What's the ultimate way to defy depression, disease and early death? Exercise
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I'm not rejecting the importance of exercise for health - I follow the general principal of eating to get healthy, exercising to get fit - but I think we skip over the absolute tragedy that is the Standard American Diet at our peril.
Recovering from the consuequences of three/four generations of preaching the lipid hypothesis[2], as fast as we damn well can, is the ultimate way to defy depression, disease and early death.
[1] http://www.thefatemperor.com/blog/2015/9/5/fat-emperor-produ...
I've found that when I tell people this, they worry about my health even more than they did when I was 80lbs heavier. It's bizarre.
Never mind the fact that my blood pressure is now a pristine 110 over 70, all my pre-diabetic symptoms have disappeared, my sleep apnea is cured, my gastroesophageal reflux disease is completely gone, my cholesterol and triglycerides are back to normal, etc.
The fact is exercise has an almost negligible impact on weight loss.
Let's be very generous and say an hour of typical exercise burns 350 calories. If you're overweight, compare that to the 120 calories you burn per hour spent sitting in your chair. That's an extra 230 calories you burned by exercising for an hour.
That 230 calorie expenditure costs you:
* 1.5 to 2 hours of disruption to your daily life
* An hour spent being extremely bored and uncomfortable
* An ever-growing amount of generalized aches and joint pains as you put together consecutive days of doing this
And at 230 calories per hour, doing an hour of exercise every single day nets you 1610 calories per week, which is less than 1 pound of fat loss every 2 weeks. You turn your whole life upside-down, make yourself miserable and in pain every single day, take significant time away from work and studying and family, and all you get is LESS THAN 1 additional pound lost every 2 weeks.
I honestly think the net impact of promoting exercise as a weight loss option is people getting and staying fatter. People have a tendency to dramatically overestimate the calories they're burning, people want to use exercise as a way to avoid having to eat less, and people use exercise as an excuse to eat more. It also causes an amount of disruption and discomfort in people's lives that's probably the number one cause of people giving up on their weight loss goals.
As far as health impacts, I'm still not convinced on the cause-and-effect here. I want to start doing some physical activities soon, but that's not going to cause me to be less depressed, that's a result of me being less depressed because of all the weight I've been losing. All the studies I've seen on exercise and health draw the same sort of "playing basketball makes you taller"-conclusion.
In the beginning, this is often true. But exercise is addictive! When your body gets used to it, you really want it and it is not uncomfortable. That "runners high" is also not a myth.
Looking around at the PT groups I was in during that time, I do not think most of them were looking forward to it.
I try to mitigate the boredom by watching a movie while doing it.
Just seeing the same people every day makes me feel like a community member and helps me stay motivated and connected.
I don't try very hard at it, I'm not running against time, I just jog and don't worry about it.
As for boredom, the opposite happens to me. I find I think better while jogging. I work on programming bugs while jogging, and often find solutions that eluded me while sitting at my desk. I write articles and compose presentations while jogging. It's often my most intellectually productive time of the day.
[1] https://staciechoice1010.wordpress.com/2014/08/08/focused-vs...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/well/move/running-may-be-...
Properly doing exercise and keeping at it won't result in joint pains or aches, and may also uplift your mood due to endorphins+more.
IMO your reasoning for avoiding exercise should be revisited.
Also, there is no proper form of exercise for an obese person that won't cause pains or aches, it doesn't exist. We might just be coming from different backgrounds and talking about different body types here.
Swimming. Doing laps is a great calorie burner too.
there's very little evidence for this, other than a very short lasting boost.
Your calculation is for a person who weighs 80kg, which is someone who doesn't need to lose any weight. People who have a lot of weight to lose aren't capable of running for an hour.
There are plenty of activities in life that initially only have costs and zero benfits - excercise at least consumes calories from day 1...
If you are 1m80, quite possibly. Don't forget it isn't just about BMI but also waist circumference. Obese men and alcoholics likely have high waist circumference.
How do you know?
I think you are being unfair to yourself to so easily dismiss what exercise can do for your moods. When I'm feeling down, getting my heart rate up for 45 minutes totally turns around the day. I don't know the exact reason, maybe all the rapid blood flow or found energy, whatever it is, it is not a reaction I get from anything else.
An article was shared here recently how so many great artists and scientists in the past were slaves to a ritual of long stretches of physical activity every day. It really changes how your brain works.
Because researchers keep failing to find evidence of effectiveness.
http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/depression/in-...
Even if there was no evidence, surely the testimonies of many others right here on this page would at least be worth the possibility that it could be effective.
http://www.cochrane.org/CD004366/DEPRESSN_exercise-for-depre...
> Exercise is moderately more effective than no therapy for reducing symptoms of depression.
[...]
> The reviewers also note that when only high-quality studies were included, the difference between exercise and no therapy is less conclusive.
[...]
> The evidence about whether exercise for depression improves quality of life is inconclusive.
Since depression is a potentially fatal illness it's important to stick to evidence based treatments.
[1] To be precise: 150 min a week of medium movement (walking, cycling), twice a week heavy movement (running, soccer aka football), and avoid sitting still [2]. Also, the difference between 0 and 15 min of exercise is larger than 15 and 30 min. That's why it feels so good to start with exercises and only do it very little.
[2] https://www.gezondheidsraad.nl/nl/taak-werkwijze/werkterrein...
I just think it would be unfair for someone to read these comments and then think, "ah, see, there is no reason I should try regularly exercising," and give up before they have started. Do you think that is a good outcome? Even you said you are a proponent of exercise.
We all sometimes share anecdotes. I shared one as well in this thread.
I don't discount the advice of doctors, or the advice from the government which is a summary of the advice of many medical experts.
What I say is that anecdotal evidence isn't evidence, and when someone calls us on that, we should accept that specific counter-argument and move on.
If we're going to enforce people to accept our anecdotal evidence what is going to stop people from accepting other's anecdotal evidence on, say, homeopathy indeed?
Also, the amount of professionals who recommend something isn't definitive proof either. Not every professional is equal. What matters is the amount of studies which haven't been debunked.
> I just think it would be unfair for someone to read these comments and then think, "ah, see, there is no reason I should try regularly exercising," and give up before they have started. Do you think that is a good outcome? Even you said you are a proponent of exercise.
I don't know about the USA or anywhere else in the world but the health recommendation I quoted was merely a minor revision and widely in the local news. I read about it in the newspaper, saw it on TV in the news, saw it covered on a popular talkshow, and I'm sure it was shared on social media as well. People who, at this point, do not want to exercise and claim it is completely useless are just ignorant or in denial IMNSHO. Its the same with people who remain smoker for whatever excuse or reason, or who keep drinking alcohol.
However as I wrote in numerous posts throughout this thread, diet has the largest effect on health. I'm repeating myself, but its: less calories, less sugar, less salt, less saturated fat (transfats are a thing of the past).
I also very much liked the quote of someone saying that whoever says there's more to dieting than calories is trying to sell you something. It makes losing weight unnecessarily difficult and complex.
I still agree with your main point though, that weight loss is mostly about diet. Just saying questions about fitness and nutrition are incredibly nuanced because the body is a complex system.
Since you are not doing sports 95% of the time, this has a lot of leverage. And you can build muscle with 30min of training per day easily.
Also, you please check whether you mean kilocalories when you say calories.
This isn't being generous at all. Once you get past the initial few weeks of not being physically able to put that much effort into exercise, 350 calories for an entire hour would be on the low end of what I expect most people to burn.
>I honestly think the net impact of promoting exercise as a weight loss option is people getting and staying fatter. People have a tendency to dramatically overestimate the calories they're burning, people want to use exercise as a way to avoid having to eat less, and people use exercise as an excuse to eat more. It also causes an amount of disruption and discomfort in people's lives that's probably the number one cause of people giving up on their weight loss goals.
Virtually everyone that advocates exercise as a way to lose weight mentions in the same breath that it has to go hand-in-hand with a diet. It is an objective fact that if you burn more calories in a day because you exercise, that you will get away with eating more food. How much more depends on how many calories you burn when exercising.
The concept of weight loss is very simple. Burn more calories than you eat. People need to start somewhere by making an estimate of how many calories that they burn on a daily basis and then adjust it slowly if they don't lose weight.
Its silly to act like the concepts of physical fitness and weight loss are so complicated that people are being manipulated and/or confused into gaining weight. The only thing difficult about losing weight is the consistent execution of an incredibly simple process.
Something must be wrong with exercise then, because that’s not true of dieting at all. Just dieting will do just fine.
This is the worst advice you could ever give to someone who's very overweight.
For overweight people exercise is a complete waste of time, and their bodyweight actually is what matters above all else as far as their health goes.
Telling an obese person that they should do some jumping jacks so their heart will be nice and healthy is just absurd. I see parents doing this all the time (and had it done to me), they get their obese kid running around and encourage them to engage in all these ultra-boring uncomfortable painful "fitness activities" that will never in a million years form into a habit for them. Then they take them home and give them some chicken nuggets for a job well done.
These people are more concerned with the theater of weight loss than they are with actual weight loss, because the theater of it gives them the highest ratio of guilt relief to effort expended.
For those kids, for the rest of their lives, every time they consider trying to lose weight, they'll see visions of running toward a brick wall for an hour without ever getting closer to it, and taking an hour out of their day to go somewhere and move things with their arms until they're sore. "Yeah fuck that", they'll say, never fully realizing that weight loss is really just about passively managing their food intake. Or maybe they'll try, it'll make them completely miserable (like it does for most people), and they'll perceive that as a personal failing and give up both dieting and exercise, once again not realizing that 99% of their goal can be achieved with just the dieting part.
The reality is that as long as you're overweight, your primary health objective should be to lose weight, and the only way to do that is to change what you eat and how much of it you eat over the long term. If adding exercise to that equation adds a 0.1% chance of you giving up, then it's not worth it.
Until you're at a normal weight, exercise is a premature optimization.
That's because you put on a (too) high standard, and if you don't make it, instead of lowering your goal you end up with a defeatist attitude and give up. If you do that in your professional life as well that's a recipe for a burnout.
Example: say you want to go to the gym but you can't make it this week. Is that a huge issue? Does that mean you shouldn't go anymore at all? That everything's lost? No! Just try next time again, and do your best. Say your training scheme tells you that you should run 5 km in 30 min, you're on 20 min and only at 2,5 km. Does that mean you should give up? No. It means you should follow your pace as far as you can push it. Overcoming such might even strengthen you if the adversary is burnout.
If you're under the guidance of a quality physician or training scheme (basically same, as physician makes that for/with you) that shouldn't happen.
I replied to a previous post of you where you were saying you were running for an hour (!) at the gym. An hour! That's not how you start with getting fit. That's way too hardcore already. For one, its too long. Second, its the same stuff all the time, while you clearly don't seem to enjoy running. If you enjoy running, sure, but you don't.
Why don't you try different exercises and accept that there's some you like and some you dislike? Example: if you're only rowling for 10 minutes while you enjoy planking more which is next, you got something to look forward to. Plus, perhaps you'll start to like rowling eventually. My (anecdotal) experience is that eventually, once I get good at it, I start enjoying it more.
When I do daily exercises as broadcasted on TV (using rebroadcasted IPTV) there's all kind of exercises I enjoy and some I dislike. Especially the stuff I'm relatively bad at (basically anything involving hamstring like multiple, deep squats) is rough. But after I did them I feel the difference. And if I can't do it exactly as the example shows, I can at least try to mimmic it as good as I can. Eventually, I'll get better.
Strictly speaking , yes, Otherwise, no it is not. If one were to really calculate calories in/out that would be really complicated: you have to consider many factors for example energy required to digest food, energy extracted from the food, energy lost as body heat etc. as far as I vaguely recollect, even something like body heat burns more calories that vigorous exercise.
In general the calorie obsession is nonsense. Just because some scientific sounding jargon is thrown in does not make it well thought off. On a 'good' diet most people will never have to count the calories. Again the takeaway should be that you can fool most people, most of the time. Treat any subject that has popular endorsement with skepticism.
Start by eating homemade food and don't eat take-out or processed foods. Avoid Snacking.
However, as most people do not count their calories (an underrated activity I'd say, it makes weight control trivially simple if you can keep it up) what's more important is how much your food and activities makes you eat in relation to what you need.
This is what makes exercise not as obvious as a solution. If you move more, you will generally want to eat more. The function of diets is to have the opposite effect, by eating certain kinds of foods you can trick your body into feeling satiated on a calorie deficit.
Generally this happens for instance when you make restrictions on your diet, like eating a limited amount of fat or a limited amount of carbohydrates.
Some foods are designed to be tasty and make you eat more, sometimes your body won't compensate for that and you get on a calorie excess. Processed food and snacks are often in this category. By eating less of those, and more of whole foods you often will naturally reduce your calorie intake. Using less added sugar and fat is often helpful as well.
Going into details of how the body manages your calorie intake like your digestive system and the insulin system is interesting in itself, but it's usually not very relevant for adjusting your diet. This is because the way these affect your body is both non-obvious and often not as well known as it might seem.
I migrated gradually (six months) to a very low carb diet including abstinence from all forms of artificial sweetener. 9g/122g/100g carbs/fat/protein. On the plate that's lots of saturated fat, moderate protein from meat and dairy (largely unprocessed) and huge volumes of green vegetables (but they are simply a vehicle for fat and micronutrients.) I will experiment with abstinence from dairy in the future.
I keep my eating to a six hour window, two meals. The artificial sweetener ban is due to the insulin response they can provoke, which goes directly against my goal - to significantly improve my insulin sensitivity. I hope that is specific enough!
I also eat during a 6 hour window and try to keep the carbs at a minimum, and the 18 hour fasting period works wonders for my insulin levels.
Ingesting zero calorie artificial sweeteners during the fasting window have no measurable impact on my insulin.
A couple of minor inconveniences: First his stool is hard. Second, he just had triple by-pass surgery as his cholesterol is sky high.
The Atkins/South Beach/Keto madness has to be stopped.
First of, the article doesn't say much or anything about weight and health. Second, there is a simple and easy to understand solution to your overweight problem: If you take in only the amount of calories, you use, you can't get fat. I'm not even sure what your overweight/previous overweight (i assume it because you are able to loss 180lbs) has to do with lipid hypothesis.
There is not even an german article available for lipid hypothesis. What is a doctor telling you when he/she beliefs in this hypothesis?
Even if you do decide to work out, it tends to be the first thing you drop when you don't have time. Or you worked late. Or you forget your gym clothes. Or you're just too exhausted to go.
We used to be active, our jobs required motion, we had to walk or cycle to work, or even take public transportation - which requires you to at least walk to the stop and back.
Now we literally sit on our asses, day in, day out, and wonder why so many people are obese.
Being fit, or at least not fat, was also a cultural priority until relatively recently.
Which western lives?
> Unless you live without a car, there is no requirement
Requirement? Choice. That's what counts.
Sometimes antidepressants are required. Sometimes therapy is required. Please avoid turning this into "why don't you just exercise".
Would being depressed prevent you from taking anti-depression medicine? Seeking help from a doctor?
There are people in the world who still have to do that labor. They're not happier or healthier or longer-lived than the western world. In fact, the overall high-level trend appears to be that happiness is correlated with being sedentary.
Correlation doesn't mean causation of course, but as long as articles like this one are going to imply that it does, I might as well point out that I can make the exact same argument in the opposite direction.
Source?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/01/Wo...
Agrarian populations spend all their time doing hard labor to earn basic necessities like food, water and shelter. That sucks and they're less happy.
People in western nations live longer and move less. The correlation is pretty obvious.
We can expand this: exercise is moderately better than nothing to treat depression, unless you use good quality studies in which case we don't know if it's better than nothing or not.
http://www.cochrane.org/CD004366/DEPRESSN_exercise-for-depre...
> Exercise is moderately more effective than no therapy for reducing symptoms of depression.
[...]
> The reviewers also note that when only high-quality studies were included, the difference between exercise and no therapy is less conclusive.
Also fixes your bad diet.
To say exercise lowers depression, disease, and death normalizes inactivity.
You can define normal how you want, but I prefer to think of exercise as normal and that lack of it contributes to depression, disease, and death.
If you like animals and you are responsible enough to be a pet owner, getting a dog can help too.
But there's no theory! e.g. mental health isn't understood, so whether exercise is of lasting benefit in that department is unclear. Consider that people pay good money to sit for a week or more to try to elevate their well-being. Consider that athletes have their fair share of mental health issues, and that even top athletes live less than 3 years longer than average. (Which seems like a small difference.)
Consider that people who move about constantly will eventually drop dead of heart failure:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_Plague_of_1518
Examples such as this are perhaps misleading edge cases. But theory would give some insight into why they are misleading. At present we are blind.
Morning exercise completely cured my intractable insomnia.
Now I have an elaborate spin bike setup, large TV playing lectures and a bluetooth headset to hear them. I ride the bike for the entire lecture, usually 45mins-1hr15mins, and recently incorporated interval training so whenever a student in the recorded lecture asks a question, it's always one that could have been answered by reading the assigned material beforehand like the student is supposed to do, so I go as hard as possible on the bike until the professor returns to the lecture. After I have no problems concentrating for another hour or so on the assigned reading or trying the proofs in the lecture notes whereas before I as always fidgety sitting for so long during a lecture not wanting to spend yet more time staring at proofs.
I also agree with the other poster exercise usually doesn't equate weight loss since I didn't lose any weight until I started making my own food and avoiding all the takeout junk I was eating. Like everybody else I overestimated the amount of calories burned so feasted on huge pasta dishes and baguette sandwiches.
If you like animals and are responsible enough to have what amounts to a light version of a child, then dogs are excellent for encouraging activity since they require daily walks.
It's amazing to me what even a slight bit of regular activity can do. It just feels good to be even a little active on a regular basis. I feel so much more ready to move.
I don't doubt exercise is extremely valuable, and that everyone should be following the advice in TFA. However, I am starting to think that lifestyle recommendations are a way for a public health system to wash its hands of its responsibility to actually, proactively care for people. As in: “Well, we're sure you can make changes on your own to improve your health, so just go and do your bit while we quietly neglect to do ours".
Yes, you should exercise, and eat right, and not drink too much, and sleep right, and not stress too much. You should do as much as you reasonably can in all these areas. But if you're looking to "defy depression, disease and early death", you'd also better learn a bit about the way your health system operates, and the common issues it is inclined (presumably for cost reasons) to ignore.
I've written in past comments about thyroid conditions, which are a big deal, and can easily go undiagnosed for a long time (due, basically, to cost-driven neglect). I'm becoming aware of more issues:
1) Testosterone: I’m a middle-aged man and I’ve been complaining to my GP for months about feeling weak while exercising, and about sleep disruption. I’ve been doing my own reading, and have just discovered that hypogonadism (inadequate testosterone levels) is incredibly common amongst middle-aged men:
“Hypogonadism affects approximately 40% of men aged 45 or older, although less than 5% of these men are actually diagnosed and treated for the condition” [1]. Even discounting the fact that the author of this article declares that he consults for pharma companies, that’s a staggering statistic. So why given my symptoms do I have to ask my GP to check my testosterone levels, rather than him having ordered the test months ago?
2) Prolactin: it seems a very significant fraction of the population (e.g. 6-25% of the U. S. population) have pituitary tumours, forty percent of which produce prolactin [2], which is a sex hormone. There’s evidence that people whose prolactin levels are in the upper normal of the physiological reference range, suffer from insulin resistance [3] and have significantly increased risk of mortality [4]. Oh, and prolactin stimulates the immune system and high levels are associated with autoimmune diseases [5]. I had a test done for prolactin levels recently (I requested some tests to check for hypopituitarism), and levels came back quite high but in the normal physiological range (see above, of course). GP response: “no problem, levels are normal”. Which is true, in that I appear to be suffering from quite normal disease that the health system intends to do nothing about.
Bottom line: Do your homework, folks. View your health service as a resource, a gateway to services. When it comes to chronic conditions and diseases of old age, you (or nobody) are the principal investigator.
[1] http://www.bcmj.org/articles/testosterone-deficiency-practic...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prolactinoma#Epidemiology
[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28384295
[1] http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2011/08/18/modern-life-rough-o...
(And conveniently misdefined it in a way that exploits men's fears about aging and masculinity to sell them things.)
> When it comes to chronic conditions and diseases of old age, you (or nobody) are the principal investigator.
Well put. This is very important no matter what system you're in. It's a real problem when mental health conditions impair your judgement and ability to make these kind of decisions yourself.
1. Upper class people seek to differentiate themselves from lower class people by status markers (like reading the guardian)
2. In the past, food was scarce, so upper class people were fat when lower class were lean, hence terms like "rubinesque beauty" or the figures of Botticelli's art.
3. Now food is common though, so the status marker is to be thin, because being thin shows you have leisure time to exercise, (you try being on your feet for 12 hours a day and then going to the gym), have money to eat the right kinds of food, and have the good form to have discipline not to eat when you need comfort (or in general need comfort).
4. but it's not enough to do it, the upper class needs their virtues reinforced.
5. Since the upper class is atheistic due to the lower class being religious (unless they are the right kind of religion, something either punishing to follow or neo-atheistic as it is), we must focus on the atheist's heaven, good health.
6. Your virtue in being thin is rewarded through lack of depression, disease, and long life! Your priestly newspaper has given you a scientific sermon.
Think about this. Why is this article in the Guardian, who I'm willing to bet already exercise, eat well, etc? Wouldn't it be in the Daily Mail instead, if the point was to convince people to exercise? That's because it's there to reinforce the idea of exercise and thinness as a status marker among the Guardian readership. The same thing happens in lower class media too, on different subjects, but the upper class usually never even gets how they are being led around.