The Myth of Moderate Exercise
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I work really, really hard.
When I go to the gym, I push myself as far as I can take it mentally and physically that day. Some days it's more than others. But overall, I work much harder in the gym than most people I know.
Treat your exercise time as something to excel it, not a chore to do. It can make a world of difference.
That you can't imagine anyone still choosing to exercise says a lot about how you think about it. Going through a good workout is the same for me as solving a hard problem.
It's cool that you've figured out how to enjoy it, but to most of society, it's an utterly boring mind numbing repetitious activity; that it has health benefits makes it no less so.
If your body was just naturally in great shape and required no exercise to stay so, you're telling me you'd still go to the gym and pump weights? For what possible reason?
My sport of choice is Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I tend to combine strength training and conditioning to complement BJJ practices. But sometimes I'll lift for power only, because it's fun to change it up.
Since you're on HN, I assume you're a programmer. Don't you like solving programming puzzles? Doesn't it make you feel good to figure something out, even if there's no obvious benefit? I have the same attitude with workouts - both BJJ and the strength training I do.
Last week, I wondered if I could do five reps of five set of Clean & Press at 185 pounds. I could seven months ago. I thought my strength wasn't up to where it had been. But I did it. It was hard; it took considerable effort to not let myself feel tired inbetween sets, and to maintain focus during the sets. I had set an ambitious but realistic goal, and I achieved it. I went home feeling good.
If you have the right attitude to exercising, there are considerable mental benefits. I think a big part of this is training for performance, not looks. Pushing yourself to achieve your performance goals, not your body-image goals. But someone else said it better, so I'll link to him: http://dynamicfitness.blogspot.com/2006/04/df-tip-13-enough-...
Find something you have fun doing. Maybe a sport or a martial art. Or maybe your concept of "working out" is too narrow; check out http://www.crossfit.com for people who stress performance during workouts that generally last less than 30 minutes, but will exhaust you.
Ah, see, that's what I meant by being a means, a sport is and end and something fun in itself where the getting in shape is a side effect. When I say working out, I'm specifically talking about pumping iron in a gym. Yes I'm a programmer, so my definition isn't so much narrow as it is precise, what can I say; that's how we are. Playing a sport isn't working out, it's playing a sport; that it happens to work you out is not the main point merely a nice benefit. Where I live, it's 115 degrees outside, working up a sweat is the last thing I want to do, I spend much of my time trying to stop sweating!
"Last week, I wondered if I could do five reps of five set of Clean & Press at 185 pounds."
Yes, but can you wonder that a few times a week on a regular basis and continue to get any thrill or sense of accomplishment out of it. Performance are only motivating when you're trying to improve your performance, but that can't go on forever, at some point you just want to maintain and it's the maintaining, at a gym, that's boring as fuck.
I agree you have to find something fun to do that works you out as a side effect, like "Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu", which is my whole point. Pumping iron in the gym, in the long term, is boring as fuck, no matter how you slice it.
I haven't found my "something fun" yet, maybe I will someday, but good for you that you have.
An important point here is that I know a variety of lifts, so I know a variety of ways I can challenge myself. Eventually I come back to similar challenges, but then I always try to improve. So, yes, doing 5x5 C&P with 185 pounds again would be boring. So I'll do 190 pounds, because I know it will be hard, and I'm not sure if I can do it.
I agree, if you look at it as maintenance, it is boring, and you will stop doing it. So focus on improving performance, even if what you try to improve changes.
And I can't help but notice you keep saying "pumping iron." Are you thinking of bodybuilder style workouts? I focus on movements, not muscles.
This self-selection tends to invalidate the study I think. It is possible that the people who chose not to exercise much were exactly the ones who needed it the most. The people who chose to exercise a lot are more likely to have been fitter in the first place.
Not to mention the fact that almost no treatment of a "study" in popular media distinguishes between correlation and causation. There is a difference, a fact lost on almost everyone these days.
[I lost .4 pounds last Thursday commenting on Hacker News. Therefore, typing causes weight loss :-) ]
<antecdote> I've found high intensity exercise for short periods of time (20-40 minutes, 3-4 times a week) has far more effect for me personally than moderate exercise (45-60 minutes, 5-6 times a week) I've seen more personal improvement doing CrossFit (www.crossfit.com) than I ever did previously going to the local gym. </antecdote>
Lately I have been doing interval swimming where I swim one lap freestyle as if my life depended on it, and then another lap doing the backstroke as fast as I can. I am going 100% the whole time.
I rest for a few minutes and as soon as I feel I've got my breath slightly back, I do it all over again.
Not sure what it is about getting the hard pumping that hard for short intervals, but I've lost weight in the process.
The thing about it is there is no way to become content. You see a lot of cardio people churning away at the same rate on the treadmill as they were doing last week.
But with my interval swimming, I am going 100%. You are always pushing full throttle; there's no allowance for contentment.
http://www.quitrunning.com/interval-training-swimmers.htm http://www.marksdailyapple.com/sprint-training/
> Jakicic and his colleagues originally designed their study to measure whether weight loss could really be achieved and maintained through moderate-intensity exercise... or whether it was preferable to engage in shorter bursts of more vigorous-intensity activity... The problem was that not enough of the women stuck with their assigned exercise categories for the researchers to gather enough meaningful data. Within a few months, most of the participants had resorted to exercising as much as they chose to. That left researchers with a slightly different data set than they had planned for
(FWIW I'm all about HIIT, but I don't know how you can get people into it once it becomes inconceivable to do high-intensity work.)
The Hacker's Diet by John Walker
So where did all the fatties come from? They didn't used to be here.
This is ridiculous. There are big, obvious changes in diet and exercise levels since the 70s that have correlated well with rising obesity.
It seems more a enviroment/culturual/city walkability thing
Across time and between nations now the role of fat is pretty clear. More fat, thinner people. The recent studies that have put people on high fat, low carb diets are unmatched. People lose the weight and keep it off when you tell them to cut the potatoes and eat butter instead.
Regarding weight loss: I work & exercise with a variety of body types (these body types have people names too!), and, within this small sample, I've found that the dominating factor in overall weight is diet, not exercise.
Essentially, exercise controls muscle tone and how "tight" the skin is, while diet seems to control the overall body shape.
Furthermore, in the 1970's the Japanese diet was even more dominated by carbohydrates and people the populace was even thinner. At that time, 75% of calories were supplied by rice, and close to 90% by carbohydrates in general.
The phenomena isn't restricted to Japan either China is also seeing increasing obesity, heart disease and diabetes as its people living in top-tier and second tier cities adopt diets higher in fat and higher in protein.
The current American diet is actually unusually high in protein and fat by historical (i.e. pre-WWII) standards.
I can't comment on why Japanese have relatively low rates of obesity for the industrialized world with a starchy diet. But the pattern does generally hold true.
> The current American diet is actually unusually high in protein and fat by historical (i.e. pre-WWII) standards.
This is simply wrong with regard to fat. I don't know about the exact change in protein intake, but people eat much less fat and oil now than historically. You can't even get things like beef kidney, suet, or lard anymore at American grocery stores.
I think French cuisine is WAY more flavorful and calorie dense, and they're thin.
We have much to learn about life-work balance from the rest of the world. It's unfortunate that some parts of the world look at America and think that they should be emulating us! Please stop that before it's too late.
America needs Mexican siestas and French vacation time in the worst way.
An interesting (but very difficult to conduct) study would be an investigation into this particular rubicon of flab. How fat can you become for how long before it is impossible to go back.
Kids nowadays have a horrible diet of sugary drinks and fatty pseudo-chocolate treats.
Fat cells are very much involved in total body weight control, both through enzymes and by hosting lipid-soluble hormones in their oil droplets. So an adult having a lot of fat cells is at a disadvantage in a McBurger world.
Uh, reference? I think you're wrong there. From what I remember, new fat cells grow when weight is gained, and are "deflated", but mostly survive, when weight is lost.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/05/health/research/05fat.html...
> Losing or gaining weight affects only the amount of fat stored in the cells, not the number of cells.
BUT
> Every year [..] 10 percent of your fat cells die [...] and are replaced with new fat cells.
So, fat people aren't at a disadvantage by having far more cells.
Your body does not try to return to a some weight, but rather resists changes in weight. Given constant diet and exercise, weight will asymptotically settle at some value and stay there. Make a significant change to diet and/or exercise, and the asymptote changes accordingly.
If there is such an fixed "equilibrium" weight, there's no evidence for it I know of. I find it curious you call the settling point model "extremely complex", since what I've described so far is very simple: body weight remains constant under constant conditions, and weight changes are dampened by negative feedback. Yours is actually the same so far, but adds a fixed, constant set point.
Most people eat large quantities of food all at once. Stop half way and wait 20 minutes and you might not be hungry anymore. If you eat too quickly then you don't know at what point you'd eaten enough to satisfy your hunger.
Some folks don't stop feeling hungry until well after they should have stopped eating, leading them to eat way too many calories.
John Walker explains this concept in his "The Eat Watch" chapter here: http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/eatwatch.html
You change your behavior, taking into account that your hunger point is lying to you.
You stop eating before you feel full.
You look up how many calories you should be eating and how much you want to lose. (3500 calories = 1 pound of fat; if you maintain a 500 calorie deficit every day, you'll lose a pound a week).
You weigh yourself every day, using signal processing techniques to remove random variations in your weight caused by water and reveal the trendline of where your weight is headed.
You then adjust your consumption based on where your weight is headed. Trendline sloping upwards? Eat fewer calories.
If you do this for a long time, your hunger point may change. It may not. But you don't care about your hunger point, you care about eating the right amount of food. The key insight is to realize that your hunger point may be lying to you, so you need to get an accurate hunger point. Walker describes how to do this in his book, combining signal processing with dieting.
Also, a fruit heavy diet is particularly bad for weight loss. Humans don't deal with fructose too well.
I'm not saying you have to follow such a diet, but the fattie excuses are laughable when solutions are right in front of them. For more information on diet: http://www.lesmills.com/files/globalcentral/Consumers/Health...
http://docnews.diabetesjournals.org/cgi/content/full/3/10/8
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2007-03-15-fruits-vegeta...
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/04/070415183652.ht...
Regardless, I definitely agree with your starch points at the top of the thread.
I have in the past seen actual population studies, not pop media articles, looking at relative vegetable consumption and coming up blank. High rates of heart disease in indian vegetarians, very low rates of heart disease in low vegetable consumption mormons, etc.
Actual controlled experiments (not surveys) come up blank when they feed people more fruit and vegetables than a relatively low cut-off. Of course surveys are going to be very hard to get any useful information out of because of course health conscious people in America will tend to eat vegetables; that doesn't establish causation, only that they follow one piece of advice whether valid or not. Look at these actual experiments:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=Search&Term=%22Freese%20R%22[Author]&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DiscoveryPanel.Pubmed_RVAbstractPlus
Have you ever been to an Indian restaurant and ordered a vegetarian meal? While incredibly flavorful, I wouldn't classify it as even moderately healthy--