I'm in good shape. To some people, it's a bit of a mystery how I'm much more physically fit than they are. They know I go to the gym, but, hey, they go to the gym sometimes, too, so what's the deal? Here's the secret:
I work really, really hard.
When I go to the gym, I push myself as far as I can take it mentally and physically that day. Some days it's more than others. But overall, I work much harder in the gym than most people I know.
Treat your exercise time as something to excel it, not a chore to do. It can make a world of difference.
Except it is a chore, it's not fun. If we could just take a magic pill and instantly be in shape, I can't imagine anyone still choosing to exercise, thus, chore!
It's a chore to you, and I'm sorry for that. So find something fun.
That you can't imagine anyone still choosing to exercise says a lot about how you think about it. Going through a good workout is the same for me as solving a hard problem.
Sure it says a lot about how I think about it, I think people weren't meant push around artificial weights for hours on end boring themselves to death, it's not what our muscles are for. They're for walking and running and hunting and other physical activities that actually have a point beyond recursively working out to have muscles to work out with. Staying in shape should be a means, not and end.
It's cool that you've figured out how to enjoy it, but to most of society, it's an utterly boring mind numbing repetitious activity; that it has health benefits makes it no less so.
If your body was just naturally in great shape and required no exercise to stay so, you're telling me you'd still go to the gym and pump weights? For what possible reason?
If you're bored during your workouts, you're doing it wrong. It's that simple.
My sport of choice is Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I tend to combine strength training and conditioning to complement BJJ practices. But sometimes I'll lift for power only, because it's fun to change it up.
Since you're on HN, I assume you're a programmer. Don't you like solving programming puzzles? Doesn't it make you feel good to figure something out, even if there's no obvious benefit? I have the same attitude with workouts - both BJJ and the strength training I do.
Last week, I wondered if I could do five reps of five set of Clean & Press at 185 pounds. I could seven months ago. I thought my strength wasn't up to where it had been. But I did it. It was hard; it took considerable effort to not let myself feel tired inbetween sets, and to maintain focus during the sets. I had set an ambitious but realistic goal, and I achieved it. I went home feeling good.
If you have the right attitude to exercising, there are considerable mental benefits. I think a big part of this is training for performance, not looks. Pushing yourself to achieve your performance goals, not your body-image goals. But someone else said it better, so I'll link to him: http://dynamicfitness.blogspot.com/2006/04/df-tip-13-enough-...
Find something you have fun doing. Maybe a sport or a martial art. Or maybe your concept of "working out" is too narrow; check out http://www.crossfit.com for people who stress performance during workouts that generally last less than 30 minutes, but will exhaust you.
Ah, see, that's what I meant by being a means, a sport is and end and something fun in itself where the getting in shape is a side effect. When I say working out, I'm specifically talking about pumping iron in a gym. Yes I'm a programmer, so my definition isn't so much narrow as it is precise, what can I say; that's how we are. Playing a sport isn't working out, it's playing a sport; that it happens to work you out is not the main point merely a nice benefit. Where I live, it's 115 degrees outside, working up a sweat is the last thing I want to do, I spend much of my time trying to stop sweating!
"Last week, I wondered if I could do five reps of five set of Clean & Press at 185 pounds."
Yes, but can you wonder that a few times a week on a regular basis and continue to get any thrill or sense of accomplishment out of it. Performance are only motivating when you're trying to improve your performance, but that can't go on forever, at some point you just want to maintain and it's the maintaining, at a gym, that's boring as fuck.
I agree you have to find something fun to do that works you out as a side effect, like "Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu", which is my whole point. Pumping iron in the gym, in the long term, is boring as fuck, no matter how you slice it.
I haven't found my "something fun" yet, maybe I will someday, but good for you that you have.
Actually, I lifted regularly - and enjoyed it - before I got into BJJ. The key is I'm always trying to improve my performance when lifting. Every time I go into the gym, I have a different goal.
An important point here is that I know a variety of lifts, so I know a variety of ways I can challenge myself. Eventually I come back to similar challenges, but then I always try to improve. So, yes, doing 5x5 C&P with 185 pounds again would be boring. So I'll do 190 pounds, because I know it will be hard, and I'm not sure if I can do it.
I agree, if you look at it as maintenance, it is boring, and you will stop doing it. So focus on improving performance, even if what you try to improve changes.
And I can't help but notice you keep saying "pumping iron." Are you thinking of bodybuilder style workouts? I focus on movements, not muscles.
I don't understand why people think staying fit is such a god damn mystery. Exercise a few hours a week, eat a well balanced diet, get enough sleep. How hard is that?
Yeah its not that hard. Just have to make time. I have been trying lately more intense training, which seems to work well for me both fitness and good use of time (as sessions are shorter and more intense).
People lack critical thinking skills and the power to change their emotional schema, the way they deal with events in their lives. They are a product of their environment. So where on the giant can we attack with the greatest work/reward ratio? Education? Media? I don't know. Human beings are some crazy ass animals yo.
> Within a few months, most of the participants had resorted to exercising as much as they chose to. That left researchers with a slightly different data set than they had planned for...
This self-selection tends to invalidate the study I think. It is possible that the people who chose not to exercise much were exactly the ones who needed it the most. The people who chose to exercise a lot are more likely to have been fitter in the first place.
Not to mention the fact that almost no treatment of a "study" in popular media distinguishes between correlation and causation. There is a difference, a fact lost on almost everyone these days.
[I lost .4 pounds last Thursday commenting on Hacker News. Therefore, typing causes weight loss :-) ]
If I read correctly all they even looked at was light treadmill exercise. Yeah, you have to do that for hours to impact the body. You have to burn through glycogen stores to really get anywhere. It's different for more intense sessions and strength training, though. They can be short and have impact beyond calorie arithmetic.
Perhaps the problem is that the study only considered exercise is moderate.
<antecdote> I've found high intensity exercise for short periods of time (20-40 minutes, 3-4 times a week) has far more effect for me personally than moderate exercise (45-60 minutes, 5-6 times a week) I've seen more personal improvement doing CrossFit (www.crossfit.com) than I ever did previously going to the local gym. </antecdote>
Lately I have been doing interval swimming where I swim one lap freestyle as if my life depended on it, and then another lap doing the backstroke as fast as I can. I am going 100% the whole time.
I rest for a few minutes and as soon as I feel I've got my breath slightly back, I do it all over again.
Not sure what it is about getting the hard pumping that hard for short intervals, but I've lost weight in the process.
The thing about it is there is no way to become content. You see a lot of cardio people churning away at the same rate on the treadmill as they were doing last week.
But with my interval swimming, I am going 100%. You are always pushing full throttle; there's no allowance for contentment.
read the whole article. They tried to get some of the women to do high intensity exercise, but they couldn't stick to the protocol.
> Jakicic and his colleagues originally designed their study to measure whether weight loss could really be achieved and maintained through moderate-intensity exercise... or whether it was preferable to engage in shorter bursts of more vigorous-intensity activity... The problem was that not enough of the women stuck with their assigned exercise categories for the researchers to gather enough meaningful data. Within a few months, most of the participants had resorted to exercising as much as they chose to. That left researchers with a slightly different data set than they had planned for
(FWIW I'm all about HIIT, but I don't know how you can get people into it once it becomes inconceivable to do high-intensity work.)
Read the book "Good Calories, Bad Calories" by Gary Taubes. The scientific evidence supports the theory that carbos, especially refined carbs and sugars, are the cause of obesity and a raft of modern ailments. The most striking comment was that input (eating) and output (exercise) are dependent variables... something that these eatless/exercisemore approaches ignore.
One theory says that the food you eat can affect your set point. High-calorie, strongly flavored foods that are easily digested (which make up most of the modern American diet) raise your set point. Breaking the flavor-calorie association with flavorless calories supposedly lowers your set point.
It does seem that the set point is movable. If you've been overweight for 20 years, there may very well be nothing that you can do about it.
An interesting (but very difficult to conduct) study would be an investigation into this particular rubicon of flab. How fat can you become for how long before it is impossible to go back.
The French have more leisure time than Americans. It's just as much about what going on in your life stress-wise as it is about what you eat.
We have much to learn about life-work balance from the rest of the world. It's unfortunate that some parts of the world look at America and think that they should be emulating us! Please stop that before it's too late.
America needs Mexican siestas and French vacation time in the worst way.
It's also about the rate of absorption into your body, as well as the consistency of flavors (packaged food is very uniform, and creates strong associations)
That paragraph in the article really got on my nerves, because the whole idea of a "set point" for weight is wrong. There is no set point for weight. The only reason people think there is one is because it's a nice, neat hypothesis. Unfortunately, it is directly contradicted by evidence.
Your body does not try to return to a some weight, but rather resists changes in weight. Given constant diet and exercise, weight will asymptotically settle at some value and stay there. Make a significant change to diet and/or exercise, and the asymptote changes accordingly.
your theory is one theory, and it's the view held by society. does not hold that the set point theory is invalid. I would not be at all surprised if your (extremely complex) body system had an 'equilibrium' weight which it will attempt to normalise itself at, at the translational, post-transcriptional or homonal level. likely a mix of both.
It's not "my theory", but rather the theory I learnt in a Behavioural Neuroscience course. There was a chapter on hunger and eating that spent a good deal of time debunking set point theory. The textbook is "Biopsychology" by Pinel, chapter 12, if you're interested.
If there is such an fixed "equilibrium" weight, there's no evidence for it I know of. I find it curious you call the settling point model "extremely complex", since what I've described so far is very simple: body weight remains constant under constant conditions, and weight changes are dampened by negative feedback. Yours is actually the same so far, but adds a fixed, constant set point.
I agree. White americans, are similiar to Europeans (more like a mix), yet they are a lot fatter.
And how do you explain people in North California, or northern VA/DC/Maryland being a lot slimer than people just a state away.
It seems more a enviroment/culturual/city walkability thing
The DC metro area has one simple advantage over the surrounding areas: money. There's a very strong correlation between lower and lower-middle income people and obesity. There are too many complex relationships involved to even begin to draw conclusions.
The walkability and culture things are pretty critical, but my armchair opinion is that the biggest factor is fat consumption. Americans eat something like 20% as much fat as they did in the 40s, and the drop off since the early 80s has been fairly sharp. People are eating much less fat and much more starch, with all the insulin and fat storage implications that brings.
Across time and between nations now the role of fat is pretty clear. More fat, thinner people. The recent studies that have put people on high fat, low carb diets are unmatched. People lose the weight and keep it off when you tell them to cut the potatoes and eat butter instead.
I disagree. On average, the Japanese get over 80% of their calories from carbohydrates, and over half from rice alone. They're also the thinnest of all economically developed people in the world, and have the greatest longevity.
Furthermore, in the 1970's the Japanese diet was even more dominated by carbohydrates and people the populace was even thinner. At that time, 75% of calories were supplied by rice, and close to 90% by carbohydrates in general.
The phenomena isn't restricted to Japan either China is also seeing increasing obesity, heart disease and diabetes as its people living in top-tier and second tier cities adopt diets higher in fat and higher in protein.
The current American diet is actually unusually high in protein and fat by historical (i.e. pre-WWII) standards.
Japanese lifespan and health have improved as fat consumption has risen almost geometrically. The healthiest Japanese are the Okinawans, with the highest fat consumption.
I can't comment on why Japanese have relatively low rates of obesity for the industrialized world with a starchy diet. But the pattern does generally hold true.
> The current American diet is actually unusually high in protein and fat by historical (i.e. pre-WWII) standards.
This is simply wrong with regard to fat. I don't know about the exact change in protein intake, but people eat much less fat and oil now than historically. You can't even get things like beef kidney, suet, or lard anymore at American grocery stores.
People also consume many more calories in places where they didn't in the past. For instance, a soy latte from Starbucks has 210 calories. If you don't change anything in your diet or exercise habits and drink one of these every work day, you'll gain 15 pounds in a year.
I don't know this for sure, but if I recall correctly people eat fewer calories now than they did in the 70s. I know it's not a dramatically different number either way. It's the composition of the calorie that has changed. I'm firmly convinced of the fat vs starch theory. People eat much less fat and oils now and eat more starch.
I doubt I'd recommend replacing fat with carbohydrates, but you're correct in that sugars (starches/carbohydrates break down into...) cause the body to store fat (more specifically, the elevated insulin levels that accompany this).
Regarding weight loss: I work & exercise with a variety of body types (these body types have people names too!), and, within this small sample, I've found that the dominating factor in overall weight is diet, not exercise.
Essentially, exercise controls muscle tone and how "tight" the skin is, while diet seems to control the overall body shape.
The number of fat cells becomes fixed by the end of adolescence. As a child, fatty cells proliferate, but remain rather small. Your daily food as a kid influences how many cells you'll end up having as an adult.
Kids nowadays have a horrible diet of sugary drinks and fatty pseudo-chocolate treats.
Fat cells are very much involved in total body weight control, both through enzymes and by hosting lipid-soluble hormones in their oil droplets. So an adult having a lot of fat cells is at a disadvantage in a McBurger world.
"The number of fat cells becomes fixed by the end of adolescence."
Uh, reference? I think you're wrong there. From what I remember, new fat cells grow when weight is gained, and are "deflated", but mostly survive, when weight is lost.
Most people eat large quantities of food all at once. Stop half way and wait 20 minutes and you might not be hungry anymore. If you eat too quickly then you don't know at what point you'd eaten enough to satisfy your hunger.
You change your behavior, taking into account that your hunger point is lying to you.
You stop eating before you feel full.
You look up how many calories you should be eating and how much you want to lose. (3500 calories = 1 pound of fat; if you maintain a 500 calorie deficit every day, you'll lose a pound a week).
You weigh yourself every day, using signal processing techniques to remove random variations in your weight caused by water and reveal the trendline of where your weight is headed.
You then adjust your consumption based on where your weight is headed. Trendline sloping upwards? Eat fewer calories.
If you do this for a long time, your hunger point may change. It may not. But you don't care about your hunger point, you care about eating the right amount of food. The key insight is to realize that your hunger point may be lying to you, so you need to get an accurate hunger point. Walker describes how to do this in his book, combining signal processing with dieting.
Yankee apologists are bad enough. Now we have fat people apologists. It really isn't hard: exercise moderately, take walk breaks, get enough sleep, consume primarily vegetables then fruit then meat/carbs. Eat five small meals a day and focus on lower calories.
The "seven a day" recommendation seems to be baseless myth. Nobody can figure out where it came from. Surveys find no correlation to life span or health beyond two servings of vegetables a day.
I just quickly went through the references and every one of them is either: a pooled analysis (inscrutable), a relative risk factor analysis (worthless; assumptions piled on assumptions), or doesn't indicate anything about servings.
I have in the past seen actual population studies, not pop media articles, looking at relative vegetable consumption and coming up blank. High rates of heart disease in indian vegetarians, very low rates of heart disease in low vegetable consumption mormons, etc.
Actual controlled experiments (not surveys) come up blank when they feed people more fruit and vegetables than a relatively low cut-off. Of course surveys are going to be very hard to get any useful information out of because of course health conscious people in America will tend to eat vegetables; that doesn't establish causation, only that they follow one piece of advice whether valid or not. Look at these actual experiments:
>> High rates of heart disease in indian vegetarians...
Have you ever been to an Indian restaurant and ordered a vegetarian meal? While incredibly flavorful, I wouldn't classify it as even moderately healthy--
What is served in Indian restaurants (especially in the US) is far removed from and has way too much oil / cream than what is the norm in Indian homes.
I work really, really hard.
When I go to the gym, I push myself as far as I can take it mentally and physically that day. Some days it's more than others. But overall, I work much harder in the gym than most people I know.
Treat your exercise time as something to excel it, not a chore to do. It can make a world of difference.