Comment by unfocussed_mike | Hacker News Reader

Comment by unfocussed_mike | Hacker News Reader

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unfocussed_mike

> 2. It... takes... so... LITTLE!

Even just not using your car to do journeys of less than a couple of miles.

I don't exercise at all, really. I just walk everywhere, to do my shopping, and for fun. I don't run or jog or lift weights. I cook food from fresh as much as I can, avoid too much meat, and I don't have a car. I have a healthy weight and a small (usually) waistline.

Like a lot of us I do occasionally still have back problems from too much sitting (as I enter middle age) but literally just a couple of weekends of daily, hilly walks will put things back in order for some time.

It's also an effective mild antidepressant and sleep regulator.

If you want a life choice that will help you lose weight: move somewhere you can function as much as possible without a car.

Most people don't have the freedom to make this choice, but the fact that the people who do genuinely have the freedom and who can see their whole family is overweight never even consider it, often surprises me.

(We should be developing societies that can function this way at a larger scale, not just developing on-demand delivery services.)

I unintentionally moved to a place where I only have to use my car on very rare occasions, and I also cannot recommend it highly enough. I’ve never had weight problems, but I’ve noticed a massive positive change in my overall mood and energy levels, and in feelings of connection to my community. :D

I presume you're American because my society already works like this. The only people I know who use their car on a daily basis live or work very isolated and far from civilization.

Here in America people make cars a part of their identity and one of the questions you’ll often hear (maybe after a few conversations) is “Do you drive?”.

As an American in my 30s I have literally never been asked nor heard anyone else asked “Do you drive?”

That is something you will hear towny people in the UK ask now. Especially when asking young people who are absolutely putting off learning to drive a thing they will not remotely be able to afford to run.

I’ve never heard the question “do you drive,” only “what do you drive?” The assumption that every individual owns and drives a car is pretty omnipresent.

Maybe it's a local thing? New York, perhaps? It's definitely not widespread. It'd be a really weird question in most of the country (of course you drive)

There are about 3-5 metro areas in the US where a substantial portion of the population doesn't drive day-to-day by choice (NYC, Chicago, Philadelphia, maybe DC and Boston). I have heard "Do you drive?" asked in those places. Everywhere else, it's "what do you drive?" and "what kind of car are you thinking about paying a bank to buy for you?".

Where I am, at least, the more frequent question is "What do you drive?". Some people are truly baffled when the answer is "I don't, really".

Same, where I live the moment I tell people I haven't owned a car in 2+ years they are baffled as to how I even survive.

No -- I'm not. I'm British.

Britain (England in particular) is half and half, really. Lots of people live in towns and can walk to everything.

But a very large number of people make the choice to live in the kind of "out of town" developments that would be familiar to Americans: a car-journey from everything and served by large supermarkets to which you can't so easily walk, rather than in the kind of smaller more traditional communities that are a walk from everything. And nowhere is cycle-friendly yet, really.

Covid will exacerbate this -- people looking to live in houses with gardens will choose to live further away from towns.

I have lived mostly in towns and I prefer that, but where I am living at the moment, the corner shop is not a corner shop, it's a small supermarket, and it is a hilly half mile away. This is right on the cusp of impracticality for a lot of people who don't have the freedom to work from home during the day and who are shopping for more than just themselves.

I live by myself and I don't have a car, but I work from home, so I choose to do that journey on foot, rather than get deliveries, but I am unusual in this; most people get deliveries or will take the car (and then go to the bigger supermarket further away).

This. When I lived in London I never got in my car except to make journeys out of London. Now that I live in a village (and not a particularly remote one; London is less than an hour away by train) I need my car to do anything.

As an addendum to what I wrote, I think a lot of societies (especially the few healthier western countries) who count themselves lucky to have avoided the cultural underpinnings that led to American-style obesity have not yet begun to comprehend what widespread on-demand food delivery will do to their national health.

Maybe but I will counter with the cost of on-demand food is not as financially accessible as you would think. As one data point our family has pretty much stopped using the services because of how much of a mark-up you pay.

Might those same cultural underpinnings impact their adoption and usage of on-demand delivery?

I don't know; I wonder if anyone knows.

After all, the USA was once a country of broad, healthy outdoorsy types, and that health pattern carried on well into metropolitan living, well into the late seventies.

And then the "TV dinner" approach was all dinners, and along came higher and higher calorie snacks. Americans became substantially less healthy in less than two decades. Through convenience shopping.

The same thing happened to the British at only a slightly smaller scale, and slightly later.

As a Western European who has lived in the US for a short while around 2000, I feel the battle is already lost.

Rising obesity in kids is observed but no link is made.

All the while I have seen my country 'Americanizing' in the last 20 years : more McDs etc, now the food delivery guys and McDs now delivers to your home too ( unfanthomable! )

It is not the US style what sells it : it is convenience. Convenience sells.

On-demand food delivery is for people with lots of disposable income. It's really expensive. You get pick-up otherwise.

At least in the US. Maybe it's different in Europe.

$4+ per diner delivery markup (increased base food price, delivery fee, tip) will keep it from being a widespread problem. This is like worrying that meal ingredient delivery services will make lots of people more sedentary because they won't walk to the grocery store—no, it won't, because not many people can afford those services.

> Like a lot of us I do occasionally still have back problems from too much sitting

Like you I had back problems at regular intervals. Then I read about building muscle using moderate weight exercises and have been free from back pain ever since. Whenever I stop doing my exercises for 1-2 weeks because of holidays or whatever, I feel the oh so familiar back pain creeping in again...

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