Stop Thinking of Exercise as a Way to Lose Weight, You May Actually Enjoy It | Hacker News Reader

Stop Thinking of Exercise as a Way to Lose Weight, You May Actually Enjoy It

fivethirtyeight.com

36 pointsALee24 comments

Something i have personal experience with -- I knocked off 80 pounds a few years ago.

Diet controls mass.

Exercise controls fitness.

They're mostly[0] decoupled. This is not intuitive to reason about.

[0] there are some interesting things in difference in metabolic rates of tissue types, but it doesn't really matter much for mere mortals.

Excercise also changes body composition. It is usually missing from these articles - people are so much conserned about sheer body weight.

Even if one didn't lose weight may look much slimmer, just by having lower fat percentage... People with low enough body fat (especially taller people) can be rather slim even with BMI over 25...

that’s what i meant about fitness.

I once did a research paper on how exercise affects depression for a persuasive writing class. I don't remember much about it, but one particular study compared people with active jobs and people who were only active in their free time. It suggested that exercise as a form of leisure was more effective in combatting depression than just overall activity.

Great article - we saw the same lack of correlation between activity level and weight when analyzing data from 750+ fitness tests:

https://hack.fitness/2017/04/09/what-we-learnt-from-750-fitn...

Increasing activity however does have a positive impact on your fitness (specifically VO2Max) -- the challenge is that this increase in fitness is invisible to most.

That's a big part of the reason why we started Revvo (http://revvo.co) - to make it easy to measure the vital but often invisible elements of fitness.

The authors only looked at weight and BMI, and not bodyfat % or lean mass, which are much better indicators of health than weight or BMI alone.

Someone who is 6' and 200 lbs could either be a body builder or a coach potato, and they'd have the same BMI.

Sure -- but body fat won't change much with aerobic activity (such as running) without also impacting weight.

About Revvo: I think the bike should be better designed i.e. similar to indoor road bike trainers.

we actually integrate an indoor bike trainer (wahoo kickr).

I am lifting (and doing some cardio) for 7 years now. The truth is there's nothing to enjoy, it's just routine. Just like having a shower, brushing teeth, making diner and washing dishes. It's hard and monotonous work, not leisure. I've seen people who seek "to enjoy it" come and go all the time, because they just don't have the right mindset.

I've been doing it for 15 years. amongst my friends I'm the workout zealot. I used to run 15 miles a day 4 days a week and I've got good PRs (approaching 1k lbs right now). I enjoy it. do I enjoy it like I enjoy candy? a good movie? a day at the beach? of course not. but I don't enjoy writing code in that way either and yet I enjoy writing code. the change of mind is coming to enjoy difficult things (not making difficult things easy)

Eh. I've kinda been off and on the wagon for the past 7 years. The routine is the same - lose the weight. Feel great about myself. Then I either decide to chase performance goals - or to pack on muscle. I do that for 6-12 months and then something in life happens that derails me (having a kid being the biggest one).

This last time I got started, over a year ago, I was 240lbs. In 10 months I dropped to 180. At 36 and the fact I wasn't as strict with my diet as usual in the hopes it would help for a more long term lifestyle change rather than just a "diet".

I tell people I just do it because it's maintenance, because who like "that guy" that goes to the gym all the time.

People like their friends and family and co-workers doing something positive and constructive and are great at encouraging it. But eventually that person sticks with it, talks about it a lot - it becomes this constant reminder to others of their inadequacies. It doesn't matter if you taught yourself a new thing, lost weight, got shredded, read Infinte Jest, picked up a hobby of some for or another. It's always the same. They get annoyed at you, they talk smack about you. Hell, sometimes they try to sabotage you.

So i just tell people, it's maintenance. That I don't really enjoy it. That I just don't want to be fat or feeble when I'm too old to do anything about it. Even with my own wife - I'm a little reserved to talk about my failures or successes. Less so than with others, but with her too.

But the truth of it is - i love running. On a treadmill even. And I really love lifting. I love having short and long term goals and meeting them in concrete ways - or learning from my failure to. I find it stimulating and challenging. Not to mention stress relieving. Going to the gym, pumping some aggressive music is a nice break from the types of passive-aggressive hipster STEM bros I work with day in and day out. It's a nice break from being Dad. It's a space where the only person I have to compete with is myself and I really enjoy that.

I get where you're coming from and I think routine is important. But I make sure to do some of the dance and spin classes for my cardio and it makes it a lot more enjoyable. I actually also enjoy lifting weights. The treadmill is a bit boring but running -feels- good. Getting the blood pumping and stretching my legs feels great. Doing sports at the park works different muscles and I can run around outside playing for 3 hours having fun.

I view it as "cling to any positive motivation that comes my way, it can make me workout harder and the time pass faster, but always fall back on discipline." 80% of the time it doesn't feel like a chore, but even when it does I still go.

Also I think there's a lot of people who use the gym as some kinda hate machine. "I'm just here because I hate my body" seems like a good way to feel awful all the time.

That's good because I do enjoy it, and it doesn't help in the slightest.

I do not like repetitive motion without productivity. I understand the argument that this type of movement ("exercise") leads to enhanced capacity for mental labor, and less healthcare budget. What bothers me is not getting anything done.

Riding a bike is repetitive, but you instantly see results (going somewhere).

Swinging an axe into a tree over and over is repetitive, but a felled tree can be a useful resource.

Rearranging all your furniture may seem repetitive, but you are creating a fresh space, simultaneously cleaning. Doing this with others further reinforces community.

"Exercise" became a common term as we gradually started expecting machines to do the heavy lifting.

Now we pay a "membership" fee to go somewhere safe and climate controlled so we can simulate labor (mostly iron going up and down up and down).

The hydrocarbon killed creativity and fortitude?

Working out (in a gym) is one of the few places I can see concrete results of my work.

I mean, I get this with house projects, or chopping a tree, or wood working. I used to do construction (building house frames) as a teeanger and I found that very rewarding too.

But in the gym - I can see my intended weight loss or gains.

I can see performance gains on lifts or runs.

As opposed to work where a business decision can cancel a project I'm working on at a moment's notice. Where "get it done now" because of some sales driven deadline means cheaping out on getting it done right, where you're told, "we'll get to that later when we have time", which means never.

Or, my personal favorite, "priorities accordion" where the dev or sys teams are constantly having priorities shift so rapidly and so frequently, that nothing gets accomplished at all.

I go to the gym and it's simple. I move metal. No boss. No co-workers. No having to impress the wife. No hoping that people in my home find it useful. It's quarantined into a realm of me. This is my space and no one can intrude, or fuck it up or touch it or criticize it.

And when I drop 80lbs in 9 months, it makes me proud of myself.

When I, at a 37 year old man, am running a 5k in under 24 and a 5mi in under 40, it makes me proud of myself.

When I can bench 2-plates on each side, deadlift 300 or squat 250, it makes me proud of myself.

I'm setting goals and meeting or exceeding them.

And I have no area in life where I can execute that so directly.

Wow, judgmental much?

For some of us the "productivity" is the mental high you get from the workout. Honestly I just feel damn good. Lifting weights and cycling (yes even indoor) both are very enjoyable and give me a high equivalent to eating chocolate, sex, or other chemically rewarding activities. I pay for a personal trainer not because of the air conditioning, but because there is tens of thousands of dollars in equipment to help me train that I have no interest in buying myself.

Today I worked some harsh terrain by hand - it is a thicket and the roots are heavily entrenched. My goal is to dig a channel away from where I'm building my house, so water can drain from the foundation. Lifting dirt is more of a lower back workout, but tugging on those roots... I feel it in my abs and triceps. The harder I tug, the larger these assets will become (as long as I supply their growth with protein).

There are lots of rocks in the primary creek where gravity brings the rain. I plan on moving these rocks out to use as for a road so I can bring my truck through the mud to my building site, and ferry heavier tools and supplies. For now I am walking a half mile to the site with my pickaxe, shovel, and hedge trimmers. Sometimes I'll go into a sprint, for no reason really, until I get winded. There is usually a steady burn on my shoulders while I lug this gear. I imagine this is the sort of conditioning required of a soldier throughout the ages - to be able to carry your own weight, equipment and all, through the mud and uneven terrain.

My ultimate goal is to build an off-grid home, and dam up this creek so I can use it for hydroelectric power to supplement my home-made solar panels. These panels are low cost, because I'll drive around on Saturdays and find glass on the side of the road that people apparently don't want (renovation?). This is another workout, and simultaneous recycling measure.

When we use physical labor only as a means to achieve an image, we are only fooling the opposite sex. Basic sexual attraction has everything to do with physicality - it is a signal of a mates capacity for strength and endurance. It's not that working out in a gym is a waste of time, because the body does become stronger if effort is applied. But that is the very thing we become good at - iron up and down in the same spot.

Also, I tend to get at least a few cuts on thorns when I do this. In a way, this exercises my immune system.

Sterile environments are dangerous.

It did not sound judgemental to me - more like a personal statement about the writer's experience. Perhaps that is just because I relate to their sentiment. I understand that many people do enjoy exercise for its own sake, as you describe, but I don't experience that pleasure, and the boredom is more than I can stand.

I find going running to be a good way to think. When my mind isn't occupied by the task at hand is when I think most clearly and creatively. I consider that to be getting something done. Uninteresting tasks which require thought are the boring ones.

I enjoy running too - the runners high is quite a sensation. But I do try and run on trails, rather than pavement or treadmills. The inconsistencies of the terrain ultimately builds ankle strength. I've had some rough tumbles too while running on bike trails, and I'd like to think my ribs have become stronger for it.

But I see your point with using a simple, thought-free run to jog the mind on backlogged thoughts (pun achieved).

If you lift weights with a decent program you should be progressing from week to week. That’s pretty good progress, as obvious as watching an axe cut into a tree. If that’s not your goal then don’t do it: life is too short to live for others.

We try to coordinate 9-19 people to carry logs to a build site. Iron smelters need to be wide and below ground.

We will bench nearly twice our normal limit.

In less gravity it is different.

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