Increased sedentary behavior alters metabolism and body composition (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Increased sedentary behavior alters metabolism and body composition (2018)

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

56 pointsgautamsomani22 comments

Due to mental illness, I've spent 22-23 hours of my day for the last 4.5 years in bed on my smartphone. I only leave for food & bathroom. My BMI has been 17-19 for the entire period, but I worry whether I'm causing permanent damage. My body constantly aches and I tire easily. I feel like an old man, yet I'm 27. I began to have what I assume is Restless Leg Syndrome after a few months, with a constant desire to tense or move my legs. I hope that this horrible lifestyle will not burden me with lasting unforeseen health problems even when I begin to exercise and live again.

If you look around, you may spot there's a decent number of people over 30 (and 40) who have turned around their lifestyles and become very physically healthy. I'm one of them, having experienced mental illness like you - and I keep noticing others who have done the same as me. It did take a change in my mental health to help me get the kick start, but then the exercise (especially moderate weight training) put me in a positive feedback loop and improved my mental wellbeing to the point where I'm shocked at how 'normal' I have managed to become.

Good luck with getting back to better health.

I was similarly mostly bed ridden when I had an onset of chronic pain.

Turned out, being so sedentary allows your muscles to shrink / weaken, and vexingly after a certain point the only thing to do from being in even worse pain was to power through some light exercise. It worked in so far as it staged off pain from atrophy.

As for restless legs, may I assume that your sleep schedule is very out of whack? I found that taking melatonin in an effort to get some more sleep was guaranteed to give me restless legs. I didn't put those two together until my wife tried some as well and suffered the same thing.

I know you adore when random people give you lifestyle advice, but I’ll take this chance to share an anecdote about screen use. My apologies.

I have a habit of spending most waking time on a screen. The other night I laid in bed without a screen for 5 hours trying to fall asleep. The next day I had significantly more energy. My conclusion is that laptop/smartphone use takes a lot of energy. And today, I read that the brain is 20% of energy usage. Maybe visual processing is a big slice of that 20%?

Try adding magnesium to your diet or with vitamins. Takes about 6 months, but seems to help, even after 25 years of shaking legs. Obviously there are other reasons why we might have an absence of magnesium, but in the between time, that seems to help. Just need patience.

Just a thought that might be related to both problems: I had a brain injury that causes me to have low testosterone. When it’s low, and especially if it’s dropping, I get restless leg syndrome. Also, low testosterone isn’t great, mentally speaking…to say the least. It might be worth checking out.

TFA says the changes are temporary, or at least reversible:

Conclusions/interpretation: A short-term reduction in physical activity with increased sedentary behaviour leads to a reversible reduction in multi-organ insulin sensitivity and cardiorespiratory fitness, with concomitant increases in central and liver fat and dyslipidaemia.

Did you read AFT though? Specifically says that the changes are permanent.

Seems to be one of those plainly obvious things. Probably valuable in a scientific sense as a factual basis for other research (in which you should never just guess things) but for the public… well duh?

Yeah the result is pretty much "Never stop moving, always do sports." as if nobody knew that that is something we should probably all do.

Medicine tends to neglect the first derivative due to the amount of complication that more rates introduces in making claims about the body, similar for impulse or step response, studied here.

The favored route is chemistry, cellular, genetic factors.

It’s sort of the opposite. A doctor telling a patient to exercise has a very small effect size because the people who need to don’t actually do it regardless of what they’re told. Patients repeatedly told to eat less and exercise more get frustrated and offended and insist on other therapies.

To be fair to those people, they probably, by and large, have no idea what to actually do. Starting from nothing, changing your diet to something healthy and learning how to be active at all is kind of huge, like maybe a university course or two worth of info to get started. I think many people who are open to change in spirit are just lost, and that’s before facing the uphill battle of habit change in general.

I also don't get this sentiment. It isn't a university course or two. That is ridiculous. Most healthy and in shape people haven't taken any formal courses in the matter. The information is mostly intuitive and the nuances that aren't have been incredibly easy to find for decades.

This narrative is an excuse for a lack of discipline and accountability at best.

I would say that habits, inherited patterns from environment shaping how we behave are far more important in our daily behaviour and outcome from them.

As far as discipline and accountability can be solution to adress those issue, they also reinforce guilt and shame for all those struggling and failing on this path to solve their issue.

And often is used as a survivor biais self glorification.

Most if not all of your behaviour are directly or indirectly tied to your environment, and feedback from your environment.

I myself struggled 30years being overweight, obese and ultra sedentary.

Adopting a dog in my home, had more impact on all those issues than all coach/doctor/ and self discipline and accountability.

The dog was a major cause of perturbation forcing me to adoption of new patterns and frame of decision.

Most healthy and shape peoples are the one lucky enough to have been living in a very positive environment which they inherited.

Mimétism is the most important way of transmitting behaviour pattern (and emotional reaction). Once you understand that, you can reshape your environment to improve, adapt the mimetic feedback to yourself.

It is intuitive but there are so many ways to do it wrong, and the ways to do it wrong are often promoted as the best way to do it.

In fact, I don’t know if physical exercise is actually taught correctly by any single person. Each teacher may help you in one way and (sometimes physically) hurt you in another. The only way to prevent that is to become an expert yourself.

I’ve read about three books worth of information about weight lifting, stretching, massage. I’ve been to several massage therapists and physical therapists. I’ve had a personal trainer. I’ve consistently practiced being active, and even did sports when I was growing up. Despite all that, I still haven’t reached my simple fitness goal of not having muscular pain.

Physical inactivity can be caused by injury. In that situation, both activity and inactivity can have serious negative consequences. Navigating someone of a situation like that isn’t something many health professionals are capable of doing, let alone random people.

I’m 28, maybe you are still 22 and don’t know what the consequences of your training on an aging body are yet. Or maybe your legs aren’t uneven sized (as many peoples are) and you don’t have to deal with the consequences of that.

I've never understood this argument. Go to anybody on the street from any neighborhood in any demographic and ask them:

"In order to lose weight, should you eat more of:

- Candy or Fruit?

- Soda or Water?

- Big Mac or Chicken Breast?

- Hot Pockets or a Salad?

- Fried Chicken or Grilled Chicken?

etc...

It's honestly so insulting when people say that people are unhealthy do to a lack of information. Not only is common sense enough to navigate you 80% there, the rest is a YouTube video away.

This feels like a pretty uncharitable take, for a start sugar is pretty addictive and reducing / cutting it out of your life if you're used to having lots of it isn't easy.

Secondly I vaguely recall the shift as a university student routinely eating take away to cooking for myself, it's not a trivial step, you have to pickup habits around shopping, meal planning and cooking. There's a lot of steps someone who's not used to doing it can drop off on.

So yes, I can believe that people both know what are healthier options, but have no idea how to actually practically execute them in their life. It is deeply unhelpful to give people advice that they can't action and then expect them to thank you for it.

The uncharitable take is assuming that a person can't make a salad.

Behavioral aspects are non-clinical, especially in the limit of psychiatry. We haven't yet developed medicines that can surgically implant the needs and goals to get individuals to put one foot in front of the other, with the skills and environment of an athlete, for example.

In other news, water is wet

> water is wet

Wetness is complex [1]. And this being Hacker News, I'll note that water technically isn't wet. It's wetting, wetness being an interaction characteristic of a solid, liquid and gas, and not an intrinsic property of any of them alone.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wetting

Reply on news.ycombinator.com