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Comment by akgerber | Hacker News Reader

We have pretty successfully engineered almost all physical activity out of the normal daily life of a middle-aged suburban American, who move from bed to car seat to desk chair to car seat to couch to bed with as little walking as possible in between.

Most other societies make walking (including to and from public transit) and bicycling much bigger parts of their transportation landscape, rather than designing new communities to make driving as easy as possible and other means of transportation impossible, either intentionally or implicitly.

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I work from home, so it's doubly bad for me - I don't even have to walk to a car, just the couple steps from bed to my office.

I went to Boston for Red Hat Summit last week and it amazed me just how exhausted I was after all the walking to/from the train stations and around the convention. I used to bike every day to/from work when I was just a couple years younger and never felt as sore and tired as I did every day during the event. I really need to start getting out more, even just walking to the coffee shop 1/4 mile away on occasion and working from there.

I live in the desert where going outside in the summer is intolerable. What's helping me immensely while working from home is playing some VR games throughout the day. If I want something light I play a few rounds of archery in Holopoint. If I want to max my heart rate very quickly I'll do boxing in Thrill of the Fight.

When I visited Houston I felt like I was being held hostage. I love living in a city because it makes it really easy to be active. Time spent in Houston feels like it's being spent in the most hostile suburb on the planet.

Honestly, I think Houston might actually be hell.

If it's practical for you, consider getting a dog. Dogs need to be exercised every day so it forces you to get out and walk or run at least a couple miles every day. And by "dog" I mean a real dog, not some fragile inbred abomination that can't handle a run around the block.

And don't have a yard, or if you do, don't allow letting the dog into the yard be a stand in for taking the dog for a walk. Obviously that defeats the point for you, but it also doesn't do the dog any favours either.

My large inbred abomination (Bernese Mountain Dog, cute, cuddly, overbred) has never lived anywhere with a yard, so gets real walks.

My wife and daughter would love a dog, but we rent and already have a couple cats so it's not really in the cards right now (the cats alone aren't an issue, but trying to get the OK from the landlady for another animal isn't in the cards).

I highly recommend doing a basic weightlifting program. I find lifting weights, and the goal setting/tracking involved, to be much more engaging than cardio exercises.

If you don't have access to weights, get a pull-up bar and some pushup handles.

I saw a huge improvement to my overall health and physique doing a basic pull-up and pushup program.

I have a membership to the local YMCA, but only have an opportunity to go once a week since I live in your typical unwalkable/no-public-transit suburban area and don't have a drivers license. Used to go a couple nights a week when my daughter still napped and stayed up until 9PM since we could go as a family and have dinner afterward, but now she's in bed by 7:30/8:00 and there isn't enough time.

Another year or two and things will be looking different again, for the moment getting some exercise on a daily basis is still a better spot than where I'm at.

Invest in a $20 pullup bar. Every time you pass it try to bang out a few reps.

I went from doing 10 pushups, no pullups to being able to bang out 100+ pushpus and 50+ pullups over the course of a day.

I can now do prob 50+ pushups and 10+ pullups in one set. Took me less than a year to get here.

I was the kid in MS/HS that coudn't even do one pullup!

its really amazing how much a difference 20 minutes of walking a day makes.

so instead, spend that time in a car, and that time again at a gym. what wealth!

How much energy do you burn with 20 minutes of walking? A couple hundred kilocalories at most? That's not going to solve anyone's weight problem.

If you work from home and otherwise spend 20 seconds walking for your "commute", a factor of 60 improvement is a big change.

I'm afraid that's meaningless feel-good talk. It doesn't matter how large the relative change is if the absolute value is still too small to help.

There are benefits to light exercise beyond calorie expenditure.

Like a hundred. Pretty much a large Apple.

A decent paced 5k burns like 400 at most

Most people aren't overeating by thousands of calories a day, increasing activity by 20 minutes without increased intake would probably diminish the vast majority of weight gain for a large percentage of the populous.

I can tell you that amount of walking makes zero difference to me. Certainly not in terms of weight. Maybe it has some health benefit that statisticians could eek out by studying 1,000 of me over a lifetime, but not anything cosmetic.

And cosmetics are what really matters in these discussions, because that is how you are ultimately judged and categorized.

It's not a lot, but 20 minutes daily walking at a good pace would be sufficient for most people to lose about 1lb / month, assuming no change in diet.

Maintaining 1lb of fat is ~2-4calories per day though this increases with activity levels. So, assuming all else is the same over 30 years you would end up around 20-30 pounds heaver.

In the real world exercise is important for regulating appetite which has a much larger impact. Remember, evolution was not optimizing for people to sit around all day long. So, feedback systems are dependent on activity.

Exercise won't cause you to lose weight. It has other important benefits though.

> Most other societies make walking

Unfortunately, obesity is a global epidemic, and it is not showing signs of slowing in, as far as I can tell, in any developed nation.

It's worse for me because I move from bed, to shower, then down to the office downstairs.

You'd be surprised how many steps you get from just walking around the office. Luckily, I don't have a problem exercising on a daily basis, whether it's just walking outside or hitting the gym.

Losing weight is an entirely separate issue for me though. After hard-core lifting sessions, I'm eating way too many calories.

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