Anyone interested in the idea of living longer (without the detrimental effects of aging) should check out any Aubrey De Grey talk/video/interview.
I struggle mightily with eating less crap, though. (Especially chocolate.) Food is one of the great pleasures in life, and I haven't found really healthy food to be a good replacement for tasty junk.
Maybe advances in food production will bring hope?
You can also reduce how much you eat for your fun meals, but changing the boring meals makes a difference even if you don't.
100% Dark chocolate isn't 100% cocoa butter, it's the non-fat solids. If you eat some it's quite obviously not fatty, it's bitter and dry like a burnt coffee bean.
Edit: I'm mistaken here, dark chocolate is half fat, TIL.
As you add sugar to chocolate, the proportion of total weight that is fat goes down, and fat being more calorie dense than sugar, calories per unit weight go down.
It helps a lot to separate preparation from the moment I want to eat something, like cutting and packing an apple in the morning or washing a bunch of berries and carrying them in a jar.
For cardio you can go to any park for running or biking. It’s way more fun. For strength training you can do bodyweight strength training at home with no equipment required (calisthenics).
Most people fall into the trap of paying for a gym membership, but then they never use it, because let’s face it, going to the gym wastes time and is uncomfortable.
If you train at home by using the weight of your own body for building muscle, all it takes is 10-20 minutes per day and there’s no cost and no excuse for not doing it.
Edit: thanks for the responses, awesome.
https://www.reddit.com/r/bodyweightfitness/wiki/kb/recommend...
I've been doing it for about a year and it's excellent. The only "equipment" I bought are some wooden gymnastics rings.
A gym membership you don't use is useless of course, but having set appointments for sport, getting called on it when you don't show, and getting encouraged when you do, is far easier than trying to work up the self-discipline to do it at home. When you don't go to the gym on your own, what makes you think you'll do your exercises at home?
I started doing crossfit half a year ago, and now I usually go 3 times a week, far more than the maximum of once a week I did for previous sport/exercise attempts. And I manage to keep it up at least partially thanks to the positive and encouraging atmosphere, and the fact that I do it together. I'd never be able to get these results on my own at home.
The worst form I've ever seen has come out of crossfit classes. The way people learn to use ergometers in those classes makes me cringe—just asking for a ruined lower back. And lifting—it just looks painful.
Form, form, form. Can't stress it enough.
I just know I had seen some horrific lifting practices—or rather that no instruction was given except for "Go for it!".
That's good to hear.
You also end up exercising near other sweaty dudes, staying in line for the squat rack or whatever, then showering in conditions that are rarely ideal.
Whenever I go to the gym it takes at least an hour to go through my training, plus 30 minutes to get there and back. At home I can do my strength training in 15 minutes. I will then bike to and from work daily and thus get my cardio too.
A majority of people that pay for a gym membership don’t go to the gym and that’s a fact.
It depends on the individual I guess, but in my case not going to the gym and exercising at home is what made me a doer.
I admit the distance to the gym and the fact that it's crossfit and not something solitary, makes a big difference. If I had to go to the other side of the city, I wouldn't go so much.
A couple of years ago, I did HEMA, which was either on the other side of the city, or in another town altogether. Very inconvenient, but it was fun to do. Once I got kids, the inconvenience eventually won, and now I really prefer my sport closer to home.
Point is: it's a personal preference. Glad you enjoy biking and going to the gym, but both of those sound terrible to me.
I don't really bike for exercise; I do it just to get around, and I hate going slow.
The only way I can really run is when there's something with one of my kids who's a couple of hundred meters away.
I cycle a lot but the benefits for this desk jockey are marginal compared to doing stronglifts twice or thrice a week.
Calisthenics develop muscle more harmoniously and yield stronger joints.
You can also practice them literally anywhere, which helps when on the move.
I did a quick google, and couldn't find any resources comparing bone density and joint strength for calisthenics practitioners vs strongmen or powerlifters. There's no way joint strength doesn't factor in when you're moving multiples of your own bodyweight. That's also a pretty hard limiting factor of calisthenics - once you're moving your own weight effectively, there's not a lot of places to go, unless you load up with more weight, and then, hey, you're weightlifting.
I'm also confused as to what you mean by "harmoniously" - the big compound movements in lifting that are in vogue right now use a ton of muscles to move stuff around, so a lot of muscles come into play. If you're talking about "muscle imbalances", well, if one was to do a ton of pull-ups and not a lot else, that's a calisthenics workout, and not balanced.
And planks/step ups may be great, but they are no replacement for deadlifts and squats.
Running in a public park is a beautiful combination of boring, painful and embarrassing. Gym provides a structure. It is a place I go to exercise and everyone is there for the same reason. I hate it with a fiery passion, but so do many other people. It is just like going to physical therapy after a trauma, it hurts like hell, but if you don't do it you will be worse off in the long run.
Knowing that; living healthy is obviously important, but to suggest that you should also drop your intellectual curiosity for anti-aging science, like your comment essentially did, is just absurd. It's close to saying that people interested in physics should stop reading physics books and start playing ball sports instead.
It won't make substantial change.
Whatever you think about his idea of escape velocity you can't doubt the engineering approach he advocates makes sense. Solve these 7 problems [1] and there will be no reason the organism should die.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey#The_seven_types...
de Grey's list is about guiding research directions, it's not for ordinary people to use.
You could fool a person ignorant enough in a speciality with statements such as:
- To fly we just need a way to defeat gravity.
- To resurrect a body we just need to insufflate the soul back to the body.
- To make a head transplant we just need to reconnect the nerves and wait the meat to glue.
- An artificial intelligence will solve our company's problem.
This ver same person could be highly skilled or smart in other aspects. The more technical or scientific we sound the more a subject will give authority to the charlatan.
I ignore if these statements made by this person are overall valid, if the list is exhaust and if the things there are additional factors I ignore. Even in such case we also ignore the deepness of the problem and circumstances related.
Most of people, including myself, are no biologist or cryonogists and have not enough knowledge on that level, in addition it is in the human nature to have high hopes in self perpetuating ourselves. Thats the perfect ground for charlatans to grow.
I don't want to turn that example in an exaggerated dichotomy, but my point is that for someone who lacks skill or knowledge on a deeply complex topic, most of the time by using the specific jargon the person will sounds specific, professional, serious,... they will automatically sound like an expert or authority in the subject.
In other words, I don't think most of people here in this forum, and for sure not myself, is qualified enough to say whether the first sentence is more specific or realizable than the second one:
- We need to find a way to fix mutations in mitochondria by looking at the telanoma and several teams of scientists are looking at that.
- To resurrect a body we just need to insufflate the soul back to the body and several teams of sorcerers are looking at that.
And even if my examples are not good enough, this whole thing could be the "detox" fashion that happened a years ago, just on a different level/topic for a different target audience who needs more complicated words in order to be tricked.
Pretty massive difference.
P.D. many bluff companies have also lots of publications, papers etc... and that doesn't mean that they are innovative.
This recent interview with Aubrey de Grey is really worth listening to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMFST20xHwk
He seems to think that anti-aging science has speeded up drastically recently, both in terms of the science itself, the funding and the popularity. I really love what the SENS Foundation is doing in terms of spinning research avenues into startups, since most investors are far more likely to fund high-risk investments than non-profit ones.
He also mentions other positive developments in terms of legislation and advocacy.
His work of identifying reasons of aging seems really reasonable. Trying to reverse every one of those is incredible challenge. It's the biggest moonshot ever attempted.
It's pretty much a law of nature that the pioneers in any field will be overconfident. If they weren't, they never would've tried.
He is the leader who put himself out there and made it possible for all of these mainstream scientists to pursue anti-aging research seriously in the open.
By the way,his theory is still better than a what many of the mainstream scientists propose because he attributes aging to a more comprehensive (and therefore more realistic) set of problems.
Take a look at http://sens.org
Its actually similar to how people claimed Ben Goertzel was a crackpot, just because he was willing to promote AGI research when it wasn't cool. It always takes some 'crackpots' (i.e. leaders) to do something unfashionable before it can become fashionable and accepted.
Notice how this article doesn't mention de Grey. That is another unfortunate social aspect. The true leaders in science often go unacknowledged. Because society operates as a popularity contest, not a meritocracy.