I reversed diabetes with diet alone by doing my own research[1], taking charge of my health. I lost 180lbs in the process. No exercise (disabled). Very much a work in progress.
I'm not rejecting the importance of exercise for health - I follow the general principal of eating to get healthy, exercising to get fit - but I think we skip over the absolute tragedy that is the Standard American Diet at our peril.
Recovering from the consuequences of three/four generations of preaching the lipid hypothesis[2], as fast as we damn well can, is the ultimate way to defy depression, disease and early death.
I'm on the same track as you, I've lost about 80lbs so far and I've done zero exercise.
I've found that when I tell people this, they worry about my health even more than they did when I was 80lbs heavier. It's bizarre.
Never mind the fact that my blood pressure is now a pristine 110 over 70, all my pre-diabetic symptoms have disappeared, my sleep apnea is cured, my gastroesophageal reflux disease is completely gone, my cholesterol and triglycerides are back to normal, etc.
The fact is exercise has an almost negligible impact on weight loss.
Let's be very generous and say an hour of typical exercise burns 350 calories. If you're overweight, compare that to the 120 calories you burn per hour spent sitting in your chair. That's an extra 230 calories you burned by exercising for an hour.
That 230 calorie expenditure costs you:
* 1.5 to 2 hours of disruption to your daily life
* An hour spent being extremely bored and uncomfortable
* An ever-growing amount of generalized aches and joint pains as you put together consecutive days of doing this
And at 230 calories per hour, doing an hour of exercise every single day nets you 1610 calories per week, which is less than 1 pound of fat loss every 2 weeks. You turn your whole life upside-down, make yourself miserable and in pain every single day, take significant time away from work and studying and family, and all you get is LESS THAN 1 additional pound lost every 2 weeks.
I honestly think the net impact of promoting exercise as a weight loss option is people getting and staying fatter. People have a tendency to dramatically overestimate the calories they're burning, people want to use exercise as a way to avoid having to eat less, and people use exercise as an excuse to eat more. It also causes an amount of disruption and discomfort in people's lives that's probably the number one cause of people giving up on their weight loss goals.
As far as health impacts, I'm still not convinced on the cause-and-effect here. I want to start doing some physical activities soon, but that's not going to cause me to be less depressed, that's a result of me being less depressed because of all the weight I've been losing. All the studies I've seen on exercise and health draw the same sort of "playing basketball makes you taller"-conclusion.
Sure, eating better has a huge impact. But you miss the main argument why physical training helps in weight loss: Physical training increaes your resting metabolic rate by ~10%. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11283427
Since you are not doing sports 95% of the time, this has a lot of leverage. And you can build muscle with 30min of training per day easily.
Also, you please check whether you mean kilocalories when you say calories.
Lifting weights is different - the muscle consumes calories just being there. Also call me a masochist, but I love lifting weights - its a physical rush, a challenge, allows me to work off frustrations, and like Arnie I enjoy feeling pumped. I can get in and out of the gym within an hour having hammered my muscles plenty. Do that 3 or 4 times a week and you'll keep yourself strong and young into old age. You should only get aches and pains if you are doing something wrong or have an underlying health issue -
and even if you do, doctors still almost always recommend weight bearing exercise.
> An hour spent being extremely bored and uncomfortable
In the beginning, this is often true. But exercise is addictive! When your body gets used to it, you really want it and it is not uncomfortable. That "runners high" is also not a myth.
I've been jogging for a long time. For the first year, I had to force myself to do it. After that, I was surprised to find I started enjoying it, looking forward it, and missing it if I didn't do it.
I don't try very hard at it, I'm not running against time, I just jog and don't worry about it.
As for boredom, the opposite happens to me. I find I think better while jogging. I work on programming bugs while jogging, and often find solutions that eluded me while sitting at my desk. I write articles and compose presentations while jogging. It's often my most intellectually productive time of the day.
I'm willing to grant that this must be true for some people. However, I don't think it's true for everyone, or maybe even most people. In the early 90s I was in the US Army for a couple years, and exercise never got better: it was always a struggle: boring, painful, and stressful. I suppose one good thing about it was that it was very rare that anything worse happened to me later in the day... :)
Looking around at the PT groups I was in during that time, I do not think most of them were looking forward to it.
Just guessing, but maybe a difference between recreational exercise by choice vs duty or imposed regimen. Or perhaps just having choice over the kind of exercise makes a difference.
I've never been able to reach a point where weight training is anything but boring and painful. The trouble is it requires mental focus, and I cannot think about other things while lifting.
I try to mitigate the boredom by watching a movie while doing it.
I listen to headphones, music, podcasts, ebooks. I find it a very stimulating time and I feel better about it at a gym, even though I don't socialize much.
Just seeing the same people every day makes me feel like a community member and helps me stay motivated and connected.
I agree, exercise is addictive, and I love running, but I worry that it's bad for the joints, from what I've read, which is the only thing holding me back at the moment. But I see all these people running, and I wonder, are there no join issues, or does everyone just not know yet.
>Let's be very generous and say an hour of typical exercise burns 350 calories.
This isn't being generous at all. Once you get past the initial few weeks of not being physically able to put that much effort into exercise, 350 calories for an entire hour would be on the low end of what I expect most people to burn.
>I honestly think the net impact of promoting exercise as a weight loss option is people getting and staying fatter. People have a tendency to dramatically overestimate the calories they're burning, people want to use exercise as a way to avoid having to eat less, and people use exercise as an excuse to eat more. It also causes an amount of disruption and discomfort in people's lives that's probably the number one cause of people giving up on their weight loss goals.
Virtually everyone that advocates exercise as a way to lose weight mentions in the same breath that it has to go hand-in-hand with a diet. It is an objective fact that if you burn more calories in a day because you exercise, that you will get away with eating more food. How much more depends on how many calories you burn when exercising.
The concept of weight loss is very simple. Burn more calories than you eat. People need to start somewhere by making an estimate of how many calories that they burn on a daily basis and then adjust it slowly if they don't lose weight.
Its silly to act like the concepts of physical fitness and weight loss are so complicated that people are being manipulated and/or confused into gaining weight. The only thing difficult about losing weight is the consistent execution of an incredibly simple process.
> There are more reasons to exercise than just weight loss and there's more to being healthy than just maintaining a specific weight.
This is the worst advice you could ever give to someone who's very overweight.
For overweight people exercise is a complete waste of time, and their bodyweight actually is what matters above all else as far as their health goes.
Telling an obese person that they should do some jumping jacks so their heart will be nice and healthy is just absurd. I see parents doing this all the time (and had it done to me), they get their obese kid running around and encourage them to engage in all these ultra-boring uncomfortable painful "fitness activities" that will never in a million years form into a habit for them. Then they take them home and give them some chicken nuggets for a job well done.
These people are more concerned with the theater of weight loss than they are with actual weight loss, because the theater of it gives them the highest ratio of guilt relief to effort expended.
For those kids, for the rest of their lives, every time they consider trying to lose weight, they'll see visions of running toward a brick wall for an hour without ever getting closer to it, and taking an hour out of their day to go somewhere and move things with their arms until they're sore. "Yeah fuck that", they'll say, never fully realizing that weight loss is really just about passively managing their food intake. Or maybe they'll try, it'll make them completely miserable (like it does for most people), and they'll perceive that as a personal failing and give up both dieting and exercise, once again not realizing that 99% of their goal can be achieved with just the dieting part.
The reality is that as long as you're overweight, your primary health objective should be to lose weight, and the only way to do that is to change what you eat and how much of it you eat over the long term. If adding exercise to that equation adds a 0.1% chance of you giving up, then it's not worth it.
Until you're at a normal weight, exercise is a premature optimization.
> If adding exercise to that equation adds a 0.1% chance of you giving up
That's because you put on a (too) high standard, and if you don't make it, instead of lowering your goal you end up with a defeatist attitude and give up. If you do that in your professional life as well that's a recipe for a burnout.
Example: say you want to go to the gym but you can't make it this week. Is that a huge issue? Does that mean you shouldn't go anymore at all? That everything's lost? No! Just try next time again, and do your best. Say your training scheme tells you that you should run 5 km in 30 min, you're on 20 min and only at 2,5 km. Does that mean you should give up? No. It means you should follow your pace as far as you can push it. Overcoming such might even strengthen you if the adversary is burnout.
If you're under the guidance of a quality physician or training scheme (basically same, as physician makes that for/with you) that shouldn't happen.
I replied to a previous post of you where you were saying you were running for an hour (!) at the gym. An hour! That's not how you start with getting fit. That's way too hardcore already. For one, its too long. Second, its the same stuff all the time, while you clearly don't seem to enjoy running. If you enjoy running, sure, but you don't.
Why don't you try different exercises and accept that there's some you like and some you dislike? Example: if you're only rowling for 10 minutes while you enjoy planking more which is next, you got something to look forward to. Plus, perhaps you'll start to like rowling eventually. My (anecdotal) experience is that eventually, once I get good at it, I start enjoying it more.
When I do daily exercises as broadcasted on TV (using rebroadcasted IPTV) there's all kind of exercises I enjoy and some I dislike. Especially the stuff I'm relatively bad at (basically anything involving hamstring like multiple, deep squats) is rough. But after I did them I feel the difference. And if I can't do it exactly as the example shows, I can at least try to mimmic it as good as I can. Eventually, I'll get better.
It's not inaccurately low at all. You're basing your estimate on perfect/ideal scenarios, I'm basing it on the kind of thing the average overweight person trying to lose weight does when they spend an hour in a gym. They walk on a treadmill or they do more intense things with a lot of breaks in between.
Also, there is no proper form of exercise for an obese person that won't cause pains or aches, it doesn't exist. We might just be coming from different backgrounds and talking about different body types here.
> I want to start doing some physical activities soon, but that's not going to cause me to be less depressed
How do you know?
I think you are being unfair to yourself to so easily dismiss what exercise can do for your moods. When I'm feeling down, getting my heart rate up for 45 minutes totally turns around the day. I don't know the exact reason, maybe all the rapid blood flow or found energy, whatever it is, it is not a reaction I get from anything else.
An article was shared here recently how so many great artists and scientists in the past were slaves to a ritual of long stretches of physical activity every day. It really changes how your brain works.
Even if there was no evidence, surely the testimonies of many others right here on this page would at least be worth the possibility that it could be effective.
No one is suggesting that exercise replace any other treatment. Is that the impression you were getting? But because it has in fact helped at least some people, it seems limiting for any person to disqualify that for themselves without a try.
I'm a proponent of light daily exercise (my government recommends 21 min a day light exercise and twice a week heavy exercise [1]), but this argument doesn't hold water. There are also people who claim to benefit from homeopathy (a pseudoscience). Is their anecdotal evidence worth as much as ours?
[1] To be precise: 150 min a week of medium movement (walking, cycling), twice a week heavy movement (running, soccer aka football), and avoid sitting still [2]. Also, the difference between 0 and 15 min of exercise is larger than 15 and 30 min. That's why it feels so good to start with exercises and only do it very little.
That's a strange comparison. Nearly every doctor in existence recommends exercise for a wide variety of reasons. How many recommend homeopathy? It's more than a little surprising to me to see several people in this thread who are explicitly skeptical about the value and potential effects of exercise.
I just think it would be unfair for someone to read these comments and then think, "ah, see, there is no reason I should try regularly exercising," and give up before they have started. Do you think that is a good outcome? Even you said you are a proponent of exercise.
We all sometimes share anecdotes. I shared one as well in this thread.
I don't discount the advice of doctors, or the advice from the government which is a summary of the advice of many medical experts.
What I say is that anecdotal evidence isn't evidence, and when someone calls us on that, we should accept that specific counter-argument and move on.
If we're going to enforce people to accept our anecdotal evidence what is going to stop people from accepting other's anecdotal evidence on, say, homeopathy indeed?
Also, the amount of professionals who recommend something isn't definitive proof either. Not every professional is equal. What matters is the amount of studies which haven't been debunked.
> I just think it would be unfair for someone to read these comments and then think, "ah, see, there is no reason I should try regularly exercising," and give up before they have started. Do you think that is a good outcome? Even you said you are a proponent of exercise.
I don't know about the USA or anywhere else in the world but the health recommendation I quoted was merely a minor revision and widely in the local news. I read about it in the newspaper, saw it on TV in the news, saw it covered on a popular talkshow, and I'm sure it was shared on social media as well. People who, at this point, do not want to exercise and claim it is completely useless are just ignorant or in denial IMNSHO. Its the same with people who remain smoker for whatever excuse or reason, or who keep drinking alcohol.
However as I wrote in numerous posts throughout this thread, diet has the largest effect on health. I'm repeating myself, but its: less calories, less sugar, less salt, less saturated fat (transfats are a thing of the past).
I also very much liked the quote of someone saying that whoever says there's more to dieting than calories is trying to sell you something. It makes losing weight unnecessarily difficult and complex.
Exercise increases your metabolic rate so you burn much more calories throughout the day, its not just the number on your treadmill.
I still agree with your main point though, that weight loss is mostly about diet. Just saying questions about fitness and nutrition are incredibly nuanced because the body is a complex system.
15 years of being very overweight and trying to lose weight through exercise = 1050 calories/hour only if I exercise at a level of intensity that risks injury and causes me to be practically bedridden for a week even without injury.
Your calculation is for a person who weighs 80kg, which is someone who doesn't need to lose any weight. People who have a lot of weight to lose aren't capable of running for an hour.
Ok, but if you plan to do something(not just excercise) regularly, maybe it is better not to calculate with the initial costs/benefits but with the long term averages...
There are plenty of activities in life that initially only have costs and zero benfits - excercise at least consumes calories from day 1...
> Your calculation is for a person who weighs 80kg, which is someone who doesn't need to lose any weight.
If you are 1m80, quite possibly. Don't forget it isn't just about BMI but also waist circumference. Obese men and alcoholics likely have high waist circumference.
Uncomfortable meaning physically uncomfortable. Even when it's not painful (like walking for an hour on a treadmill), it is uncomfortable and it feels bad and it's boring. Yes podcasts and ebooks are great, but they're even better when you're not exercising.
People who enjoy exercise are by far the exception, otherwise we'd see a lot more people doing it. We would see every elliptical at the gym occupied on January 1st, and they'd stay occupied indefinitely.
But that's not what we see. The ellipticals are all taken on January 1st, and they're all empty by February.
People need motivation and willpower to do it. That should tell you all you need to know about how enjoyable it is. You don't need motivation or willpower to eat a steak or watch a movie, because those things are fun. You need motivation and willpower to exercise, because it's boring and it sucks.
Sorry but every time this subject comes up there's this contingent of people trying to insist to everyone how fun exercise is, and none of you seem to realize that you're outliers and this is your hobby and not everyone likes your hobby. Most people don't like it and can't be convinced to like it and will never like it, and that's normal.
But the tone is always that there's something deficient with people who don't exercise, and if they don't like it that's a sign of their deficiency or something, and you think we all need pep-talks to better ourselves. I don't agree with this.
I don't think exercise matters anywhere near as much as you think it does. I've waited my whole life for proof, and all I've ever gotten is correlations found in studies funded by vested interests (if exercise works the food industry can shift blame onto the consumer).
> I don't think exercise matters anywhere near as much as you think it does. I've waited my whole life for proof, and all I've ever gotten is correlations found in studies funded by vested interests (if exercise works the food industry can shift blame onto the consumer).
It's pretty clear that you haven't researched much, given that you had absolutely no clue how many calories are burned from an hour of exercise. And the vested interests of the fitness industry are not nearly as strong as the food industry among others, and I don't think it's fair or accurate to characterize the massive amount of research showing the benefits of exercise as being corrupted by money.
You are right though that diet is the key to losing weight, because most out of shape people cannot exercise hard enough to be able to eat as much as they want -- but that is one of the nice benefits that you've disregarded of being in really good shape and exercising intensely.
> It's pretty clear that you haven't researched much, given that you had absolutely no clue how many calories are burned from an hour of exercise.
Treadmill manufacturers have every incentive to overestimate the number of calories burned in an hour, so I was generous and used that number. If I had to pick a number myself based on my personal experience, I'd probably have gone lower. The laws of thermodynamics put that number somewhere above 0, I'll admit.
My point was that a population that burns 10,000,000 calories in additional exercise will consume >10,000,000 additional calories as a result of having exercised.
> And the vested interests of the fitness industry are not nearly as strong as the food industry among others, and I don't think it's fair or accurate to characterize the massive amount of research showing the benefits of exercise as being corrupted by money.
I wasn't referring to the fitness industry, I was referring to the food industry. Companies like Coca Cola are among the largest funders of pro-exercise research.[1]
The food industry has an incredible amount to gain by getting people to believe exercise works. They get the PR benefits of showing everyone how much they care about preventing obesity by spending a lot of money on the research, they get to influence that research by cutting funding to scientists who produce inconclusive or negative results (which shapes the way the population thinks about exercise to fit the Coca-Cola narrative), and they release themselves of all liability in the obesity epidemic by shifting the blame onto the consumer.
It allows them to credibly claim that any consumer who experiences negative health effects from drinking their soda could have mitigated those negative health effects by exercising, but chose not to exercise. Muddying the waters on exercise is the food industry's perfect panacea, they want this to be true more than anybody.
And they're winning, too. Remember all that stuff the tobacco companies were doing in the '50s and '60s? That's the food industry right now, except they're winning. Because people will believe anything about exercise.
If you feel physically uncomfortable after exercise perhaps you're doing something wrong. You say walking an hour on the treadmill? You need to start light, and do multiple courses. I recommend making a training scheme with a physician. A good gym has one, the more expensive ones have a lower ratio hence more per person (lower overbooking). A good gym doesn't stimulate you signing up for a subscription, it stimulates you to go to the gym. Another thing I recommend is: go by car (we don't have one) or go to one near you so you can give it everything you've got without worrying getting home.
There's no such thing as people who do and people who don't enjoy exercises because one can learn to enjoy exercise. Been there, done it. The only thing I really liked as a kid, was running, but it was useless in high school because we went to school by bus or bicycle. I hated gym on high school. Too many people, I got bullied, I was lean, nerdy, clumsy, and eventually not fit (turns out I happen to be autistic as well). You can find an exercise you enjoy. It doesn't have to be one at the gym (personally, I'm a hermit, but that is one of my issues and with headphones I can close myself down). A small gym might also work. Or, do gym at home with TV or videos (recorded DVDs, YouTube, I still got converted VHS lying around here from an ex).
We recently moved, and I used to be an avid runner + 1 hr yoga a week. We used a moving company, but we still had to paint and I had to carry the old lamination to a point in the street where the city waste disposal will pick it up (~100 meters). Took me a total of 2,5 hours, solo. It was tough, but because before we moved I changed my running exercise (3/week 30-40 min) to just 15 min a day overall exercises (5/week, all kind of different ones on TV. A mix of some examples: yoga, salsa dancing, boxing, tai chi, including a warming up and cooling down) I was overall more fit. After 1,5 hours I bruised some muscles and my arms could no longer carry so much. I had to half the amount I could carry to an amount which in the start would've been a laughter. My legs were still strong at that point though, so I just had to walk more.
Had I not exercised I'd be far more depressed to even start with this. Had I remained running solely I'd have to walk even more with less amount much sooner. Had I have RL friends, I'd have help. If I wasn't so shy I'd have borrowed a shopping cart from the store near me, and used that instead as my partner suggested.
If my mother-in-law needs help with her smartphone, I can go bicycle to her in 15 min. Instead of looking depressed at that ("oh no I gotta cycle"), I see it as an opportunity, and fun. I gotta go to the store, carry some groceries? My partner needs me to pick up something heavy? Carry her backpack for whatever reason? No worries, I'll do it without a problem. Because I am (relatively) fit.
That is what it's about, and that is precisely "less depressed" as the title says. And, I feel more masculine.
The ultimate way for the entire title is not exercise however, it is a different diet. Exercise can be a good co-factor and goes hand in hand with a better diet. It is great against the depression. And when did I restart running in early adolescence? When did I pick it up? Somewhere end of '00, when I quit smoking.
Exercise is probably over rated is my opinion. Moderate activity like not being a couch potato, and walking around is probably good enough for most people rather than vigorous exercise. Also correlation is confused with causation. The person who is is not active is not necessarily lazy. It the the probably obesity and ill health that makes him/her inactive. Personally I'm on a ketogenic ( about 60 %to 90% calories from saturated fat) nearly all carnivorous diet for the last 4 years. Vegetables, fruit and greens aren't necessarily your best foods. I regret all the earlier years spend eating main stream definition of a 'healthy diet' ( low saturated fat, little or no meat, lots of greens, whole grains and other nonsense.)
Takeaway - you can fool most people most of the times, including the mainstream 'scientific' community.
It very certainly is. Anyone trying to tell you otherwise is probably trying to sell you something.
However, as most people do not count their calories (an underrated activity I'd say, it makes weight control trivially simple if you can keep it up) what's more important is how much your food and activities makes you eat in relation to what you need.
This is what makes exercise not as obvious as a solution. If you move more, you will generally want to eat more. The function of diets is to have the opposite effect, by eating certain kinds of foods you can trick your body into feeling satiated on a calorie deficit.
Generally this happens for instance when you make restrictions on your diet, like eating a limited amount of fat or a limited amount of carbohydrates.
Some foods are designed to be tasty and make you eat more, sometimes your body won't compensate for that and you get on a calorie excess. Processed food and snacks are often in this category. By eating less of those, and more of whole foods you often will naturally reduce your calorie intake. Using less added sugar and fat is often helpful as well.
Going into details of how the body manages your calorie intake like your digestive system and the insulin system is interesting in itself, but it's usually not very relevant for adjusting your diet. This is because the way these affect your body is both non-obvious and often not as well known as it might seem.
Being on a caloric deficit is a sufficient condition for weight loss[0]. The composition of your diet will determine what ratio of it is actually fat/lean body mass, ie diets higher in protein will usually yield higher fat loss and keep more LBM. Exercise/resistance training is also a factor.
>Would you say it's just a matter of calories in minus calories out?
Strictly speaking , yes, Otherwise, no it is not.
If one were to really calculate calories in/out that would be really complicated: you have to consider many factors for example energy required to digest food, energy extracted from the food, energy lost as body heat etc. as far as I vaguely recollect, even something like body heat burns more calories that vigorous exercise.
In general the calorie obsession is nonsense. Just because some scientific sounding jargon is thrown in does not make it well thought off. On a 'good' diet most people will never have to count the calories. Again the takeaway should be that you can fool most people, most of the time. Treat any subject that has popular endorsement with skepticism.
First of, the article doesn't say much or anything about weight and health.
Second, there is a simple and easy to understand solution to your overweight problem: If you take in only the amount of calories, you use, you can't get fat. I'm not even sure what your overweight/previous overweight (i assume it because you are able to loss 180lbs) has to do with lipid hypothesis.
There is not even an german article available for lipid hypothesis. What is a doctor telling you when he/she beliefs in this hypothesis?
The typical refrain that I hear for weight loss/getting back to a healthy balance is "80% diet, 20% exercise" and that the exercise is more to raise your basal metabolic rate up a little so maintenance requires more calories, and thus eating at a deficit has a greater effect. I think the same thing is achieved with even mild physical activity and a solid, well-rounded diet.
I was eating a typical western high carbohydrate, moderate protein, low fat diet with a modest caloric deficit. Lots of starchy veg, breads, rice and pasta.
I migrated gradually (six months) to a very low carb diet including abstinence from all forms of artificial sweetener. 9g/122g/100g carbs/fat/protein. On the plate that's lots of saturated fat, moderate protein from meat and dairy (largely unprocessed) and huge volumes of green vegetables (but they are simply a vehicle for fat and micronutrients.) I will experiment with abstinence from dairy in the future.
I keep my eating to a six hour window, two meals. The artificial sweetener ban is due to the insulin response they can provoke, which goes directly against my goal - to significantly improve my insulin sensitivity. I hope that is specific enough!
I think it's amazing the way we've completely sidelined physical activity - not exercise per se, but any physical activity - in our western lives. Unless you live without a car, there is no requirement for you to walk more than 1000 steps during the day. Wake up, drive to work, sit at your desk, drive to a restaurant for dinner, drive home, plop down on your couch. Rinse, repeat.
Even if you do decide to work out, it tends to be the first thing you drop when you don't have time. Or you worked late. Or you forget your gym clothes. Or you're just too exhausted to go.
We used to be active, our jobs required motion, we had to walk or cycle to work, or even take public transportation - which requires you to at least walk to the stop and back.
Now we literally sit on our asses, day in, day out, and wonder why so many people are obese.
But especially so in the US in comparison to Europe - in the US the urban form implicitly precludes walking through low density of housing and lack what we call pavement in the UK, whereas in Europe more people live in settlements that are focused on an identifiable centre, with walking routes to that centre. Even worse, in some places in the US walking is explicitly banned! However even in spite of that we manage in Europe to be following the US in porking out as a population, so I guess we must be walking less over here also. Personally I find myself walking less and less these days because I can feel the diesel soot making my chest tight, and that really cannot be good for my health. The sooner they get rid of diesel the better.
We like to think so, but there are swaths of Western European where this is true. Replace the Dodge with a Citroen, the Walmart with Tesco, and the Olive Garden with a pub. Even in the most pro-bike and public transportation nations in Europe 20-30% of adults drive to work.
I wear a fitbit. Tuesday I was home sick from work, and all I did was move a little bit to grap a soda, use the bathroom, etc. Even so I went over 1k steps.
Just to avoid confusion, not all clinical depression is fully treatable by exercise; I've known several people who were severely depressed while also being non-car-owning regular cyclists.
Sometimes antidepressants are required. Sometimes therapy is required. Please avoid turning this into "why don't you just exercise".
You can see this if you just look at the last few hundred years of human history. Humans used to have to engage in hours of labor every day just to survive. If the sun was up you were exercising. Were they so much happier and healthier?
There are people in the world who still have to do that labor. They're not happier or healthier or longer-lived than the western world. In fact, the overall high-level trend appears to be that happiness is correlated with being sedentary.
Correlation doesn't mean causation of course, but as long as articles like this one are going to imply that it does, I might as well point out that I can make the exact same argument in the opposite direction.
> They're not happier or healthier or longer-lived than the western world. In fact, the overall high-level trend appears to be that happiness is correlated with being sedentary.
> not all clinical depression is fully treatable by exercise;
We can expand this: exercise is moderately better than nothing to treat depression, unless you use good quality studies in which case we don't know if it's better than nothing or not.
"why don't you exercise?" is always a valid question tho; unless you are physically incapable of doing so, you should, and you're unquestionably damaging your health if you don't.
Actually, yes. It's difficult to try and take control of a situation when simply doing all the things necessary to keep being alive is a challenge. Couple that with the social stigma of being diagnosed with mental problems and yes it's completely possible.
Just in case you need to read this again, exercise changed my life. It simply get rid of the fatigue. Dont take drugs to stay awake, go run half an hour (it really doesn't take more than that to feel tremendous effects).
Definitely. I've recently started exercising more. My bare minimum commitment to myself is to walk a half an hour a day. I regularly do more, but if I only do 30 minutes I don't feel guilty. No matter how long of a day I've had, I'm never too tired to walk for 30 minutes. It's also a good way to build self control through habit.
I would rate my life satisfaction as at least moderate, but is nothing about being alive that could possibly justify the experience of exercise, particularly of running. Given the choice between a lifetime of regular running or death, I’d choose death without even blinking.
You would be missing out on some great experiences. Running is what humans are good at: our bodies are evolutionarily adapted for it. It makes you feel good. Yes, running is hard at first, if you're sedentary. But I can assure you that regular running is considerably more enjoyable than death :)
I started playing tennis twice a week (would like to do it three times but those are the group times) and I love the difference. Aches have completely gone away, and I feel much fitter overall.
Went from 320 pounds to 260. Back problems basically go away unless I have been sitting a really long time. After I go to the gym I feel great no matter what day I have had. Since I haven't died I will just rely on the stats in the article.
I did go back to sport, I used to be moving 6h+ per week then stopped. Amazing help. One thing I should do is swimming, the feeling of complete exhaustion and relaxation after is overwhelmingly good.
I stopped eating shit 3 years ago, but since I started long jogging sessions, I can sense another level, I don't eat, I devour. Apple, beef, veggies, whatever, it doesn't spend more than 15 seconds in my mouth.
You don't really need motivation to get started, you just have to do it anyway, motivated or not. Start small, go walk for 20 minutes around your neighborhood. Repeat until it becomes a habit and part of your daily routine.
If you like animals and you are responsible enough to be a pet owner, getting a dog can help too.
Well, depression is a positive feedback loop where a negative mental state leads to actions that amplify that state. To break the loop, something has to change.
I think it's more organisation than motivation, at least for me. I think most people if someone knocked on the door once a day and said 'hey were off cycling/walking/whatever for an hour, wanna come?' and you had the time available would go. The key is to make it fun and convenient, and then motivation creates itself.
There is a simpler explaination to this: If you spend a few hours doing some exercise (changing cloth, showering, going to the sport area) you are not sitting alone, as usual in front of a display or in your couche. It distracts your mind from your negative thoughts. Also beeing able to walk normally and without pain, going up stairs etc. is a good and normal feeling. When you get older and those basic things stop working, that really sucks. Or being overweight when 'normal' things become tedious.
I'm a great fan of my daily walk. So not saying this is necessarily wrong.
But there's no theory! e.g. mental health isn't understood, so whether exercise is of lasting benefit in that department is unclear. Consider that people pay good money to sit for a week or more to try to elevate their well-being. Consider that athletes have their fair share of mental health issues, and that even top athletes live less than 3 years longer than average. (Which seems like a small difference.)
Consider that people who move about constantly will eventually drop dead of heart failure:
Schools in Canada have kids work an exercise bike to get their heart rate up before class which helped eliminate disruptive behavior and being unable to concentrate on lessons. I tried it on myself in the morning before working through texts, definitely works.
Now I have an elaborate spin bike setup, large TV playing lectures and a bluetooth headset to hear them. I ride the bike for the entire lecture, usually 45mins-1hr15mins, and recently incorporated interval training so whenever a student in the recorded lecture asks a question, it's always one that could have been answered by reading the assigned material beforehand like the student is supposed to do, so I go as hard as possible on the bike until the professor returns to the lecture. After I have no problems concentrating for another hour or so on the assigned reading or trying the proofs in the lecture notes whereas before I as always fidgety sitting for so long during a lecture not wanting to spend yet more time staring at proofs.
I also agree with the other poster exercise usually doesn't equate weight loss since I didn't lose any weight until I started making my own food and avoiding all the takeout junk I was eating. Like everybody else I overestimated the amount of calories burned so feasted on huge pasta dishes and baguette sandwiches.
It's great to have a dog that will be walked every day on every weather. Ok if you have a cold it's not such a great thing but as a desk worker you must go out and walk at least one hour per day around.
If you like animals and are responsible enough to have what amounts to a light version of a child, then dogs are excellent for encouraging activity since they require daily walks.
I agree and disagree. A well-treated animal does require attention and some effort, but I agree it causes no stress, to the contrary. But they're like children who never grow up and will always need you or someone who loves them from the bottom of their heart when you're gone (maybe not so much with, say, lizards, but certainly with dogs and to a lesser degree cats). I don't mean this as a negative per se, I just needed to say that as soon as I saw "light version of a child". When my cats died, I thought what it might be like to have children, and I nearly swooned. But then I thought how much better it is for them to have lived a full life and die on me, than the other way around, and that's certainly not how it would feel with children.
Sometimes it winds me up to have to do it, but I can't not do it or the poor dog ends up miserable. It's the perfect way to force yourself to do at least a minimum every day.
I've moved from an apartment to a house, which means I have two staircases I traverse daily, a small lawn to mow, and a few other things like that.
It's amazing to me what even a slight bit of regular activity can do. It just feels good to be even a little active on a regular basis. I feel so much more ready to move.
Exercise does nothing to lighten my mood. I hate exercise in virtually all forms. Never experienced the "runner's high" or any kind of apparent dopamine production (not saying it didn't happen, just that I don't ever feel better with exercise).
This is a UK article, and I'm going to post a UK-centric, male-centric comment (as a UK-based man), but I suspect my comment applies to both genders, and to many health systems around the world.
I don't doubt exercise is extremely valuable, and that everyone should be following the advice in TFA. However, I am starting to think that lifestyle recommendations are a way for a public health system to wash its hands of its responsibility to actually, proactively care for people. As in: “Well, we're sure you can make changes on your own to improve your health, so just go and do your bit while we quietly neglect to do ours".
Yes, you should exercise, and eat right, and not drink too much, and sleep right, and not stress too much. You should do as much as you reasonably can in all these areas. But if you're looking to "defy depression, disease and early death", you'd also better learn a bit about the way your health system operates, and the common issues it is inclined (presumably for cost reasons) to ignore.
I've written in past comments about thyroid conditions, which are a big deal, and can easily go undiagnosed for a long time (due, basically, to cost-driven neglect). I'm becoming aware of more issues:
1) Testosterone: I’m a middle-aged man and I’ve been complaining to my GP for months about feeling weak while exercising, and about sleep disruption. I’ve been doing my own reading, and have just discovered that hypogonadism (inadequate testosterone levels) is incredibly common amongst middle-aged men:
“Hypogonadism affects approximately 40% of men aged 45 or older, although less than 5% of these men are actually diagnosed and treated for the condition” [1]. Even discounting the fact that the author of this article declares that he consults for pharma companies, that’s a staggering statistic. So why given my symptoms do I have to ask my GP to check my testosterone levels, rather than him having ordered the test months ago?
2) Prolactin: it seems a very significant fraction of the population (e.g. 6-25% of the U. S. population) have pituitary tumours, forty percent of which produce prolactin [2], which is a sex hormone. There’s evidence that people whose prolactin levels are in the upper normal of the physiological reference range, suffer from insulin resistance [3] and have significantly increased risk of mortality [4]. Oh, and prolactin stimulates the immune system and high levels are associated with autoimmune diseases [5]. I had a test done for prolactin levels recently (I requested some tests to check for hypopituitarism), and levels came back quite high but in the normal physiological range (see above, of course). GP response: “no problem, levels are normal”. Which is true, in that I appear to be suffering from quite normal disease that the health system intends to do nothing about.
Bottom line: Do your homework, folks. View your health service as a resource, a gateway to services. When it comes to chronic conditions and diseases of old age, you (or nobody) are the principal investigator.
I have no idea about the health claims being addressed, but I do feel obligated that normal != healthy and perhaps the original comment is conflating the two.
It could be due to all sorts of things, like lower lead levels, endocrine disruptors like BPA, lower smoking rates, social and cultural affects that view masculine traits negatively, lower personal autonomy, declining quality of life for most lower and lower-middle class men, and many similar possibilities.
I've heard that the UK sets its hypothyroidism threshold lower than other countries, so it's harder to get treated. But I don't have the stats to hand.
> When it comes to chronic conditions and diseases of old age, you (or nobody) are the principal investigator.
Well put. This is very important no matter what system you're in. It's a real problem when mental health conditions impair your judgement and ability to make these kind of decisions yourself.
Indeed, I used to have a non-British girlfriend and there seemed to be many cases like this where they will happily treat you outside the UK, but the NHS stubbornly refuses to acknowledge that perhaps the rest of the world has it right, and perhaps the NHS has it wrong. I suspect some important prof somewhere made a call at some point and now cannot go back on it case of losing face..
You should really actually make sure hormonal issues are the problem before attributing your problems to them. This is easily done with a bit of blood work.
tu7001's comment shouldn't be down voted, it is correct. The human body has to expend energy to heat or cool itself when the ambient environment is outside a certain narrow range. Sweating burns some calories, even if you're just sitting around. When we spend our time inside climate controlled rooms then we burn fewer calories. The effect is small, but measurable.
Anecdote time here, but spending some time in a steam room and then entering a cold bath, and doing this 3 times or so, feels like a great cardio workout without the muscle soreness. There's definitely a lot of energy expended, particularly by the circulatory system, in keeping one's core temperature more or less stable.
These articles are such exquisite forms of class warfare that it approaches the sublime.
1. Upper class people seek to differentiate themselves from lower class people by status markers (like reading the guardian)
2. In the past, food was scarce, so upper class people were fat when lower class were lean, hence terms like "rubinesque beauty" or the figures of Botticelli's art.
3. Now food is common though, so the status marker is to be thin, because being thin shows you have leisure time to exercise, (you try being on your feet for 12 hours a day and then going to the gym), have money to eat the right kinds of food, and have the good form to have discipline not to eat when you need comfort (or in general need comfort).
4. but it's not enough to do it, the upper class needs their virtues reinforced.
5. Since the upper class is atheistic due to the lower class being religious (unless they are the right kind of religion, something either punishing to follow or neo-atheistic as it is), we must focus on the atheist's heaven, good health.
6. Your virtue in being thin is rewarded through lack of depression, disease, and long life! Your priestly newspaper has given you a scientific sermon.
Think about this. Why is this article in the Guardian, who I'm willing to bet already exercise, eat well, etc? Wouldn't it be in the Daily Mail instead, if the point was to convince people to exercise? That's because it's there to reinforce the idea of exercise and thinness as a status marker among the Guardian readership. The same thing happens in lower class media too, on different subjects, but the upper class usually never even gets how they are being led around.
You realise that by rejecting health and exercise on political grounds, you are condemning the lower classes to shorter, unhappier lives? Good food and exercise really are good for your body and mind, whatever you think of those effete Guardian readers.
I'm not rejecting the importance of exercise for health - I follow the general principal of eating to get healthy, exercising to get fit - but I think we skip over the absolute tragedy that is the Standard American Diet at our peril.
Recovering from the consuequences of three/four generations of preaching the lipid hypothesis[2], as fast as we damn well can, is the ultimate way to defy depression, disease and early death.
[1] http://www.thefatemperor.com/blog/2015/9/5/fat-emperor-produ...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipid_hypothesis