How fit can you get from just walking?
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You can run _flat out_ for an hour, or you can just skip the french fries with lunch. I found the latter to be orders of magnitude easier to accomplish on a day-to-day basis.
But cardiovascular exercise, muscle strengthening, etc do confer other whole-body benefits that going for the french fries won't convey.
It was both important to control portion size as well as content though.
So for me, the key point was adjusting my meals to make me feel fuller, so I could reduce portion sizes without feeling hungry.
I primarily did this by increasing the relative amount of protein and fiber, and trying to reduce fat or carbs.
For my saturday steak I swapped french fries with peas, and cut the butter for the bearnaise in half.
For my "tacos" I limited the number of tortillas, increasing the amount of salad and also swapping out regular iceberg lettuce with romaine (more fiber). I also stopped using additional oil or fat for cooking the mince meat.
For breakfast I swapped butter for mustard or similar, and tricks like using more mature cheeses so I could use less cheese while still enjoying a lot of flavor.
I think the important thing is being honest with yourself about your goals and limitations, and use that to find something you can live with.
I just had to have that saturday steak, but I identified what about it that was important and as such managed to tweak the dish. I knew I couldn't cut chocolate entirely so instead I found ways to get the chocolate I needed while having far less of it in total.
At the same time I've noticed I'm much hungrier if I don't exercise. And exercise displaces time I could be eating. So, at least for me, it seems to have an indirect impact on weight loss.
Our bodies seem to be good at calibrating hunger and calorie intake to maintain balance between calories in and calories out, but there is something about being completely sedentary which causes that mechanism to malfunction.
If you go only diet route, you may or may not become healthier.
Mind you, it got harder to do brisk activity as it went. What started as walking for 2 miles ended up being running for 5 miles. (5 miles became the target after a while so I stopped with 30 minutes. It would take 38-40 minutes at my best.)
Also got hit with COVID gain, so I’m back at it. Bought me a treadmill and am doing at least a 5k every day, training back up to at least 4 miles.
I found a lot of it was consistency. It felt like weight loss had an inertia to it. Took a while to really start losing, but once it started it was easy to keep dropping a pound per week. Even after stopping running for a bit, the weight stayed off for quite a while.
Anyway, good on you (us!) for regular exercise! It really can make all the difference.
This is a much bigger factor than most people realize. I've kept track of my weight for almost ten years and found that the thing it correlates most with is my sugar intake. More sugar, more weight. The time matters too. Late-night sugar packs on the pounds more than mid-day sugar.
What makes it really insidious is that there's a latency of a week or more. The problem is not so much that sugar itself causes you to gain weight. The problem is that over time sugar actually changes your metabolism so that your body stores more fat. And even that does not happen directly. What sugar intake does is make you feel hungrier, so you eat more in general. It also lowers your baseline metabolism so you feel more tired in between sugar rushes. The net effect of all this is weight gain over a long period of time, and it takes a long time to undo the damage. Quitting sugar really is a lot like quitting smoking.
Another thing many people don't realize is that alcohol has much the same effect as sugar.
A bit of an oversimplification, but for the purposes of diet, alcohol effectively is liquid sugar. The top ten list of caloric density starts with fat and alcohol pulls up second place.
Sugar actually has the perverse effect of making you feel more hungry after you've eaten it. This is one of the things that makes junk food so addictive.
To the original point, I don’t agree that hard absolute statements are really good guidelines as they tend to oversimplify. For example, I believe the best recovery was found with 3:1 carb:protein post workout consumption. The typical protein supplement is around 25g, meaning it would be combined with more sugar than is in a can of soda (usually dextrose because it has a higher glycemic response). Some athletes consume sugar regularly (notably, Floyd Mayweather). Point being, I don’t believe it’s a good hard rule to say you should limit sugar as much as possible, but rather the appropriate (and less satisfying answer) is “it depends on your goal”
BTW, I'm Ron, the coiner of Ron's First Law, if that helps you put it in context :-)
I somehow guessed it, the moment I read it, though I didn't know your full name earlier, despite having read your comments on HN before.
Maybe because I've mulled making up such laws myself :)
Un bella domani, fratello!
(One fine day, brother. - From a Morris West novel. I think it is The Shoes of The Fisherman. Great read.)
Lower is better, makes you feel fuller for longer.
It's a measure of how fast glucose is released in your bloodstream. It can be one big hike (like from deserts), or evenly spread out over a longer period of time (Natural Muesli).
The problem is that most alcohol isn't regulated the same way food is, and there is often a ton of sugar in it that is not required to be labelled. Beer, for example, has tons of carbs, and Captain Morgan is fulla sugar.
My mom calls these "the covid 19".
In my opinion, it really doesn't help to tell people what kind of exercise they should be doing. Just sweat. Do whatever it is that you can do consistently. No matter what, you are almost certainly burning more calories than you did sitting around. Combine that with better macronutrients, and you'll almost certainly lose weight.
Once you get slimmer, this can get more difficult because people with more body weight have a greater basal metabolic rate. What I do now when I need to shed some weight (sometimes I get up to 160) is do those things you did before but also eat less. I calculate my BMR, divide it by half, and only eat that many calories. This is a short term strategy, not a long term one.
I stopped adding it to drinks. I stopped drinking soda and fruit juices and smoothies (fruit juices/smoothies are as bad as soda imho as they all try and pretend they are healthy). Stopped having dessert (unless out for a meal for a special occasion), no biscuits, chocolate, crisps and snacks.
Plus I started viewing my calorie intake over a 7 day period rather than daily. This way I didn't 'feel bad' if I went out for a meal or had a movie and pizza night with the family. I found that 'feed bad' mindset made me quit many times as I felt I had 'failed'. So by removing it and viewing intake over a whole week I could easily reduce a bit over 3 or 4 days and still break even. A simple change of perspective really worked for me.
It took a while but now I don't like how sweet many things are. Like a mars bar is disgusting to me now. Two bites and I feel kind of sick from how much sugar is in it. It shocks me how desensitised I was to sugar as it is added to literally everything.
Also an added bonus to the weight loss was that I also saved a lot as my appetite changed and I was naturally less hungry than I used to be. Smaller meals and less processed crap meant my shopping bill was much lower than before.
If I was running late in the morning I would have a Mars bar and a 330ml bottle of Coke or Pepsi for breakfast!
Looking back I am embarrassed at how shit my diet was. I would eat sweets and sofa for breakfast and a grab a takeaway on the way home (often Chinese as it was near my house). The only "normal" meal I would eat would be lunch at my work restaurant. However it was subsidised which would also lead me to over eating as it was so cheap and I was always hungry from having junk for breakfast.
By my late twenties/early thirties I was around 112KG (~247lbs) on a 184cm (6 foot) body. Shocking.
Read product labels closely, and/or don't buy ones without labels. For unprocessed products, to know their natural composition, use Wikipedia and sites like USDA nutrition data site.
I'm 270lbs/5'11" with a bunch of weight related health issues. I do have an appetite, for sure. But careful calorie tracking says I should be at a 1000kcal/day deficit, but my weight is stable. Go figure.
Have you tried varying your eating regime?
1000 Cal is a very large deficit. AIUI large Calorie deficits will cause your basal metabolic rate to slow down, and so will long intervals between meals. Your low resting heart rate may be related to a slow basal metabolic rate - one normally only sees 45 bpm in dedicated athletes. Low BMR might mean your deficit is not actually a deficit. (But this is a very weakly reasearched area.)
If I were you and wanting to lose weight, I'd try for a daily deficit no greater than 200 Cal (averaged over a week), and eating your daily allotted Calories in four or five small meals spaced a few hours apart. (But, of course, this regime might not work for you either.)
I haven't deliberately tried this regime, but I have seen it repeatedly recommended on bodybuilding fora. (And thinking about it, it's approximately what I am doing.)
Getting a job in which I stand for nine hours per day (with mild upper body exercise) and am more or less forced to follow that eating regime has resulted in me losing about 7.5% of my body mass over three months. Fat loss will be higher since I have put on some muscle mass in that time.
I now consume a little more sugar (in diluted electrolyte drinks) than I did before I started.
I'd also note that cycling seems to be ~ 20x lower energy cost per mile than walking. You'd be better off driving to work and adding a mile to your daily walk in the time saved.
Edit to add: a hikers' rule of thumb (based on US Army research) is that an extra pound on your feet increases energy expenditure by 5%. Wear heavy boots when walking.
I did consider this. However if I stop exercising, my RHR increases up to about 60 within a month or so. Indeed my exercise HRmax is around 230, which is, as I understand, on the high side. I'm guessing it is still related in some way though because clearly I'm not an athlete. Additionally I have a low respiration rate and sleep a fair amount. My doctor has done a few blood tests and such - and as far as he's concerned, I'm metabolically completely normal with no diabetes or hormonal issues - but on the low side. For example, my thyroid hormone levels are quite low, but still just within the normal range.
The doctor suggested that some people's weight issues don't respond all that well to exercise in his experience. He said research in the area was weak, but said it may be due to higher levels of fitness combined with favourable body mechanics in some meaning total energy consumption from exercise didn't amount to much. I come from an extremely athletic family, so it's possible that might have some truth. So for me, perhaps, the adage that you can't outrun a bad diet is even more truthful.
"daily deficit no greater than 200 Cal"
To do this (on paper), I'd have to eat a lot more than I'm able to, or cut down exercise. What I might do is try and get booked in for one of those metabolic studies after Covid, to actually accurately calculate my cycling/walking/resting energy consumption. That way I should be able to accurately calculate what exactly a 200kcal deficit really is for me. Thermodynamically, I must not be at a calorie deficit or else I'd lose weight. I'm just not exactly sure where my calculations could be so wrong.
> Getting a job in which I stand for nine hours per day (with mild upper body exercise)
I would love this. On holidays and such, I spend at least 10hrs a day active, and I feel a ton better. Back pain disappears, etc. Unfortunately not too easy with programming. I tried a standing desk and found it didn't really work for me. Might try a treadmill desk, but I can totally see myself getting a head injury from that!
" I'd also note that cycling seems to be ~ 20x lower energy cost per mile than walking. You'd be better off driving to work and adding a mile to your daily walk in the time saved."
Definitely true per mile, but per hour, cycling should be more energy intensive than walking (but less than running). Certainly I spend longer with my heart rate above 180 when cycling, and feel more exhausted after. Metabolic study is the only way to confirm it for me though.
It's sort of irrelevant anyway because bicycle is the quickest way to get to work for me and I don't own a car.
It's also possible that your insulin response is messed up. This Peter Atria Drive podcast has an excellent explanation of the biochemistry which prevents some people from losing fat, and treatments which usually work.
As far as blood tests show, my insulin/glucose/hb1ac/etc. is all essentially optimal. Indeed, better than one might expect for a man of my rotundity. Thyroid is lower than average, but not outside of normal range.
I'll check out the podcast, thanks.
I stopped drinking sweetened drinks, cut out refined carbs, and took up learning to cook everything from scratch as my new hobby. (It's hard to really get the sugar in your diet under control unless you cook everything from scratch.)
I didn't change my level of physical activity.
This has worked to keep the weight off for more than a decade.
My findings is that food intake is 100% of weight loss based purely as ratio to movement/use of food intake. (you can run all day, and if you eat too much, you stay overweight)
> So if you're chasing high-level performance, single-digit body fat, or a bodybuilder physique, then relying solely a ton of walking isn't the right move. But the reality is that most average people are pretty far from those goals, and focusing on the routines of really high performers my be doing more harm than good. In other words, expecting that you'll accomplish the training required for a movie star body when starting out a fitness routine is setting yourself up for disappointment. Walking a bunch, on the other hand, is something that is relatively simple to fit into your everyday life. The best fitness routine is always going to be the routine that you follow consistently. And I can vouch for the—unscientific, absolutely not peer reviewed—results.
While, overall, Steinbeck said something different, your description of the intent is incorrect. "I guess the trouble was that we didn’t have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist." - This can only make sense when attributed to capitalists (believers in it) regardless of what systems they are currently participating in. This is a subtle description of human nature at large, which is why it's so memorable.
My interpretation is not.
> most of the so-called Communists I met
> Steinbeck positing that the reason the movement is unsuccessful as it being opposed by the temporarily embarrassed millionaires
> This can only make sense when attributed to capitalists (believers in it) regardless of what systems they are currently participating in <--- ie Communist support or however you want to constrain it
The same phrasing you repeated, reiterates my point. Good luck with whatever.
I remind myself of that a lot -- it's easy to overanalyze and then architecture astro-not myself into doing nothing
https://media.gq.com/photos/55a3daafdab0df6312e2710b/master/...
I'm not a fan of the mixed grip for someone who isn't doing this competitively, but that's personal preference. He's set up like he's going to squat it up which can be ok, but he's gripping it like a traditional deadlift, and the bar is way to far forward. If the bar were closer, he squatted a little more, and had a wide grip, he could be set up for a snatch.
The idea was that this helps you develop the habit of going to the gym, having a pleasant time, and not seeing it as a scary and foreign place where everybody's better than you (you're probably not gonna get insecure about somebody else reading more magazines than you are). Once you have that habit and familiarity, you can start actually exercising without those mental obstacles.
Funny advice, but it's an interesting way of thinking about building new habits.
It also reminds me of people on various fitness subreddits who will expend a bunch of effort trying to craft an optimal workout routine when their baseline is barely working out at all. Just pick something you like and do it at a moderate intensity for a few months! It's way better than nothing, and you'll accumulate random knowledge along the way that will help you come up with something better later.
43 pounds in 16 weeks is 2.7 pounds per week. A pound is 3,500 calories, so 2.7 is 9,450 calories per week, or a deficit of 1,350 calories per day.
Even if he was walking a very low 3,000 steps per day previously, an extra 7,000 steps/day - about 3-4 miles - is walking for perhaps 60-80 minutes. For someone who weighs about 260 pounds, 1 hour of moderate walking would burn about 450 calories. So, assuming he didn’t do other exercise that the article omitted, the remaining ~900 calorie/day deficit came from eating less than his metabolic rate (BMR).
Walking sped up the process, but he would have lost the weight just by eating fewer calories - and food changes account for about 2/3rds of the loss.
(I’m assuming he neither added nor lost much muscle mass, which seems likely from the description.)
This is likely true for everyone losing weight. Exercise gets you fit(-ter than you were before), though, and there are a lot more health benefits from being fit than thin. I'm pretty sure being thin just helps you with your sugar.
Yes, adipose tissue contributes to insulin resistance and impaired glucose metabolism. Why? Not exactly sure. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.molmet.2019.12.014
On the side, exercise does make you fitter, and consume some calories, etc.
But then, I find that it also has a non-negligible effect on the food I crave. I find it much, much easier to not eat tons of "junk food" when I exercise. And by that, I mean I practically don't feel like eating any, at all. I actually crave vegetables and meat. And those have a tendency to be "filling" and not have you want to eat again 2 hours later.
So it's much easier for me to actually lower my calorie intake when exercising.
So I could skip breakfast, jump on the bike, and then have a late-breakfast/early lunch at work. At the end of the work day I'd start to get hungry, but then I'd jump on the bike and when I got home I still had time to make and eat dinner before the raging hunger kicked in.
This helped me skip an entire meal per day, which made things a lot easier for me.
Maybe I'm just weird that way though.
In fact, when building up for distance cycling, I felt like learning when to eat and making my saddle and handlebars more comfortable was equally as important as building strength. Extra strength makes you finish your trip faster, but you'll probably still complete it even slowly, but if your saddle isn't right for you, the pain can be insurmountable.
Guess I'll have to pack some food next time!
Also, at the very start, I am certain it was more than 450 calories per hour after weighing that much in my case. It certainly came down as the body got used to it and did build muscle mass in legs. Same with food, the body will get used to the calorie restriction over time and calorie restriction alone won’t take you the distance.
is that correct?
I think of non-exercise activity thermogenesis as being like the idle rate of an internal combustion engine car. If you increase the idle engine rate, it doesn’t affect the fuel consumption at higher activity speeds, but at times when the car is slow or stationary, it would burn more fuel than necessary. In a car, that’s a bad thing. The claim is that doing exercise increases your “idling speed” (NEAT) , or rather stops your body’s idling speed from dropping the way it would normally do during calorie restriction. If you are trying to lose weight, burning “more calories than necessary” would be a good thing
but eating less causes the body to reduce burning calories because less calories are coming in.
so eating less while exercising more maximizes the effect of weight loss because the body is forced to use up more of the stored fat reserves to compensate for less incoming calories while also needing to burn more due to the exercises.
Elevation gain during walks matter hugely. Walk up a few pretty decent hills and your 400 number becomes a 600 number
Ultimately using your own figures (400 Vs. 600) it doesn't alter the person above's overarching point: That most of the weight loss was from diet changes (as is typically the case).
While diet is a 'major factor' - for people who are sedentary, then walking 2 miles a day can be a huge step up.
It turned out quite well. I am officially heart-healthy today, blood pressure went down about 20-25 mm Hg, weight 10-15kg.
Regarding running - I do it the same way I do something for my upper body. Sometimes the body is longing for it, and than I do it. In the case of running: Long walks often give a certain stiffness, especially in the legs. When this happens, I simply include a few (1-3) kilometers during the walk.
I also learned, that it is far easier to sustain such a regime instead the more common forms of exercise. I think its more natural for all but a few people in the long run. Someone wrote here about running as hunting/fleeing which by origin is necessarily associated with stress. I think there is much truth in this.
The only part that becomes sometimes difficult, is the time demand. Doing the math: My 180 km / month are 12km (two hours) every other day. I had to aquire some additional discipline to make it happen.
25k is excessive in that regard and I wouldn't recommend that much, but 10k is incredibly achievable and I would highly recommend anyone make a habit of walking every day.
I used to run a lot more, but I never actually enjoyed it. I just forced myself to do it to burn calories. Walking I enjoy much more, so I do that more now instead.
Weighted or incline walking is a great compromise to increase effort, but I do enough strenuous activity with weight training that I would rather take it easy and enjoy the walk instead most of the time.
Anyway. One of the important steps (pun somewhat intended) of getting back in mental shape was to walk part of the way back from work. If I would have walked all the way that would probably have been something like 80 k steps and I could get off the train at several places on that way. And since I could also get on it again I could both choose the length of my walks and the vary where they took place.
My record during that period was a day where I in tota walked almost 40 k steps. There is something that happens after about 3-4 hours of walking like that. At least I can achieve something similar to a runners high. Also, I had some problems around let's say my more sensitive parts, which also got completely fixed by that treatment.
If you've just walked for 1-1.5 hours, that's still good and everything. But if you have the time and have some mental/physical problems, and like walking, try 3-4 hours several times a week. There's some magic in that. I recommend having a start and a goal but taking different paths and exploring. Listen to some pods sure, but also explore and think. Most important though, put in those 25 k + steps, and do it in a pace you like!
Human legs are heavily optimized for walking. Running is a hunting/fleeing mechanism and it just feels wrong for me to artificially simulate that stress environment.
That's exactly what I started doing last year when covid hit. Before then, I used to do decent running / stepper cardio in the gym. When covid hit, I cancelled my bus pass membership and have been walking everywhere since then. I do all my groceries, buying pet food etc walking. It takes about 40 minutes and I get to listen to podcasts during then. I have even started to "plan" my groceries - so I only buy around 2-3 days worth of meat and that ends up forcing me to leave the house at least every couple days. I sometimes plan things like buying larger items like toilet paper on separate days so I can walk with all my items without having to do uber or something else.
That's why I like running.
Running would just make what I'm listening to background noise, but that's not the correct level of engagement I want. I want 'exercise' to be the side effect and not the main activity I'm engaging in. Running is the other way around.
For the longest time i ran really fast to the point of exhaustion, ,sometimes with small pauses interval style.
Then i tried running slower, which was actually hard for me for some reason, but could go much longer, and with less tax on my sympathetic nervous system and joints.
I've also seen people do the "powerwalking" thing so that's also an option.
If you can’t do this you’re probably running too fast for your fitness level. I was for a long time.
But this feels more like a "trance" to me, in that I seem to not actively think about anything at all, I just "observe".
What I meant is for me running is the background and it's mostly automatic. I can listen or think about things and they are my primary focus.
I'd say it takes a few months to get to this level but for most people it's doable.
"Artificially simulate that stress environment?" Is that a joke? Exercise is [physical] stress. What about that seems "wrong" to you?
However, simulating a hunt should be good for the health since it informs the body that it is in a prey rich environment. The same goes for other stressful but evolutionary fitness promoting activities such as sex.
However, I find that taking this time "off" from my usual activities, especially during the work day, is like a breath of fresh air (pun not initially intended).
Yes, I also find that walking allows me to either listen to podcasts, music, or just think about random things. I will even start walking around my apartment or my parents' garden when I need to think over a difficult problem.
But I find, more and more, that being "on" all the time and trying to optimise every last minute of the day isn't all that... optimal.
Taking, say, an hour off work every day [0], during which I absolutely do not think about work at all, and only focus on the feeling of my muscles working or my breathing during a run has enormous consequences on my thinking about work when I actually get back. I find that this helps be much, much more focused than had I staid at my desk browsing random things on the internet or even walking and having my thoughts drift back to whatever it was I was working on. Bonus points for this removing my back and other random pains while sitting.
To me, those are different "tools", each with its own purpose.
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[0] I don't run for long periods of time and am not looking to run a marathon. My goal is usually to run around 30 minutes, just enough to give my cardiovascular system a bit of a workout. So all in all, it takes me around 1h, counting the cool-down period (when the thinking random thoughts process comes back), washing my clothes and showering.
Pandemic has not been kind to the bathroom scale. I lost my regular exercise but my diet got worse from stress eating.
25k would really take a huge chunk out of my day, I think at least 3 - 3.5 hours or so. But it really depends, working from home means I'm sedentary all day. In other jobs you wouldn't have to squeeze everything into the few evening hours so much.
The biggest issue I have with walking is that the city becomes a bit boring. I love walking and exploring, but I've also lived in the capital city of my country for decades. Every day is new and brings new little experiences, yet also many similar ones. Especially because I'm always leaving and returning from and to the same place, there's a limit to my routes. I've walked the same streets thousands of times by now. On holidays in Europe or Asia I easily hit >40k steps daily because it's just so much fun, every corner brings something new, architecture, a river, a forest, a square or park, or lots of little shops or eateries or public art pieces.
I usually listen to audiobooks or bring a book to read when taking a path I've taken before, which usually alleviates the boredom problem. But it's not always necessary, sometimes if I'm in an energy surplus from delicious bread and sweets walking just feels so good on its own.
Check out StreetComplete -- I find it a great way to give walks a little more purpose.
I basically do everything on foot that is within a 5k step radius. I make allowances for when I'm carrying heavy stuff (once made the mistake of walking 7km with a 10liter bucket of paint). It's not something I would recommend to everyone, but I would recommend it to almost everyone.
14 mi, 22 km, 3.5+ hr?
Really? And here I thought the hidden weapon of celebrity body transformation was steroids.
When so many other athletics endeavours have widespread doping, despite testing? And somehow Hugh Jackman at age 50 is more ripped than Lance Armstrong was at age 30? And the secret weapon is walking? Sure.
Some facts. - I am a professional stuntman, so my livelihood and time are dedicated to this pursuit. Making the time is a requirement. - the time is made up of stretching, skill work, cardio, and strength training. It’s not 3 hours of 1 rep maxes. It is still intense. - lots of people use PEDs and HGH to acquire a temporary physique. However you would be shocked what small changes can do to affect your health, physique, and overall happiness. Adding squats will help you move move better. Yoga will help you feel better, and sprints will shed fat. - consistentcy beats all. Take all the drugs, do all the weekend bootcamps, and try all the crash diets you want. Simply doing anything over a long enough period of time will always yield better results.
What are your characters stats (I don't know how to put it): muscles, bench press, endurance, etc. ?
This place never ceases to surprise me.
E.g. you're not going to manage 3-4 hours of heavy compound lifts a day done in quick succession, sure. At least not without lowering the weights so much it becomes more cardio than resistance training.
Even 1 hour a day is overdoing it for powerlifting type training. At my strongest I was doing 45m every other day. I could probably have done more, but I got my best gains when I eased up and let my body recover properly.
But if you're doing bodybuilding, and a lot of that time are not the big lifts but adding in lots of isolated lifts of various small muscle groups, and sufficiently low intensity cardio takes up a good chunk of the time as well, sure you can easily spend 3-4 hours a day without drugs.
That said, a lot of people clearly claim to be natural while they're not.
Having trainers, dieticians, etc. professionals around you to help with everything probably makes it easier in the sense that you probably save one or two hours of planning and organizing your life per week, and probably your programming is a bit more optimized, but it's hardly a game changer. If you are somewhat devoted to the topic, you can learn and do all the same stuff yourself.
Also, for this having made it, money-wise, being able to afford a great cook, having a personal trainer who reminds you of your goals, being tempted less because you never visit a supermarket, etc. all help.
No hate to them for doing it. But it's important that we're at least honest about it because of the effect it has on people's (especially men's) own body images and ideas about transformations. Losing 60 pounds while packing on muscle in 6 months at 38 years old is not possible without gear.
Sure, you need to spend some money on medical supervision. Beyond that all it takes is ~6 hours a week at the gym.
Steroids are mostly there to aid recovery from the otherwise unmanageable amount of work one puts in. Most people are limited by their willingness to put in the work and never reach the point where steroids would be required (or even make a significant difference).
The hidden (not so much, plenty are open about it) weapon of celebrity body transformation is (1) having plenty of resources for dietitians, trainers, equipment, etc., and (2) having it be central to your livelihood so that you can literally spend as great a proportion of your waking hours on it as necessary.
I mean, yes, obviously having trainers helps, but really the basics of a good exercise plan are pretty readily available. As for equipment, really most gyms have enough equipment to get 95% of what most actors achieve.
And yes, it's part of their livelihood, but they can't actually spend every waking hour on training. Both because it's actually detrimental to gaining more muscle, but also because actors actually do have other things to do, like acting in other things, learning lines, appearances, etc.
This is not to take away from their hard work and sacrifices w.r.t. diet. Obviously they have to work very hard at it. But the actual reason most people won't end up "looking like a super-hero", even if they can devote lots of time to training and dieting, is because of the steroids.
(Lots of people do take steroids, btw.)
No it's 100%. What do actors have that can't be done with a gym?
> Obviously they have to work very hard at it.
How hard do they really have to work if they are taking powerful steroids? The roids will have large effects even with minimal training.
I mean, sometimes there are fancy machines. E.g. in a video on Kumail Nanjiani (whom I love, btw), they talk about using that machine which runs electricity through the muscles to aid in contraction. Or something, I really don't know. Most people won't have access to that.
But neither did the bodybuilders of the 70s, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, and he still managed to get a pretty impressive physique :)
> How hard do they really have to work if they are taking powerful steroids? The roids will have large effects even with minimal training.
Honestly, I really don't know, there's a raging debate on just how much the steroids help assuming no training, and since I have no hands-on experience and am not planning to get some, I'm not sure how big an effect it really is (again, assuming no training).
Your observation about Hugh Jackman is on point. If you need more evidence, look at the difference between The Rock (a pro wrestler and admitted user) between 1993-2003 vs. now. In 2021, he’s at least 20 years older, and yet his latest action movie appearances have him at a lower body fat, and higher muscle mass % per height than when he was 20 years younger? Come on, that’s not how biology works.
If you go to any serious website or forum where actual steroid users converse, none of this is shocking news. Drugs make for fast body transformations, and the results revert back to natural limits once you stop the drugs (useful for an actor preparing for a movie/show/appearance, who then does not care about that look once it’s finished).
It was mostly about getting skinny and more defined, not bulking up.
Agree that to put on 10 pounds of muscle would take years.
I’ve been a light, disrupted sleeper for as long as I can remember, but a walk outside and getting daylight on retina has the effect of shutting down melatonin levels, properly starting your day in biological terms. Now I hit 11:30pm and feel genuinely sleepy, which is novel in and of itself and get nearly double the deep sleep I was getting before.
Doing the exact same walk at midday does not have the same effect.
The impact of feeling genuinely rested and refreshed is life-changing.
My healthiest was when I lived in a small town of 30k people.
Everything was walkable. So I walked 30 minutes to work and back every day.
Went to the town centre for shopping and carried it back.
Put on a podcast or audiobook. Time will fly
In so many places in NA you are forced to get into your car to go anywhere. You're in your car to commute to work (where of course you sit all day), in the car to get groceries then back at home where you sloth on your couch, or desperately sweat on the peloton to try to make up for the fact that you sat in your car or at the office all day.
It's an incredibly stationary lifestyle that is forced by making it impossible to walk or use active transportation to do anything.
Sidewalks can be patchy at best and bike lanes are an afterthought; often they include the steepest part of the road grade to shed water off to the side and include pinch-flat-happy sunken sewer / drain grates. Roads are often laughably designed in a car-centric manner, i.e. higher than an European highway with no lane markings or stop signs, turning it into a veritable drag strip.
Whenever someone in the boomer generation says "why don't kids go outside to play these days?", I always retort "look at the Outside that y'all designed for them" :|
I grew up in the US suburbs (in an area with some of the hottest and most humid weather in the country) and it has all the problems you mentioned. However, I have made it to age 40 without ever driving a car. How? By not ever driving a car.
Many people love the idea of biking/walking but they seem to love making excuses for not biking and not walking even more. Yes, it’s a risk. Many things are but people do them anyway. Yes, it’s inconvenient but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done.
Lots of guesses from the group about tectonics and whatnot.
Finally the answer, "Alex Lowe used to carry them up in his pack when training. He didn't want to hurt his knees on the descent with the extra weight, and this was his turn-around point".
Mountaineers are beasts.
You get home and there is food everywhere, and maybe, maybe if you are lucky, the time and motivation to do fivish miles a day or a similar amount of exercise.
Getting back into climbing was pretty brutal, to put it mildly.
Also, if we're being totally honest, the diet of the average thru-hiker is pretty abhorrent. Lots of tunamac or equivalently unhealthy meals for dinner. Thru-hiking might get you fit, but I wouldn't recommend it to anybody as a way to get healthy.
If you take before and after snapshots of bloodwork and other physical health markers, it's probably an unambiguous improvement for anyone fit enough to undertake the ordeal.
For example: https://www.outsideonline.com/2125031/what-happens-your-body...
Walking also allows you to better appreciate the environment, fauna, flora and scenery, eg. on a hike. Sure you can take some of that in as an ultra-cross-trail-marathon runner but it's less contemplative.
Walking and cycling let me mix exercise and utility, e.g., commuting to work or walking to nearby shops. It's also just a pleasant lifestyle to go for days if not weeks without needing to drive. Truth be told, my love of mechanics and tinkering is one of my motivators for cycling.
It probably behooves everybody to at least give a few different exercise modalities a try, to see which one you can tolerate, with enough intensity to be beneficial. If you find one that's addictive, so much the better.
I've gotten myself some little dumbbells that I keep by my "work" computer, and I lift weights during online meetings because I know that my main modes of exercise don't do much for my upper body.
- less strenuous
- much less fitness required to walk for an hour than to run for 30 minutes
- easier to avoid sweating while walking, which can be useful for some commutes
- easier to talk on the phone while walking
- easier to find someone to walk with you than it is to find someone who will run with you
The article was about making fitness easy and not about making fitness efficient. I 100% agree that running is more efficient, but I'd recommend walking to anyone who thinks "bleh/eww" at the thought of exertion.
So our bodies are efficient at running, but maybe not meant to be running all the time.
Walking and some mobility work are great for the the average person. Once they've got a decent baseline and have cleaned up their diet they can start adding more intense work.
However, in my current state, I don't think I would be able to comfortably run the same distance every day. If I got into the habit, though, I expect I'd see more changes to body composition, though, yes.
For many, walking is more enjoyable than most other exercise. Some people can do strenuous, repetitive exercise and not get bored or feel miserable, which is why a certain number of people can manage to go to the gym regularly and stare at a wall for an hour as they run on a treadmill and lift dumbbells. Others give up more easily in reaction to stimuli that isn't highly dopamine driven for them. For those people, if they can instead keep up walking on a regular basis, it makes more sense they stick with that rather than effectively punish themselves by running.
Running normally requires deliberately going for a run: alllocating time, changing clothes and so on. It’s not as easy to change a lot of would-be drives to walking. It’s not as convenient to fit a run into a lunch break as it is to fit a walk.
I see them as not mutually exclusive though. But for me the difference is that the walk actually gets done but the run doesn’t. The comparison is then: “is walking better than not running?” and answering that is much easier than comparing the two!
Even doing little things like parking at the back of the parking lot and taking the stairs to the third or fourth floor office can add a decent chunk of walking to the day without creating a major hurdle (unless you're chronically late, the extra 5 minutes of walking to and from the parked car won't be bothersome).
https://www.webmd.com/fitness-exercise/features/does-running...
Walking and running are both good for cardio and long term health, but running has higher wear and tear on the body. Cycling is also great, but comes with its own risks of accidental (or malicious) injury or death
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/walking-vs-running...
I love cycling but there are many, many places in this country (USA) and times (Summer in AZ, winter in Michigan) where I would not touch a bike.
I can now push myself to my limit and will feel fine after 15 minutes.
I get brain fog the same day too. I've not heard or read of this occuring normally. It's not bad enough to stop me driving but it is enough to stop all work.
I think it's fatigue basically and I've found that gradually increasing my fitness allows me to do more before this starts. But it's not listed as what fatigue is, especially the brain fog bit.
It was like hitting the reset button and I was fine for the rest of the day.
You can blame our couch potato physiques on modern life to a large degree. We don't have to quietly accept this. We can decide to redesign the world such that walking to run errands is much more the default norm again and then fitness can be incorporated into daily activities of living instead of being an extra burden on top of them.
Do you have a source for that? I've never heard of such thing before.
Before life got in the way, I wanted to be an urban planner. So I've heard this a lot over the years.
Here are a few excerpts from a piece by the CDC:
Urban planning and public health have been intertwined for most of their histories.
During the middle of the 20th century, the disciplines drifted apart, to a certain extent because of their success in limiting health and safety risks caused by inappropriate mixing of land uses.
The disciplines recently have begun to reintegrate. During the last 20 years, shared concerns have included transportation planning to improve air quality, encourage physical activity, prevent injuries, and promote wellness.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/su5502a12.htm#:~:t....
So in other words, a single individual, who already had a history of being fit and the ability to pursue athletics at a high level, reverted to his mean, and made up almost half of the entire gains across 4+ ('a few other') people, by using bog-standard recommendations, of the sort that have completely failed to solve the obesity crisis and fail for most people that try it.
What can I say to a writeup like this, which is so self-refuting? "Nothing in psychology makes sense except in the light of individual differences." How can fitness journalists and 'nutrition coach and personal trainer' experts be so blind to the reality of individual differences? Just look at exercise studies's summary statistics, and look at how different the results are for individuals doing the same thing!
People might be interested to know that this is not just some fringe theory or freak result. It's well-known in the field that there's a massive pile of studies that show large inter-individual variability and a comparatively tiny pile of studies that are actually designed to examine inter-individual variability. [1].
Whatever your goals, it's hard to go wrong with a mix of weight training, cardio/walking and eating right.
It's worth keeping in mind that much like "8 glasses of water per day", this recommendation does not have any particular pedigree (outside of trivia about the early marketing of pedometers in Japan). It's not clear that it was based on any evidence, and it isn't especially supported by the studies that do exist (which suggest that the benefits on mortality and morbidity for most people taper off somewhere in the range of 6,000-8,000 steps per day). It's a reasonable enough goal as far as it goes, but all signs point to it being chosen to be a "round" number and not because it's an actual estimate of anything materially meaningful.
I've tried also 10000 steps for a while but it was non-practical, just couldn't fit that extra mile.
During the 6-week streak of 8000+ step days, it felt as if a switch 'flipped' and I went from a plateau of 90kg to 85kg (what I saw as a target) and surprisingly am able to maintain it at that level for a few years now, without almost any changes in dietary or activity habits, even throughout the 2020 lockdown.
I'm a typical developer/couch potato, I do not avoid occasional junk food, beer, extra slice of cake etc. I try not to eat late, except for nuts and seeds. I wholeheartedly recommend Turkish? (white, large sort) unsalted sunflower seeds, which have nutritious benefits according to Dr.Google, plus it definitely helps the next morning.
That said, it can still work because ritualizing fitness also brings more awareness to other aspects of your life. When you are regularly working out (walking or otherwise), it can make you conscious of mealtime choices. You also are fundamentally not eating when you are out walking.
If you want to lose weight, you either need much more intense exercise or to figure out how to stop eating. Walking or other activity is still important, but it's not a "Weight loss" solution.
Another 2 hours is spent showering, prepping for sleep and waking up and using the bathroom during the day.
So you have 14 hours left. If you work, you only have 6 hours left. Commute to work? 4-5 hours.
Dishes, mowing the lawn, prepping and eating meals, studying for your next job advancement, housekeeping, laundry, etc etc... by the time you are done there isn’t a ton of free time in the day.
Spending half of that free time on such a mundane and boring way to pass the time sounds truly impractical to me.
Skip it for a few days/months and you'll be less healthy and more letargic.
My compliments to the author for this genre-ambiguous sentence.
I've lost 100lbs Fasting/Keto/Walking (approx 280lbs/127Kg ===> 180lbs/82Kg) over a period of 2 years. I've experimented what is best for me and it was rolling 72 hour fasts/walking for a couple to a few weeks and then switching things up to keep my body guessing (Longer fasts/OMAD). I feel like being in Ketosis during those fasts and eating extremely clean was the most helpful. Cole from the SnakeDiet Youtube Channel was basically the guy I followed, he is natural and doesn't use PED, just diet and exercise.
Snakewalking
I'm skeptical that it will work because I only ever seem to lose weight when really trying
By definition this will take at least several weeks to see if it is working
I'll follow up next time someone re/posts this article or similar
Don't think too much about losing weight when picking up a new fitness/exercise habit. Think about other fitness and health goals more specifically, the weight will usually follow. If you focus on weight, the initial lag or a change in your body composition (I was exercising regularly for nearly 2 months before I lost more than 5 lbs, and then I lost another 25 in the next few months) can be sufficiently demotivating to cause you to quit even though you are getting something beneficial from the activity.
What's worked for me and for my friends I've worked with is a focus on what kind of activity you can do, for how long, and to what level of exertion. If it's walking, on a non-exercise day try going for a much longer than normal walk or a much faster than normal walk, it's a kind of test. Is that 5 mile hiking trail now easier for you than at the start? If so, then does it matter that your weight has plateaued or is the fact that you can do something you couldn't before more important? Focusing on the improved capability and then trying to focus on sustaining that has helped me a lot more than thinking of weight itself as a goal or primary goal. (That said, it was a goal for me, just a secondary or tertiary goal.)
Therefore, a major step in getting a healthier lifestyle is to carve out the time for dedicated sports activities, e.g. not joining the world of warcraft boss run with Leroy Jenkins, not reading that book on your desk, and/or not playing chess with your grandpa, as you used to in that time slot.
In one of my first attempts to improve my lifestyle that was a major hurdle. But walking is easy. It doesn't need much prep, it doesn't take a strain on your resilience as "harder" exercises would, and even people who don't believe in your health goals will believe that you are capable of taking a walk once in a while. So the burden of carving out that time is much lower when starting with walking. 10k steps for a beginner also means 2hs of walking every day. When you get faster, you can replace parts of it with other training. And then the next time when your overreading goals fail, you can fall back to walking instead of couch potatoing.
"Remember: Slow is smooth, smooth is fast." - Shooter, 2007
The only exercise I have found that doesn't aggravate my problem is swimming. But thanks to the lockdowns in effect because of Covid that's off too.
For becoming fit and for losing weight faster, I think walking is not enough.
Also, what people want is a completely different game.
The problem is that societal expectations for males are not just of being lean, it's to have some muscle.
Women generally have it easier and just need to lose weight (skinny, not muscular women often rate even better than muscular women) albeit in the last years having a big booty became trendy, increasing the popularity of lower body focused weight training for women.
Losing fat is not easy but building muscle is 10x harder.
Your sleep, caloric intake, protein intake, progressive overload exercise routine need to be in place. Screw up one of this factors and you'll just be a skinny dude.
But we were talking about people actively trying to lose/gain weight, and willing to do the sacrifices, which is a different set of people.
Coincidentally today I walked more than 20k steps (10k carrying a baby), and it's a great way to have a "non zero" day while listening to music/podcasts. But it feels very, very far from a workout.
> Losing fat is not easy but building muscle is 10x harder.
> Your sleep, caloric intake, protein intake, progressive overload exercise routine need to be in place. Screw up one of this factors and you'll just be a skinny dude.
As someone who went from "quite skinny" to almost "magazine cover body" in 18 months, having a nice looking body is hard, but much easier than many people expect. Consistency is key, and I'd say eating enough is the hardest part (I think that's also true for people trying to lose weight), but it's perfectly doable. In 2 years you can achieve it. And I'm talking all natural.