cheap, no-name state school.

EDIT: As well, you typically end up setting your own goals within the constraints of the course. Usually an A requires: Be fitter/healthier/faster/stronger than when you started.

Where I studied, there were indeed groups of choices, but they had to take you for some reason (either be fast to apply or have good fit already). Most people were raked into general class, where it was as bad as in school, under the fear of dropping you out, since it was a required course.

Seriously makes me want to bulldoze the stadium (bonus points for frags) and set a few extra dorms on top.

> You typically pick which one you want

Typically being the key word. IIRC, at my college, the choices were baseball, weights, basketball and track.

> PE is usually taught in a manner that's great if you're already fit, and atrocious if you're fat.

I remember going through the Presidential Fitness Challenge, and saying "how am I supposed to just stretch further? It hurts!" If, instead, gym class (at least, by the time one gets to high school) was more about finding ways each person liked to exercise, it would be a much greater force for health. I recently decided I just don't like to run, and I'm not really going to try to force myself to anymore.

Well, this feels obvious, but let's say the required PE classes have skilled professors that can adjust a PE program to your fitness level? Would your opinion change then?

No. It should not be mandatory. It would make sense for some fields (kinesiology perhaps) but on the whole it's ridiculous to force it on students.

some schools let you pick which type....mine had dance to weight lifting and maybe swimming.

I can see a bunch of college students angry and complaining that their college feels like high school and that their money/time is wasted in such classes.

As they should, if you're looking for fitness you can get a personal trainer and then some for that kind of money. And focus on self-improvement instead of checking some box to graduate. We're talking about adults here, after all.

No, we're talking about students, and institutions intended to prepare them for the world after graduation. Fitness is a critical element of mental and physical well-being. Consequently, it's entirely reasonable to place physical education within the scope of a university.

Fitness is a critical element of mental and physical well-being

I disagree. It may contribute, but it's not critical. I haven't intentionally exercised in decades and my well-being is fine.

Fitness doesn't require intentional exercise.

I hear the same arguments about engineering students forced to take political science, or liberal arts students forced to take x number of laboratory credits. Arguably, health is more important that a journalist's ability to use calculus.

Though considering the HN consensus on science reporting, journalists knowing calculus and statistics would be a good thing.

I ran and did judo so required PE classes would've just been annoying on top of that. This is purely anecdotal but I knew pretty much what I wanted to take so required courses just ended up getting in the way for me. At a certain point you have to trust college students to be able to decide how they themselves want to live

Probably. Students will complain about everything.

Even in 2006, when I was still in high school, most of the time in gym class the teacher would just roll out a ball. There was no other physical fitness type of classes.

I think at best once a year we were measured. There was no requirement of anything, just a hey let's see what everyone can do and record it, kind of thing.

It should be noted that in larger schools it is most likely different. This is just my personal experience.

My high school PE class was walking around the track.

Yes, walking. We just had to walk in circles (ovals?) until it was time to go.

At least at my high school, it wasn't taken very seriously and the quality of the class was low. There wasn't any education (how to properly XYZ, how to train, how to eat for training) and the activity wasn't very valuable either.

Not in all places even where required by law.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-skipping-phys-ed-class...

"But humans also “evolved with a very large stick: if you didn’t exercise, you had nothing to eat.” Exercise was mandatory. For many humans today, he points out, there are very few incentives and no penalties."

Not entirely true - in fact further down in the article:

"Furthermore, says HUHS director Paul Barreira, the same surveys show that students’ own sense of health and well-being tracks the amount of exercise they report getting. Those with the most depression and anxiety also get the least exercise. The happiest students get the most."

So the penalties include depression, anxiety, and in future, propensity for heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, etc., etc. So either we haven't evolved enough to consider the penalty of dying young and having a more miserable existence while alive, or is it just that evolution optimizes to the point of reproduction and then doesn't care about much after successfully handing down genes to the next generation?

(Edit: I might also ask, without putting forth a theory or guess, what statistics say about obesity and likelihood of reproduction? If health is poorer than non-obese humans, is there a lesser chance of successful reproduction? If so, shouldn't that be considered the ultimate penalty?)

Getting up and going to the gym sucks right now. It sucks in the 10 minutes it takes me to get to the gym. It may suck for some time while I'm there. It sucks after when I think about the time I could have spent playing videogames or doing work ( I'm a notorious workaholic so this is big for me). It feels great in 20 years if I do it consistently enough.

Eating crap feels great right now (endorphin release and whatnot). Sleeping in feels great right now. I know what exercising feels like, I know what being lazy feels like. I don't know what diabetes and hypertension feel like. Getting the will to overcome that and make the right choices consistently takes diligent practice and sometimes a little coercion.

As someone whose parents never forced me to play sports, exercise is a particularly bad struggle. I stepped into the gym for the first time in college. I've never really experienced being skinny (I would love to someday and am working towards that). Motivation is slightly more complicated than people like to acknowledge, especially when you consider that the environment we experience now is so drastically different from the environment we evolved in.

Also, in a social species, reproduction is a less acute need for individuals. See: why condoms exist. Personally, I hate the idea of having children. My act of "reproduction" will be making the world a better and more survivable place for the other children of the world whose DNA is 99.99% similar to mine.

Those penalties are less direct, however. It makes it harder for people to draw the immediate correlation between the two. Hunger drove a sufficient level of fitness to obtain food to satisfy hunger (not in the sense of encouraging the person to do push-ups, but it encouraged them to literally move and obtain sustenance, ideally before they were too weak to do so). Unhappiness doesn't lead to movement until thought and reason are applied to recognize the causal or correlative nature of unfitness and poor mental health.

>...or is it just that evolution optimizes to the point of reproduction and then doesn't care about much after successfully handing down genes to the next generation?

I think this is more or less accurate. The optimization wouldn't be just for reproduction but also for the N years of rearing required before offspring are relatively self-sufficient, so reproduction + time to mature seems to be the rough target of evolution.

Sedentary lifestyles were a very small minority up until a generation or two ago. Two generations is not at all enough to see evolutionary yields.

Modern solution to campus exercise requirement: Put the dining hall 1 mile away from the dorms.

And remove cheap, high calorie, low nutrition foods. No reason schools ought to provide students with tons of mac & cheese, they can do that to themselves. Give them healthy, nutritious options with the meal plans, and let them spend extra on the unhealthy stuff if they really want it.

Isn't college where people are supposed to be responsible for their own actions? Or have we extended the hand-holding that far out?

Sure, they can be responsible for their own actions. Doesn't mean the schools have to provide them the option to be actively harmful to their health. They're adults (as mentioned in another comment). If they want to buy a few cases of Coca Cola and drink that instead of water every day for 4 years, that's their prerogative. No school should stop them from making such a terrible, stupid mistake, but no school should present that to them as part of the meal plan either.

Yup, likewise I knew a guy who flunked out his sophomore year because he spent all of his time playing Quake 2 on the dorm's LAN. The university offered plenty of classes he could have been spending his time on, and he chose differently. Only so much you can do to save a man from himself.

There's a little bit of cognitive dissonance going on here. If they're responsible for their actions, and they're adults, why are you taking an option away from them in fears that they're "making a mistake"? This is universally seen as hand-holding.

The option isn't taken away. They can go to the grocery store if they want. That's still an option. There's no cognitive dissonance. As an institution, a university is not required to provide every option to its students. It, similarly, shouldn't bar students from making choices they want to make.

EDIT: And if they make choices that turn them into unsuitable students (poor grades, arrests, whatever), the institution is free to suspend them as appropriate.

This is a trinary variable, not a binary one. Sure, between the two options of giving people freedom to make their own mistakes versus applying coercion for their own good, I'm in favor of the first option. But there is a third: soft paternalism, giving people freedom to do what they want but setting things up so that the right choice is the easiest. Such evidence as we have, indicates that it works very well.

So should the meal plan serve alcohol, too, to avoid reacting to 'fears that they're "making a mistake"'?

That's a bit of a straw man. You can choose alcohol or no alcohol. But you don't choose mac n cheese or not -- you choose mac n cheese or some other food.

You can choose alcohol or some other beverage.

Choosing to offer only healthy foods at a location provided by the school does not preclude the students getting unhealthy food anywhere else. It's just making a healthy choice available, not making unhealthy choices unavailable.

My last year of college the university finished a brand new dining hall and forced every student living on campus to buy an expensive meal plan, justifying this by saying students ate poorly and the meal plans would force them to eat a balanced diet. Well, my diet was perfectly fine - was being the key word, as I can't resist cookies and ice cream for long when I am surrounded by them at a cafeteria - and as a matter of fact, a lot cheaper. A lot cheaper, because the basic meal plan only got me one meal a day, so I still had to buy groceries.

So I guess the answer is yes.

Yes, and the cafeteria is run by people who take actions.

Sure, but many colleges require you to get a meal-plan with the dorm room. And, IME, the food was expensive, and garbage.

Yea, starve the skinny students!

Why would they starve? Are skinny students only capable of eating unhealthy, carb-loaded, crap? Most healthy skinny people I know eat fruits, vegetables, and moderate amounts of meat, dairy and carbs, or they run 20 miles a day.

20 miles a day? Surely you aren't serious? Someone check my math but at a 7 minute mile, that's a 2 hour run every day, plus warmup, stretch, change, cleanup time. That feels absurd for anybody with a job, family, etc. Maybe every other day would make more sense.

A couple specific individuals I've known. Both ran 15-20 miles a day. They'd just go for runs most evenings or mornings and run and run. At least every weekday for one, the other I know ran daily. One was a Catholic seminarian (ran in the mornings, no family, obviously). The other was a middle-aged, family man, working as an engineer. He'd run most of his life. Both were African, one Nigerian (the seminarian), I don't recall where the other was from.

> One was a Catholic seminarian

That explains a lot. One of the true and tested recipes for libido suppression the Church takes to heart is to physically and mentally exahust their horny young men until they are not horny any more.

This of course is just my opinion, but an informed one. I went to a Catholic mid-school and highschool, and even when we were not 100% on board as a seminarist would be, sports was something the administration promoted very heavily. We'd also get to know lots of seminarists that would come to do field work there prior to taking their vows, and an almost universal trait of them was their passion for sports.

> He'd run most of his life. Both were African, one Nigerian (the seminarian), I don't recall where the other was from.

Now you're making sense. For someone who's not been doing serious long distance running since childhood, 20 miles in a week is quite good. From what I've read in running magazines, and personal experience, doing much more than 30-40 miles a week is not good for your body (esp. knees). 100+ miles per week is crazy.

I guess the confusing part was that you said "most". Unless you only know a few skinny people.

Ah, that "or they run 20 miles a day." was an aside at the end. The first part was what I typically see of healthy, skinny people, the second part of very few (substitute other sorts of crazy levels of physical activity for the running if you want).

Two hours a day is not a crazy number at all for some endurance sports. If you do cycle racing 10 hours per week is a good starting point to build up endurance.

But that works because cycling isn't weight bearing, so after the initial exponential learning curve you can pretty much do as much of it as you have time and motivation.

20 miles a day of running, on the other hand, is absolutely not typical. Other than ultra-runners no professional does >100mi/wk regularly simply because the diminishing returns don't justify the linear increase in injury risk and aggravation (it's running, injury incidence is already crazy high).

Capable? No, people with the sort of metabolism I'm talking about need that (high carb/protein) on top of the healthy diet you described. Removing that dining option to keep fatsos from gorging themselves doesn't seem fair. High calorie food lets me get adequate energy from a reasonably-sized dish.

A brief skinny manifesto: I hate how the world caters to the obese. Thermostat kept at low temperature in all seasons because of fat insulation. Replace high calorie options with high fiber so their overworked/stretched system feels "full." All diet/nutrition advice biased towards losing weight. The list goes on... and things geared towards losing weight/being comfortable as an obese person naturally are useless or make life worse for somebody trying to gain/maintain weight.

It's a public health crisis, I get it, but it still sucks.

> A brief skinny manifesto: I hate how the world caters to the obese. Thermostat turned way down in the winter/up in the summer because of fat insulation. Replace high calorie options with high fiber so their overworked/stretched system feels "full." All diet/nutrition advice biased towards losing weight. The list goes on... and things geared towards losing weight/being comfortable as an obese person naturally are useless or make life worse for somebody for whom weight loss is unhealthy.

So the obese are oppressing the skinny? First I've heard of this. Please, tell me more.

More specific than oppression. As obesity and its effects are seen as acutely unhealthy, quality of life for underweight people is sacrificed for the health benefit of the obese. Clearly there is not some cabal of fat dudes stroking their bellies plotting ways to stick it to the skinny man.

[stops stroking]

...Yes! Clearly!

That would be ridiculous. Obviously. I mean, why would fat dudes even do that? Ha ha ha ha... ha ha. Ha.

[whispering] Drop the thermostat another 2 degrees in zone 4-1831A/N and put 5% more cellulose powder in the cafeteria meatloaf.

This sounds to me like yet another form of tribalism. I get that people may become annoyed when the world appears to be shifting its loyalties away from their tribe towards someone else's, but no good will come of deciding that the skinnies and the fatties are natural enemies, and are responsible for the others' ills.

Assuming access to quality foods, but activity and metabolism keep them skinny (that is, this is a healthy skinny, not a malnourished skinny), in what ways are below-average weight people's quality of life sacrificed?

It's very difficult to buy clothes that fit, for one. Especially suits.

That's fair, but in my experience (from when I was fat), buying clothes that fit may not have been hard. But buying clothes that fit and looked good was hard. They even have specialty shops for the particularly obese, it's not like they're finding well-fitting suits off the rack at Jos. A. Banks.

EDIT: Actually, clothes that fit could be hard. I wasn't terribly round, I ended up with a 38" waist at my fattest at 5' 10", but usually around a 36" waist. But my legs, thighs in particular, were not toned or thin. My option on pants almost always required me to go up several inches on the waist to get pants with large enough legs for me. My thighs, now, are well-muscled and toned, but I still have a hard time finding pants that fit them well now that I'm down to a 32" waist.

But I still don't think the problem is catering to the obese hurting the skinny. The problem is that being that thin is abnormal (from a statistical perspective). Consequently, it's a small market. It's hard to justify making off-the-rack shirts that fit a 6'2" 120lb man. Just as it's hard to justify making of-the-rack shirts that fit a 5'4" 250lb man.

If you're having trouble keeping healthy weight eating normal food, it may be that you have some digestive disease/problem rather than just "fast metabolism". (Or it could be an appetite problem.)

Consider this: if you had a fast metabolism, your body would be producing more heat than a normal person; where else would the extra energy go? This means you would prefer lower-than-normal room temperature. If you're having trouble keeping weight AND you prefer higher-than-normal room temperature, it means you're not getting all the energy you should from the food you eat, in other words, your system is digesting food incompletely.

I do have a digestive disease myself, and at my worst before surgery + medication, I was drinking glasses of custard every day just to stay above 155 lbs; I'm a pretty tall guy, ideal weight that I'm seeing now is around 190 lbs. I gained 30 lbs in one month after the surgery.

Beer kegs on the top floor of a tall building with no elevator.

Solution: Uber.

Is there actually any evidence that ancient hunter gatherer groups didn't do what we now call "exercise" on a voluntary basis? Some ideas come to mind: dancing, walkabouts, spirit quests, right of passage rituals, ?ancient forms of martial arts? I am compelled to believe that early man did things merely to do them, including exercise.

Interestingly, all of those activities you list seem to have an underlying purpose beyond merely "fitness for the sake of fitness" - exercise (and the fitness which follows) are incidental side-effects of completing those activites.

Not sure what you mean by "actual" evidence, but we know a lot of what we know from studies of modern-day hunter gatherer groups and it seems unlikely that the ancients would have significantly different behavior around needless calorie expenditure.

I'm not sure how much modern fitness would qualify for 'fitness for the sake of fitness'.

Seems more likely it's backed by wanting to have sex (or maybe I'm just projecting my own motivations).

Modern day hunter gatherers do not "play"?

"Play" isn't exercise for the sake of exercise.

Which leads us to the current situation of the only people who stuck to exercise long term are those for whom "exercise for the sake of exercise" is play.

None of those things you mentioned are exercise. They are physical activity yes, but productive (including mentally productive) physical activity.

Exercise is physical activity without being productive at all.

But that's false. While exercising, we socialize, we can explore our immediate surroundings as well as provide a useful function, like getting to work. Are you saying my commute by bike isn't exercise? Do you think dancing isn't now seen as a form of exercise?

You seem to be contradicting yourself, confusing "things which happen to be exercise" with "things which are intentionally exercise."

Your argument was originally that the ancients performed the latter, but you've supported yourself with examples of the former. Hunter-gatherer tribes certainly did and do activities which happen to be exercise all the time, and that (and other reasons) are why they didn't need to set aside time and energy for the express purpose of staying in shape.

I'm really not. What I'm disagreeing with is the idea that exercise is defined as physical activity without productive value. It certainly could be that but only because that's what we now frame it as, which itself is a purely contemporary idea. No wonder "exersice" today seems so pointless. Much of the modern world is without the ritual it once possessed. And then we defend our new ways as more pure. For me, it's a head scratcher.

Exercise is maintenance of the body. Maintenance of any machine is productive.

No it's not. Some machines are too far lost to put worthwhile effort into.

That's why we upgrade machines (either through pharmaceuticals, and soon, I suspect, gene therapy. Introduce the caloric restriction gene and suddenly the urge to eat uncontrollably goes away.)

Hell, most legal stimulants are appetite suppressants anyway. There are always options. Comparing humans to machines is probably one of the most bizarre expressions of materialism/physicalism I have ever seen on here. The analogy is also quite poor, the human body is far more complex than even our greatest machines.

> The analogy is also quite poor, the human body is far more complex than even our greatest machines.

For now at least. Progress is slow, but we work on making more complex machines all the time. Also, I have a nagging feeling that we tend to underestimate the quality/complexity of machines and overestimate that of our bodies, probably due to some "we must respect nature/evolution/god/.." beliefs. Human bodies are very lacking in some respects, and it shows.

Why on earth would he do this? Why would you be compelled to believe this?

you forgot sex :)

Nope, sex forgot me.

:-)

Let me die in peace. For some reason, it is always assumed that everyone wants to live as long as possible. If you don't have a cola each day, you can dribble into a towel for another 3 years when you are older.... No thanks, Ill take the coke. put it on the reapers tab.

It's so strange to me how people in this country seem to share a common expectation that an adult should be a productive member of society, but have no expectations about being a healthy member of society. The amount of taxpayer money spent on providing treatment for type II diabetes alone is staggering, and even the amount that isn't paid by the government is paid by insurance, so still amortized across the population: "The total estimated cost of diagnosed diabetes in 2012 is $245 billion" "Most of the cost for diabetes care in the U.S., 62.4%, is provided by government insurance"

http://www.diabetes.org/advocacy/news-events/cost-of-diabete...

The cost is so high precisely because our healthcare toolkit is so poor.

If we could restore our systems to full functionality, our healthcare cost will drop like a rock.

Though we will be faced with new questions. If everyone are fully healthy, then our mortality rate will also drop like a rock, destroying social security as it currently exists.

Solution: Extreme sports.

Our society pays people to be 'productive members of society,' but not to exercise.

There are better ways to die young than deliberately harming your health. Take on riskier hobbies (while still remaining physically active). Refuse to wear safety gear while riding a motorcycle or never wear a seatbelt while in a car.

A coke a day, probably not a huge problem if you're moderately active. But, smoking, excessive drinking, excessive time spent physically idle, etc, will all reduce your health. They may also reduce your lifespan, but that's not guaranteed. My great-grandfather made it to 90 (or very near, maybe 88) smoking cigarettes almost daily from age 12 on. He may have shortened his life, but he also significantly reduced his quality of life. His last 5-10 years were spent in the living room during the day sitting and watching TV because he couldn't get around well anymore. Similar for a grandfather who made it to 83, but the last 3-5 years he was senile due to (it turned out) brain tumors, consequences of lung and colon cancer, which were (most likely) consequences of his drinking and smoking habits.

And living a healthy lifestyle offers no guarantee of longevity. But it offers a greater guarantee on quality.

> Refuse to wear safety gear while riding a motorcycle or never wear a seatbelt while in a car.

Not wearing a seatbelt somehow doesn't compare to a juicy burger, fries and Coke.

Try it you might like it. I find I'm a more aware, more relaxed, slower driver. I find myself less determined to pass all the clueless bumpkins.

You won't like the $100 fines for not wearing your seatbelt, thanks to laws that were passed dishonestly (many states got seatbelt laws on the books by promising they would only be enforced with another violation such as speeding).

You are simultaneously more relaxed while being more afraid of collision risk?

Like every other human driver, I drive so as to maintain a collision risk equilibrium (c.f. "risk compensation"). So no I am not more afraid of collision. However I am driving more sanely, which is incidentally more relaxing than driving less sanely. YMMV.

Your "every other human driver" must exclude people who think it's a good idea to ride motorcycles at 1.5x the speed limit on the freeway. Needless to say, without seatbelts.

Anyway, this thread is about embracing some other risk as an alternative to unhealthy eating.

I posited that driving without a seatbelt is a poor substitute for a burger, fries and Coke. What I mean is that driving without a seatbelt is not a risk that provides am amount of thrill or pleasure in comparison to a meal.

So, that argument applies in triplicate to driving like a wussy without a seatbelt, don't you think?

Whatever thrill is derived from not wearing a seatbelt, it is attenuated by driving slowly to reduce the risk of injury.

Be sure to uninstall that airbag, too, by the way.

> If you don't have a cola each day, you can dribble into a towel for another 3 years when you are older.... No thanks, Ill take the coke. put it on the reapers tab.

But fit people have better quality of life.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3567315/

http://www.heart.org/HEARTORG/HealthyLiving/PhysicalActivity...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22249758

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/11/051110215438.h...

If anything, an unfit person is slowly dribbling in a towel throughout his relatively shorter life.

You live a shorter, low quality life. I don't see how you see that a positive over living a longer, healthier life with may be a bit of suffering at the end compared to suffering throughout your life(out of breath, joint pains, clogged arteries...)

I can't blame you for thinking this way at all. However the reality is that it's not so much a clean subtraction where you lose X amount of time at the end of the tally,but rather a gradual decline where bad habits end up harming the quality of your prime "temporal real estate" even if the actual last gasp comes much later.

That's why to me a Coke is also a poor investment in the present, all things considered. Not to mention that the craving for one is quite situational.

I think your point is good, why prolong the end of life as much as possible? Instead focus should be on extending the quality of life. But I don't think binging coke with all health problems it entails is a good choice.

When living healthy, you don't dribble into a towel for another 3 years, you live 3 years longer before you dribble into a towel.

I've noticed that, at least in photos & videos, it seems cheetahs are exclusively either sprinting at 75mph, or lounging on the ground like a housecat.

It certainly makes sense for them, considering how much energy they expend to run that fast. So perhaps there's precedent.

If we have always been lazy, why is there now an obesity epidemic? It seems to me that means the cause of obesity lies elsewhere.

Prior to the 20th century (depending on where you live, but this is for the areas hit with obesity epidemics):

1. You had to walk most places (often miles a day).

2. You had to physically labor. Most people didn't have desk jobs or the period's equivalent.

3. Food was relatively scarce, and harder to transport.

4. Social activities (we are social creatures) required physical effort (walking to, dancing, walking around). We can now be social while being remarkably physically passive.

5. Entertainment options were more scarce, so boredom meant you did something. Now, you can entertain yourself by sitting on a couch or at the desk playing a video game or watching a movie. You could make a case for books being similarly physically passive, but that requires widespread literacy and access to books which wasn't true of the general population.

The expansion of ranching and farming in the great plains of the Americas was sufficiently bountiful to lead to the first 'health food' crazes of the early 20th century--more people had enough to eat, and increasing automation was already reducing labor. So the roots of our current problem were already being planted, as it were. But in the last 30-40 years, there's been a noticeable uptick in average caloric consumption, even more reduced activity, and more of those calories (at least in the US) coming from processed foods with ever-larger quantities of sugar.

This also tracks with lower obesity rates in cities and other places where walking is a fact of life.

I didn't actually think there was anything informative about the article. It was just a prominent name stuck on what we already knew intuitively.

> 3. Food was relatively scarce, and harder to transport.

Plus: no refrigeration.

You left out probably the biggest culprit- modern, highly-processed foods

We were poorer, less healthy, shorter and no one was actually measuring obesity.

All other things equal, I imagine people used to eat a lot less calorie-dense food...?

Because we haven't always been sedentary. I thought the article covered this point pretty early on.

One of the likely contributors is the unhealthy long-chain long-shelf-life fats of most prepared foods, which didn't arrive until the 30's and 40's.

Given that most people don't make the time to make fresh meals from scratch, they're getting fairly unhealthy food even if they cook at home. (And many folks short-cut with fast-food options, which are usually worse.)

For having lived in several Asian and European countries, I can claim on the basis of anecdotal life experience that it has a lot to do with the local culture. When I first came to America I was (and still am) shocked by the way people related to food and the ease with which you could fall in a sedentary lifestyle.

Pollution must have something to do with it. Everyone has some level of dioxins, lead and other crap in their cells.

It's not just obesity; people were more fertile. Men had much higher sperm counts 100 years ago.

Do you think a hundred years ago you'd be employed as a programmer, sitting at a desk?

Delightful cause behind muscle atrophy. Annoys me on a daily basis because I have to keep working out to maintain my shape, but makes so much sense once you see why it is the way it is.

I was very frustrated by PE. At my college, you could take a class about making maple syrup for a wellness credit. It's a joke. But how many people can brace correctly, or squat, deadlift, and press with proper form? These are archetypal movement patterns that we repeat 100s of times a day without thinking about it, and most people don't even know what they're supposed to look like. How many people know how to use a foam roller? How to read a nutrition label? Forget about trying to impart healthy habits, most people don't know what healthy habits are and wellness classes, whether they're making maple syrup or playing soccer for 2 hours a week, aren't going to fix that.

In my opinion the maple syrup class could be a fantastic wellness opportunity -- making maple syrup involves hiking around the woods, often in the snow, carrying heavy buckets full of sap around. It's this kind of real-world, ecologically reasonable movement that most people are so profoundly deficient in. To say nothing of spending time in a beautiful natural setting, which is often quite restorative and de-stressing.

It would be awesome if everyone knew proper lifting form, but it's just not going to happen. Getting people to engage in an activity that they like, and that involves lots of real-world movement, is the biggest win you can hope for, practically speaking.

>> It would be awesome if everyone knew proper lifting form, but it's just not going to happen

I'm not talking about proper lifting form, I'm talking about proper human movement. We perform these archetypal movement patterns every day throughout our entire lives. Every time you sit down in a chair you're performing a squat. Every time you pick up your bag off the ground, you're performing a deadlift.

And to say "that's just not going to happen" is a self-fulfilling prophecy. We're not teaching people these skills, therefore we wouldn't be able to teach these skills.

I completed a minor in music and I still had to take more general liberal arts classes for my CS degree. They can afford to include a class that teaches about how to correctly use and care for one's body.

It's less a self-fulfilling prophecy than drawing on a bunch of professional experience with trying to get people to do things that would be vitally important to their health.

That debate is already extremely toxic due to the diet craze nutjobs, it really doesn't need any of the unscientific hunter-gatherer lore that extrapolate bits of data to romantic premedieval fantasy novels.

This explains why I am unable to bring myself to exercise without getting exhausted instantly.

But if I need to do something like fix a car, build something, whatever, I'll work myself to utter exhaustion and not even notice.

Interesting.

This thread is a good argument that many people don't choose effective health without coercion.

It's probably a good idea for public health for the government to sponsor to the point of "effectively free" adult sports such as running/soccer/swimming, along with requiring such each semester for state-sponsored schools.

It's probably past time for me to put on my running gear and take regular evening jogs, myself. :-)

Can we just turn off those "lazy/slacking" mechanisms on genome/cell level? A pill will be nice.

Make your organism always maintain optimal muscles and circulation system while burning a lot of calories? Seems like a win/win to me.

Some people are strong and healthy without excersice, I think we are all entitled to same package?

I had PE in University (and before that school), hated it and now I'm turned off from any excercise.

Could be upsides to that, but cranking up the global food requirements (remember, a muscular body requires a lot more energy to maintain) would be a negative.

Also, what's optimal? Your body adapts to what you are doing, something we take for granted today. E.g. If you like bicycling, a permanent linebacker build may be undesirable.

It would probably be more ideal to set some kind of fitness "floor", rather than remove the mechanism completely.

Most people already eat much more than they need, might as well make use of those calories.

Of course there should be a "floor", we don't want to grow into blobs of slithering muscles and veins, just well-built.

If they think it's a good idea to require physical education for the students, why not require it for the faculty?

The part of making exercise more fun is interesting. I remember growing up and being shocked that adults did not play team sports in such a team-sport obsessed country.

Also, probably could to have some sort of multiple-person activity in ones schedule that isn't work (c.f. church attendance dropping faster than religiosity).

It is odd for a piece like TFA to fail completely to mention the role of internal combustion engines. Harvard has many shuttle buses, which might make sense when the snow is deep but seem actively harmful while serious consideration is being given to a phys ed requirement. A less coercive and cheaper solution might be to scale back the shuttle buses and introduce some sort of bike-sharing scheme. They could make uphill rides like Mather to the Yard free, and charge a nominal fee on the fun downhill rides. (Otherwise all shared bikes would end up in the river forever.) I guess they'd want to subsidize both directions for those poor souls stuck in the Quad.

[EDIT:] It occurs to me that this is the sort of amenity that would be basically free for Harvard to provide. Because it would be a highly visible part of students' lives, hordes of donors will line up to sponsor individual bikes (with donor nameplates), pay stations (likewise), named chairs for bike mechanics, or even the whole program.

Quite interesting that Harvard Magazine would publish something like that. Doesn't that pretty much imply that Harvard is unnatural and abnormal

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