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Comment by hutzlibu | Hacker News Reader

I am not sure, how appropriate this is, but a related question/poll:

there is the stereotype, that hackers/IT guys are in general fat/unhealthy.

But in my experience, this is not at all true. It might just be my circles of people (mostly germans around 30), but most of the IT guys I know, take good care of their body, eat healthy and do all kinds of sports. Even though some are now starting to get lazy, the overall picture for me is, that most are healthy, above average (compared to people of their age).

So I am curious, how the world is for other people here on HN?

View on HN

Office of 5 developers here - UK, in our 20s and 30s. We have a marathon runner / CrossFitter, a triathlonner, martial artist, and a weightlifter. Only one of us isn't into some kind of "fitness", although he doesn't have a car so he walks everywhere. None of use are overweight by anyone's standards.

I have made this observation as well (Denmark, age range around 30-55ish). In this IT department, I honestly cannot find any colleagues that are outright unhealthy. Most of them are actually very dedicated cyclists or runners, we've had a couple of weightlifters too.

People with higher education often take better care of their bodies. Here is my theory: A couple of decades ago, IT didn't require much education, because there weren't many schools doing IT. So many people without higher education worked in IT.

I would go more with, a lot of sad, fat kids at home, discovered the world of computers, where they could shine, because nobody cared how they looked in the real world, it only mattered what they could do. And this stereotype definitely still exists, I would be curious, how many of the HN crowd fit into it, but I can understand, that nobody wants to out himself like that.

edit: and I believe every fat person, knows and knew, that being fat is bad, but when you are sad and eating is your allmost only joy, what can you do? Starving and give up that little bit of happiness?

I don't have any higher education, I took the vocational school route for electronics and IT support, got a job and worked my way up through experience and various courses/certifications.

Maybe I'm a good example, because I used to be rather overweight (125+kg) and inactive. After I started working in IT, I've slimmed down to below 100kg and I've been doing crossfit for ~5 years.

A lot of us never did higher education, work in the industry, and still aren't fat.

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