[fuwafuwa]

All of our fitness and nutrition advice is troubled by the cargo-culting, marketing-driven, personal-religion factors: if I go to a yoga class I spend a lot more time and money to get effects roughly similar to doing a high school gym class stretching regime each morning and evening. I paid $14 yesterday for the experience of a burger with a fancy name and an overly sweetened bun that was ultimately less satisfying than Burger King. If I buy and use supplements marketed by a bodybuilder, or try to follow their training program as printed in a magazine, I'm not going to look like the bodybuilder, and I will probably overtrain, because they weren't using the supplements at all, they were using a PED stack to train harder, eat more, and recover faster without overloading their system. Worrying about my body weight, BMI, or aesthetics is similarly Quixotic in that my body will prefer to stay in a certain range regardless of how I eat or train, and the numbers I can consistently improve tend to be "weight and reps" or "time and distance", while aesthetics and vanity numbers are much harder to aim towards.

To wit, it's more important to develop your own feedback loops for each of these things. There are serious concerns with fitness and nutrition in the U.S. but they aren't necessarily because it's impossible to get at the good stuff: it's just that eating beans and rice and oatmeal, making a habit of stretching and bodyweight exercise, and studiously logging one's training are all unfashionable, implicitly discouraged by most workplaces, and not well served by market forces.

[ice109]

this kind of thinking is just another iteration of self-serving anti-intellectualism (akin to climate change denial and anti-vaxxing). there is absolutely hard exercise science you can read in order to exercise more effectively than "stretching" (an activity whose value has never been empirically proven) and "body-weight" exercises (slightly more effective than nothing but pales in comparison to real weight training and cardio). protein supplementing does work[1], creatine does work[2], caffeine+ephedrine does work[3] (though you can't buy that anymore). the hard science is in exactly the same place it always is: research journals. for starters I always recommended exrx.net.

[1] http://m.ajcn.nutrition.org/content/96/6/1454.short

[2] https://jissn.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1550-2783-4...

[3] http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/1318281

[brucephillips]

> implicitly discouraged by most workplaces

What do you mean?

[fuwafuwa]

Long "crunch" work hours with little or no enforced break, laissez-faire approaches to lunch and break room snacks, occasional encouragement to drink alcohol, lengthy car commutes to office parks, heavy preference towards in-person over remote. These are just some of the things workplaces do to lifestyle that are too small to be a topic for regulation but big enough to impact lives.