I find that being sedentary can get you stuck in a weird local maxima where your body hurts, but it hurts even more when exercising (back hurts, RSIs, etc) and so people don’t exercise and they protect their body like it is glass. If however, you can do some moderate exercise (swimming worked well for me) you can gradually build up your strength again and all of a sudden your back isn’t killing you anymore and you are able to strain you body much more without being in pain.
I personally went through this journey where I was sedentary for about 10 years and in my late 20s I could not run, I could not walk long distances, by back was killing me, I had wrist issues. Seeing a physical therapist who could help rebuild my body while starting with light exercise and gradually building up worked for me. I spent 2 months just strengthening my ankles and feet before I could run because they were so atrophied.
Eventually I got past that local maxima and now I can run 25 km with 2km elevation gain up a mountain and back which would have killed me before.
Lastly I will say that exercise should be gradually eased into, a lot of people are put off by exercise because they start too hard and make themself miserable. For cardio you should try to keep your heart rate within a lower range (zone 2 cardio at around 70% of max heartrate). For most people this means your cardio starts with walking up a hill, and you won’t get to actually running until later.
I work from home, and around two months ago it dawned on me how little movement there was each day. So I got myself a under desk walking pad. And now I'm doing around 5-8 km each day. It feels great!
And for muscle training, nothing beats a few kettle bells and a rubber mattress in the corner.
i go for actual walks 1-2 hours each day. it's my time to listen to audio books, and when i am immersed in the story i don't even notice how long i am walking.
Not the OP, but I've been using this one for about a year and it has been a great addition to my WFH setup: https://amzn.to/3ZXD88h
For something smaller or cheaper (or if you just prefer cycling movements) they also have some 'peddler' options as well, but I don't have any personal experience with those. Enjoy!
I chose that one because it folds together when stored, goes to a decent speed (at the max I can have a brisk walk), my stride fits in it (I'm 194cm tall) and it can carry my weight (~90kg).
> but it hurts even more when exercising (back hurts, RSIs, etc)
I think that's where I am at right now. I have always been exercising to some extent. But it feels like the older I get the less one kind of exercise focusing on some set of physical and physiological aspects transfers to another set. Meaning, to go biking a lot, doesn't mean you can run.
> strengthening my ankles and feet before I could run because they were so atrophied.
Even after years of semi-regular weighted calf raises and yoga I just recently noticed that I could barely do a few hundred rope skips cause of my feet. 15 years ago I remember cardiovascular obstacles and the usual DOMS but I don't remember that my feet hurt.
---
Currently my lower back / sciatica is giving me serious issues. I think I got it from some overexertion due to prolonged pelvic motion ... so that's yet another physical department to keep in mind.
I personally found that doing single foot tree poses in yoga can really get in there to strengthen your feet and ankles. If you really want to isolate the ankles band exercises are pretty useful. For foot stuff the majority of things I worked on was dexterity and proprioception. For example, spread all your toes apart, pull all your toes together, lift only your big toe, lift all your non big toes. For me I was missing the mind body connection to move me feet how I wanted to move them and regaining that took me time.
Another thing to consider is that sciatica can manifest in your feet depending on how the nerve is being pinched. It can be very confusing when your feet hurt but the source of hurt is not actually in your feet.
> but it hurts even more when exercising (back hurts, RSIs, etc)and so people don’t exercise and they protect their body like it is glass.
100% this. Whenever I've had longer breaks from strength training, clocking in the kind of hours I do in a desk chair eventually gets me to back pain, Aeron chair be damned.
The only thing that works for me then is to hit the weights; squats and deadlifts to be specific. Obviously not doing 1 rep max, relatively high rep range (8-12).
- Week 1: muscle soreness is horrible.
- Week 2: muscle soreness is quite OK and the regular back pain is all but gone.
This is really under-rated. People will happily keep pushing exercise as a health intervention (hidden implication: instead of other interventions?), and forget that quite a lot of people have health conditions that get in the way of their ability to exercise. Especially older people. Who have poor health outcomes.
The problem with exercise is everything in modern life is set up to discourage it. The economy is all about paying money to make your life easier. We design our cities to require cars. Work schedules and commutes eat into free time. Screen based entertainment displaces more active pastimes, etc.
Then our body instinctively hoards calories like a squirrel hoards nuts, because evolution takes thousands to millions of years and this era of abundant calories and sedentary lifestyles emerged in the last few decades.
It doesn't matter how potent it is if nobody wants to take it.
Modern life enables the most effective exercise (really "training" is the correct word) in the history of humanity.
There is no more potent stressor (in regards to the degree of adaptations that result---I guess getting shot in the face is a more potent stressor, but it's hard to recover from) than weightlifting. For example, you can radically change your physiology just doing a single (hard) set of 5 deadlifts a week. Spending just ~30 seconds a week under acute stress can take a human male who cannot lift 185 lbs to one who can lift 405 lbs in a number of months. It's radically, stupidly, unreasonably, and absurdly effective.
We have the most understanding and most effective tools to take advantage of the adaptive mechanisms of our bodies than ever before.
I think people think that "exercising" has to be this pervasive, incessant thing that invades every facit of life and requires constant discipline. Even the linked article hints at this---walk 45 minutes daily, stand all the time, etc. All that shit constitutes (for all but the most untrained) extremely small stressors that are rapidly adapted to (and hence no longer do anything but maintain your existing level of fitness) and that take a lot of time (and can be rather uncomfortable, like standing for hours). More is not better. If you disrupt homeostasis with one set of 5 deadlifts, you've disrupted homeostasis! The adaptation is in motion. It doesn't matter that it only took 30 seconds. And unlike standing or walking, it's easy to effectively increase the stress to reap more adaptations: add weight to the bar. (To be clear, I'm not discouraging walking/standing/Zumba/whatever---they're all better than doing nothing and they can complement weightlifting. I'm just pointing out that there are much more efficient ways to rapidly accrue useful stress (well, I'd argue the amount of useful stress you can accrue from walking or Zumba or whatever is limited because the activities themselves can't be effectively scaled to result in more stress) and if you were to choose only one, the choice should be weightlifting.)
Deadlifts are life's panacea. You should be doing them.
> Spending just ~30 seconds a week under acute stress can take a human male who cannot lift 185 lbs to one who can lift 405 lbs in a number of months. It's radically, stupidly, unreasonably, and absurdly effective.
185 lbs is 83 kg; 405 lb is 183 kg.
As someone who has been doing a 5x5 deadlift set every week (plus other stuff) for about three years: this is a wild exaggeration that sounds like some sort of supplement marketing claim. Perhaps you forgot a few hidden variables? For example, I'm over 40.
(It was also very apparent when I had COVID and was out of the gym for over a month that I "lost" about 25kg from my working weight)
It's not a wild exaggeration and it's possible for most (healthy) middle-aged men within a year (usually a lot less), except for the truly unendowed. (We don't control our genetics and/or other ailments, but I think it's better as a policy to not try to rank yourself in this regard and just be Pollyannaish about it and assume you can achieve it.)
5x5 deadlifts is generally too much volume and probably constitutes overtraining for you if they're sufficiently heavy. Admittedly, when you're not particularly strong it's less stress and more recoverable (because they can't be that heavy).
Not being able to deadlift 405 after three years is generally indicative of poor programming (if you're trying to get stronger, at least) and/or poor recovery. You have to eat, you have to sleep, and you have to increase the weight each time.
If you're an adult male who's been training consistently for 3 years and can't deadlift 405 for a working set, you probably need to change your programming.
Being 40 isn't really an excuse. You're 40, not 80.
Try looking into 5/3/1, Hepburn style programming, or Tactical Barbell.
If those 30 seconds are the total time the bar is in your hands and off the floor it sounds reasonable tho, doesn’t it? The numbers quoted match about what I personally experienced
I don't know about that, 30 seconds is for the whole set and was just a rough estimate. Time-holding-the-bar isn't particularly relevant here (other than to emphasize the point it doesn't take much).
Yeah, I was doing 5x5 forever. It is a good starter, but you will plateau.
Everyone will have their own methods here, but after years of having marginal growth per year I changed it up.
I now only do 1 set per exercise, 3-4 exercises per day. For arm focused exercises I do 15 reps in 1 set. For everything else, I do 20 reps for a set.
If I succeed, then I up the weight for the next exercise (2.5lbs for arms, 5lbs for everything else).
If I fail, I do a drop set and shave off 20% per set taking just 30 seconds per drop.
I use the drop set as both the thing to help the growth, and the thing to punish me for failing to increase the initial set. If I get my 20 reps, I get to move on, so I push really hard because the drop set totally sucks.
If I fail 3 weeks in a row, I drop the weight.
Been doing this for the last two years and I am 47, and each year I have increased my strength by 20-40% depending on the exercise.
I also keep the number of exercises per day to be minimal. With 5 days in the week, I do just 3-4 exercises per day. M, W, R are 1-2 from the 5x5 program (squats, deadlifts, bench, should-to-overhead, rows) along with some extras that I want to focus on. Tues, Thur are more extras, and ones that I am willing to sacrifice if I have a busy week. This means I can still hit the gym just 3 days a week, and hit the core exercises. Also, the core exercises are rough, so Tue/Thur are almost like easy days.
Here is my schedule:
M:
Bench,
20degree lying dumbell curl,
Squat
Tues:
Lat Raises,
Hip Thrusts,
Neck exercises (put a plate on your head and do lifts from 4 different angles while lying down)
Wed:
Overhead press,
Deadlift,
Cable Row
Thur:
Tricep Rope
Kettlebell swing
Lat Pull down
Fri:
Dumbbell Bench
Dumbbell Shoulder
Barbell Row
Front Squat
You'll notice their are some repeats in there with cables and dumbbells. This is helps hit the muscle groups twice a week, but with some variation and some different stabilization. I chart all this in a google spreadsheet with each column being a week so I can see my progress, and so I can see if I missed anything from the core days in the week, and I happily change up days so I ALWAYS hit the core 3 day exercises.
Agreed, it’s like doing static HTML instead of an SPA for a simple website. It’s not glamorous, it’s not exciting but it’s incredibly efficient.
I have been lifting for 18 years now and it’s become like brushing my teeth: I just do it without thinking much about it. Just basic stuff - squats, bench, deadlift, few vanity additions. The older I get the more I see how much my peers physically suffer without it.
I've found that training yourself to enjoy the feeling of hunger (intermittent fasting) is a boon to weight loss. Another tip: fully chew your food, and eat slowly. Don't try to satiate yourself at every meal. It takes a lot of effort at first, but it's very effective. You start to respect food (and your own body's processes) much more.
Backing it up a bit - not only enjoy being hungry, but recognizing it in the first place.
Lots of overweight people have never been hungry in their whole life. They eat on a schedule, so have an appetite, but real hunger? Never more than the grumbles of an empty stomach.
But it would benefit them to not eat until they are hungry. Then have a small meal. Feel what it's like to be satiated, not full, just satiated. The notice how long it takes to feel hungry again.
Then try being really hungry. Like "I woke up from a deep sleep at 3am and felt a ravenous need to eat something".
I've found that my sense of hunger was reset by this process. I get hungry if I don't eat a meal, but it's not a big deal. I can ignore it. Another 6 hours and I'll start to be really hungry. Then I can have something small.
I don't find it hard to keep a healthy weight any more. It's not difficult to eat to a slight caloric deficit and lose weight if needed.
That is the way to begin the process of getting a little hungry and then appreciating it as it grows. Taking that extra time then makes finally eating more enjoyable, in my experience.
And your tip on fully chewing food is subtle but powerful. It's very much in the spirit of being more engaged in the moment, where gratitude settles us down and keeps our worries at bay, for at least some small moments.
Science says in most normal cases, should be like that. The hunger can be masked by other pleasure hormones, that is why exercise is important, to set endorphins free.
Mind to give more insight in how to loose weight without ever feeling the need to eat at all? There are thousands of books that claim that, but no one delivers… ask me how I know.
I find absolutely shocking that you say what I claim is false, and your justification is “ Hunger is what you feel when your ghrelin levels rise.”.
Ghrelin is one of many ways to feel hungry, and also has many other functions: also participates in regulation of reward cognition, learning and memory, the sleep-wake cycle, taste sensation, reward behavior, and glucose metabolism, for example. The exact mechanics of hormones in the body is far from being completely understood.
Independent of that, the fact that you know the name of an hormone, does not even remotely make my claim false. The question is “what triggers the ghrelin?”. Part of the answer is circadian timing (what I mean with “I would like to eat”) but also the body need for energy (start using reserves).
Yep, you hit the nail on the head. I think a similar train of thought with mental health. Every time there's a new study on how terrible chronic stress is, or how many years of life chronic loneliness loses you. Well how about - radical thought incoming - we stop constructing a society where we are increasingly exploited and isolated? "Oh but the free market" (or whatever other excuse) we bemoan. Crap, yeah, guess as long as someone makes a dollar, the wellbeing of millions doesn't matter...
Toure really contributing to the problem here. Hearing people complaining about the state of the world is stressful for everyone and causes people to isolate even more.
I recommend to be constructive and make actionable recommendations, and have a positive tone. I know it’s not easy in the current state of affairs though.
“ stop constructing a society where ….” really doesn’t tell anyone what you think we should do.
And I agree with you btw, I think the root cause is, we have anonymised too much, revenue is the only thing that matters, because before that, there were things like traditions, shame, ethic, etc. but they went all out the window when money making became possible anonymously via funds, VCs, etc. You can switch to child labor to save 0.1% margin because, guess what, no one is responsible anymore: the shareholders, these anonymous mass, want it.
What you say is true. Although I'm conflicted on whether a 100% positive approach is best. Thing is, we're currently doing a pretty shit job of building a good society, and it needs to change ASAP, for our benefit and the benefit of the planet. I'm partly of the mindset that people need a huge wakeup call. While we are humming and hahing and saying "no don't worry, it's not THAT bad", the world probably doesn't get any better. Bad actors prey on complacency. How long do we need to wait for cost of living to soar, inequality to increase, mental health to decline, etc until we take a hard stance and put a stop to it? You and I may be in the privileged position to take a nonradical stance and ultimately still live decent lives.
Also, I think many people don't think we are headed in the wrong direction, or are generally uneducated about the topic. Blissful ignorance... during which they continue being good consumers to keep the hamster wheel spinning. We are sleepwalking into some sort of societal disaster. You're probably right that people need to be addressed with a positive tone. But it's hard.
Well you saw how those millions recently voted in the US. I've largely stopped worrying about this. Slavery took hundreds of years to get phased out, and Europe took hundreds of years to mostly-stop going to war. I only have a couple decades to my life.
I got a nice exercise bike, which I use for 30m most days. I got one for my parents too, but my mom refused to use it and promptly got a heart attack. Can't win them all. I do what I can, but I've stopped trying to lift mountains.
That's right, convenience is the enemy! We should start some kind of movement and convince others in the least productive way. I know, it sounds like a lot of work.
There is one more funny twist to the picture you've painted. What little physical labor we have left is piled onto as few people as possible while others are dying in cubicles.
The hardest part about exercise is the mental aspect of pushing past the inertia of habit and comfort.
As Dr Ashley says in the OP, if you can just walk 30-45 minutes five or six days a week, you're already doing your health a great service. The hard part isn't the walk itself, it's the motivation to start, and the discipline to make it part of a routine.
Once you have ingrained exercise into your routine, it becomes easy. Not exercising feels uncomfortable; feeding your body with things which do not support your more healthful state will feel more innately uncomfortable. Once you establish a routine of exercise, you have the basis for a virtuous cycle.
> It doesn't matter how potent it is if nobody wants to take it.
Nobody? I can't agree, lots of people want to, and do "take" exercise. Most of my friends are super active and they look good and feel good and are living really healthy lives.
It's true that a lot of society is set up such that we can totally avoid exercising, but on the flip side we've probably never had more access to great ways to be fit that are tailored to personal interest, aptitudes, needs.
Sadly I agree that most (north Americans at least) are extremely under-exercised, but it is a choice.
The article mentions the difference in health outcomes between bus drivers and bus conductors. An outcome that is effectively dictated by the employer. And of course, since then, one of those jobs has been eliminated: the one that required more exercise.
> The problem with exercise is everything in modern life is set up to discourage it
Psychologically manipulative gamification can address that.
Soon after I got an Apple Watch the reminders and rewards for the activity rings got me to make sure to close all three of them daily. That was 2063 days ago and I've not missed a day.
Before I got the watch I rarely deliberately exercised. I would choose stairs over elevators, and for a while I would do a 10 to 15 leisurely bike ride a couple times a week (but that stopped about a year before I got the watch due to problems with my bike that weren't worth fixing), but other than that it was mostly sitting at my desk or on my couch for me.
I'd get in about a mile of walking during normal daily activities and maybe 2500 steps. Those are both 2.5x to 3x as much after the watch.
What's interesting is that there were no days during that 2063 (and counting) streak where I had to force myself to continue. I got sick occasionally with a cold or a flu (or something flu like--I never got sick enough with flu like symptoms to actually go get tested to see what it was), but never bad enough that I just wanted to stay in bed until it was over.
In the several years before that I would maybe once a year get something that would leave me with no will or energy to get out of bed for a day or two. So something seems to have changed, and increased exercising seems like a decent candidate.
Take that to its logical conclusion: the key problems are car-dependence and, well, capitalism.
We completeely design our cities around cars. Just the act of walking 30 minutes a day makes a huge difference. If you can get that just going about your day, then it's kind of built into your life, almost "free". But walking (like every other form of exercise) has to be an intentional activity in a car-centric city.
Car-dependence didn't just happen. It was intentional and relates heavily to economic segregation.
So what about capitalism? Well, leisure time, from the perpsective of capitalism, is lost revenue. Where once you needed 1 full time job, now you need 2 plus 3 "side gigs". Housing costs, student loans, education costs, your cars and student loan debt are all designed to keep you working, creating wealth for someone else.
> We completeely design our cities around cars. Just the act of walking 30 minutes a day makes a huge differenc.
+1. Car-centric design stands 99.9% for US. In contrast, many cities in EU have grown organically over decades both with walkability, accessibility in mind and quite decent public transport. With business offices often still being pretty centric.
I've been moving around EU, working in different big cities and had a luck of renting flats within walkable 30-45 mins from the workplaces / client offices. If the weather sucks, I can count on public transport. It's always a bit of extra budget stretch to rent something more centric, but it's really worth it imho.
A morning walk to the workplace, while grabbing a coffee / breakfast on the way or a walk back home while disconnecting from the virtual world is a routine that can highly recommend. It gives also more motivation for either passing by the office or marking the work/leisure boundary when working in hybrid/remote mode. No need to live in a constant hustle mode.
Cars are great for mental health. They let people access a lot more things in less time. And plenty of people drive cars who are in fine physical and mental health.
They don’t actually allow you to access more things in less time. They reshape cities to spread things further out so you spend the same time accessing the same things, but you get there by sitting in traffic rather than walking or riding a bike.
When I used to live in the suburbs it would take me 15 minutes to drive to the supermarket. Now I can walk there in 5 minutes. Walking is faster and healthier than driving.
>They don’t actually allow you to access more things in less time. They reshape cities to spread things further out so you spend the same time accessing the same things, but you get there by sitting in traffic rather than walking or riding a bike
You're equivocating. In some vague, general sense, over a long period of time, cars might make it harder to access things. For any given person at any given moment, having a car gives greater access to more things in less time.
Cars don't reshape cities, people do. It's a deliberate choice, and there are plenty of cities around the world that have not gone anywhere near to the extremes that American cities have.
"Plenty" may be in good health, but since the median person in the US is NOT in fine physical health, we can confidently say that "most" (by far) people who drive cars are not in fine health, and the situation is trending worse, much worse.
> Healthy nutrition requires more than eating less.
Except in specific cases, this is mostly not true. Food in the modern era is very nutrient dense. This is why vitamin pills are mostly a placebo; you're getting an overabundance of nutrients in your diet already.
The first principal component of healthy nutrition is simply _eating less_. Eating less reduces your risk of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, injury when you are older, and on and on.
We've been overselling what exercise does for weight loss (almost nothing) and underselling what exercise does for everything else. Even better if you can get your exercise outside.
Agreed. I’ve come to realize I don’t know anyone in my life who ever lost significant weight and actually kept it off permanently through exercise.
I go to the gym regularly and when I look around and see other women who have been working out for a long time, they are pretty much the same body shape I’ve always seen them.
Once you reach a new weight, that’s just your body’s new normal. I stress to people now that they should aim to never gain weight in the first place unless it’s muscle.
GLP-1 agonists are not exercise and thus using them would not change the calculus on how common it is to lose “significant weight and actually [keep] it off permanently through exercise.”
Nor does their availability change the validity of GP’s advice.
The idea that exercise doesn’t lead to fat loss is obviously false. If you’re eating a small surplus and increase your exercise volume you will lose weight. Clearly diet is a bigger lever, but plenty of exercises burn a lot of calories. Swimming and cycling are great for this.
Speaking as someone who, over a few years, lost about 50kg, the problem is that when I most needed to lose weight, my body couldn’t put up with enough cycling or swimming to burn useful calories.
I found it very funny that I spent about 2 years eating less so I could get better at cycling, then suddenly had to start eating more, once I was down 50kg, because I was getting faint on very long cycles.
Cyclists typically have enough energy stored up to ride for about 90 minutes without needing to refuel. For me it's 90 minutes on the button, and it doesn't seem to matter what I've eaten beforehand or how hard I push myself.
Its recovery keeping up with expenditure. -1000 cal deficits limit recovering from muscle/ligaments soreness leading to build up of stress that is more damaging than simply not eating
Your body rejigger caloric expenditure based on how much you exercise. It isn't a straightforward addition of physical activity plus basal metabolic expenditure.
Sure, you get more efficient but then you can just run a little faster or find a nice hill. If that’s boring go pick up something heavy. You can endlessly switch up training to find a thing you haven’t gotten used to yet. People act like there isn’t half a century of exercise science out there being put to use by athletes and regular people.
If you exersize a lot, your body will ask for a lot more food. Your body does not want to starve, and using a bunch of calories without replacement leads to that result.
At some point you have to control your diet. But, if you can control your diet, the exersize clearly isn't a requirement.
I find that’s only true for the first few months of training while you get the beginner gains. Running half an hour a day was by far the biggest contribution to my weightloss once I finished the couch to 5K program and my diet settled down. My body adapted relatively quickly to the new regime just like it did with my sedentary lifestyle but YMMV.
Once you can run frequently without gorging afterwards, the extra 300-500 calorie buffer makes dieting a million times easier.
(Lost 35 pounds in 2024, 90% of it during weeks in which I ran consistently)
> When you increase activity, over the course of weeks, the body adjusts and does everything it can to not touch those fat stores.
Your body doesn't adjust endlessly. The technique to continue to shift body composition is called progressive overload, this isn't outdated and is the basis of most athletic training regimens.
Again I want to reiterate that no one is suggesting that diet isn't the foundation of fitness and controlling body composition. I am simply and factually stating that you can use exercise as a lever to achieve a calorie deficit. Arguing otherwise is to argue against thermodynamics, moving your body consumes energy and you body simple cannot achieve perfect efficiency.
> TT and FT began to decrease starting 12 weeks in both moderate and high intensity exercise groups. Most significant decrease was at 12 weeks in high intensity exercise group
I hear this all the time from the exercise deniers and it makes me laugh, it's such a drop in the ocean compared to everything else that you will get by simply moving a bit more.
It's true. I jogged about 5-6 days a week for about 20-30 minutes a say a few years ago and the weight left me at a healthy tick. Naturally I could lose more with a better diet but I like eating so exercise it is.
Yep, if you were at stable weight before, it’s trivial amount of daily exercise to create a 500 kcal deficit which will have you drop 1 lbs /week. People who say exercise did nothing are either lying about amount or intensity of exercise or compensated with increased caloric intake
They never said that exercise doesn't lead to fat loss.
Only that it's a minor contributor and I would argue that's the case.
One of your examples, swimming, will put on weight as it will builds muscle mass which obviously is heavier. But one of the side effects of this is that your appetite will increase. And without careful diet management it's very easy for this exercise to be a net negative.
It's not a minor contributor though, people vastly underestimate how much exercise our species is adapted for, how much we're capable of, and just how far off from that most of us live.
It is, in quantities that are compatible with a modern lifestyle. Sure, if you're gonna run marathons every weekend, you will lose a lot of weight from that. But that's not possible to achieve while leading a normal modern life (full time employment, a relationship, children).
I think it is doable in a modern lifestyle, but that most people don't make it a priority.
Most people waste a shocking number of hours out of every day scrolling, watching TV etc, and just take it for granted as part of a "modern lifestyle", but it's just an optional way to spend time, and not very productive.
I have full time employment, a relationship, children, and manage to get our for 1hr of running almost every day. (And find time to debate with strangers on HN XD)
>The idea that exercise doesn’t lead to fat loss is obviously false.
People tend to offset that energy expenditure elsewhere in their life, often without being conscious of it. The body is really good at balancing out your energy consumption.
If I go for a 40 mile bike ride today then I'm pretty sure I'll zombie out in front of the TV tonight.
I think you need to exercise in order to get past a weight loss plateau though.
If you simply cut back on calories by 20% - 30%, your body will adjust to the new norm within a couple months, and you just expend 20% - 30% less energy. You have maintain some baseline activity levels in order to continue burning fat.
You can also train yourself on how you eat. When I was eating a Keto type diet, I was surprised at how my feelings of hunger between meals (two a day spaced at 8 hours between) disappeared. And how my tastes largely changed so that I didn't want other foods. However, it was easy to slide if I let it. Training back to the old was easier than training to Keto. I switch was just enough that I didn't have to keep myself in line with total discipline. But the path to sliding was still staring at me.
So, people don't necessarily need to diet. They need to train their appetite just like they train their body.
While that is a logical assumption, it’s not actually true. [1]
If you intake X calories, your body will use them to provide you energy for exercise. If you don’t exercise, you won’t always just turn it into fat - your body will find another find other uses of the calories such as producing stress hormones.
Exercise is important but will not make you lose weight alone.
No one is suggesting that you can out run an increasing calorie surplus. You can however keep your diet the same and add two hours of running to your week and lose weight.
If one were getting the doctor recommended amount of exercise running for 30 minutes or some commensurate activity would not be intimidating, and it's far less likely that you would have a weight issue in the first place. Doctors recommend about 150 minutes of moderate intensity exercise per week. Imagine doing that every week, for your whole life.
Agreed that life is not that simple as a math equation, but I think baselines apply, e.g. if you are sedentary, adding 150-180 mins of moderate exercise will definitely improve your health and life.
if you are already meeting that baseline, and still have issues, then you should look at tweaking other variables in the equation, whether diet, stress, etc.
What I find worrying is the cherry picking some people do, e.g. "aha your body will get used to exercise, so I might as well not bother", then wonder why at their next visit to the doctor, they are now told to go on a steady diet of statins etc.
The only thing being claimed is that exercise doesn't significantly help with long term weight loss.
That doesn't mean exercise isn't extremely important for your health. It is, in a myriad ways. Even the mechanisms that make it not help with weight loss are some of the reasons why it is so healthy - it's taking away calories from metabolic processes that are more harmful than helpful.
You're treating the human body as a far simpler system that it actually is, leading to drawing unsupported conclusions about the efficacy of exercise as an intervention for fat loss.
I guess if I'm totally out of condition then exercising feels very inefficient. Once I'm in condition, though, it's calories in = calories and it isn't complicated, at least for endurance activites. If I pile on more activity then I need a corresponding amount of extra calories and it's simple arithmetic.
I only see that study cited by people who are looking for excuses to not exercise.
You're off the mark here - I'm in great shape and exercise more or less every day.
At the same time, I keep up with the latest science and understand the limitations of exercise as a means of sustainable weight loss for the general population.
Please stop talking about simple arithmetic - the body is not a simple machine and trying to conceptualize it as such is willfully ignorant.
It's really not. Weight, atleast if you control for muscle weight, is an extremely good predictor of health issues at almost every level. It's a huge problem for your body both in many complicated internal ways, all the way to simple mechanical ways, putting increased stress on most of your joints and bones.
Just throwing this out there. I'm a homebody living in a climate where the weather is kind of miserable for half of the year so would rather just execrise at home, and I've gotten fantastic mileage out of resources on the r/bodyweightfitness subreddit. I just have a pull-up bar and some gymnastic rings hanging from it. Been doing something very closely based on the Recommended Routine for almost 10 years now, on and off (mostly off, to be honest). It keeps me sane and healthy, or at least definitely more so if I didn't bother with it.
Sure, it'd also be nice to have a small portioned meal that tastes good and meets your needs and satisfies your hunger for longer. Can GLP-1 agonists (intestinal enzyme, so maybe just package it well?) just be added to foods like MSG to achieve this? Like a lactaid but it's a GLP-1 agonists
There are also plenty of ways to have a large portioned meal that tastes good and meets your needs and satisfies your hunger for longer, without having to resort to drugs to curb your appetite.
Greg Doucette's cookbook shows how you can add "bulky" food that are lower in calories. I'm not a fan of the propensity of artificial sweeteners, but the principles are the important thing.
As an aside, I also wonder if this fascination with having "quick fixes" (aka let's add GLP-1 agonists to reduce appetite) is a generational thing, or just that in HN we have a bio-hacking mindset?
You can eat as much meat and tropical fats as it takes to satisfy, and you WILL lose weight and regain metabolic health. The catch is, you gotta ditch most of the carbs.
I think most people are put off by running. It's just too intense. But if you buy few pieces of equipment like a kayak, a paddle board, a trail bike and rollerblades. And this is all the equipment you need to exercise outdoors in a fun way, for most of the year. And you'll forget you're getting exercise, once you're out in nature. And can actually enjoy it.
It's also possible (and fun!) to run with very low intensity. Meaning, at a pace where you can still talk without too much discomfort. Doing a nice 20-30km trail run at this pace is incredibly relaxing.
> We knew from studies in the 1950s comparing London bus drivers and London bus conductors that lived in the same environment, but one — they had the bus drivers who were sitting, the conductors were standing, and the heart disease rate among the drivers was twice that of the conductors.
> We knew from studies in the 1950s comparing London bus drivers and London bus conductors that lived in the same environment, but one — they had the bus drivers who were sitting, the conductors were standing, and the heart disease rate among the drivers was twice that of the conductors.
Yeah, uhhhh, driving a bus in an urban centre built before motor vehicles doesn’t sound like the most calming of careers.
It's all relative, from the PoV of the driver it was less stressful than his earlier driving gig:
"He said that he had been a tank-driver during the war and that a tank would have had no trouble getting on to the other side and decided to see if a double-decker could do the same.
Unless they randomly assigned jobs, I am quite skeptical. A person with poor cardiovascular health seems unlikely to pursue a job that requires walking all day!
Some places in the UK are having problems retaining/recruiting drivers because of safety issues: attacks on bus drivers, either by angry passengers or random yobs :(
Everyone should work up to at least meeting the physical activity guidelines for health [0]. Highly recommend the Barbell Medicine podcast for more information.
"It doesn't matter whether you do it in the morning, at lunchtime, in the evenings. It's particularly good after meals, so the evening is a fine time to take a brisk walk"
Its not even remotely true. A lot of people before the invention of modern medicine did considerable manual labour and yet died at a younger age. Bang for the buck the most effective intervention is definitely vaccines, they are responsible for most of the longevity and the enormous reduction in childhood deaths we see today. Exercise is a mere blip in comparison to the effectiveness of vaccines and worse is a lot of the studies to do with exercise are low and very low quality because they are observational with relatively small effects leaving them prone to bias.
That isn't saying exercise doesn't improve health it looks like it does, but compared to other pharmaceutical interventions its not very impressive.
You are right. But. I know Ivy League educated compsci kids 22-25 with "e/" shit in their social media, working for giant companies whose products you use, who think vaccines should be optional / revoked. None think exercise is bad for you.
I was always wondering if the exercises are the real panacea. if you look at some of the real successful and effective people, they all have one thing in common. they don't exercise. Look at Henry Kissinger, who is about 400 ibs and 100 years old when he died last year. He wrote a book about aI right before he died. Warren Buffet, now 96 years old, still working and incredibly smart. Donald Trump. again become president twice already. these people are all obese and never exercise.
I personally went through this journey where I was sedentary for about 10 years and in my late 20s I could not run, I could not walk long distances, by back was killing me, I had wrist issues. Seeing a physical therapist who could help rebuild my body while starting with light exercise and gradually building up worked for me. I spent 2 months just strengthening my ankles and feet before I could run because they were so atrophied.
Eventually I got past that local maxima and now I can run 25 km with 2km elevation gain up a mountain and back which would have killed me before.
Lastly I will say that exercise should be gradually eased into, a lot of people are put off by exercise because they start too hard and make themself miserable. For cardio you should try to keep your heart rate within a lower range (zone 2 cardio at around 70% of max heartrate). For most people this means your cardio starts with walking up a hill, and you won’t get to actually running until later.