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.
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.
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?
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 :-) ]
<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.
http://www.quitrunning.com/interval-training-swimmers.htm http://www.marksdailyapple.com/sprint-training/
> 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.)
The Hacker's Diet by John Walker
So where did all the fatties come from? They didn't used to be here.
This is ridiculous. There are big, obvious changes in diet and exercise levels since the 70s that have correlated well with rising obesity.
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.
I think French cuisine is WAY more flavorful and calorie dense, and they're thin.
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.
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.
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.
It seems more a enviroment/culturual/city walkability thing
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.
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.
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.
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.
Some folks don't stop feeling hungry until well after they should have stopped eating, leading them to eat way too many calories.
John Walker explains this concept in his "The Eat Watch" chapter here: http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/eatwatch.html
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.
Also, a fruit heavy diet is particularly bad for weight loss. Humans don't deal with fructose too well.
I'm not saying you have to follow such a diet, but the fattie excuses are laughable when solutions are right in front of them. For more information on diet: http://www.lesmills.com/files/globalcentral/Consumers/Health...
