"While we await the results, the best course to help fight that middle-age spread hasn’t changed. Eat right and follow an exercise plan that you know you can stick to—it will make you feel better. Take it from me, a guy who decided eight years ago that it was time to shape up, stopped eating honey buns, got into a regular exercise program with a trainer to keep me accountable, and lost those 30 pounds. You can do it, even without a DNA-PK inhibitor!"
I'm glad the article finished with the above paragraph because while the study is interesting, Americans don't seem to have unique physical traits that cause them to gain weight, we just don't have healthy habits. I wonder what the weight gain in the same time period is in different regions of the world
We have pretty successfully engineered almost all physical activity out of the normal daily life of a middle-aged suburban American, who move from bed to car seat to desk chair to car seat to couch to bed with as little walking as possible in between.
Most other societies make walking (including to and from public transit) and bicycling much bigger parts of their transportation landscape, rather than designing new communities to make driving as easy as possible and other means of transportation impossible, either intentionally or implicitly.
Most people aren't overeating by thousands of calories a day, increasing activity by 20 minutes without increased intake would probably diminish the vast majority of weight gain for a large percentage of the populous.
I can tell you that amount of walking makes zero difference to me. Certainly not in terms of weight. Maybe it has some health benefit that statisticians could eek out by studying 1,000 of me over a lifetime, but not anything cosmetic.
And cosmetics are what really matters in these discussions, because that is how you are ultimately judged and categorized.
Maintaining 1lb of fat is ~2-4calories per day though this increases with activity levels. So, assuming all else is the same over 30 years you would end up around 20-30 pounds heaver.
In the real world exercise is important for regulating appetite which has a much larger impact. Remember, evolution was not optimizing for people to sit around all day long. So, feedback systems are dependent on activity.
It's worse for me because I move from bed, to shower, then down to the office downstairs.
You'd be surprised how many steps you get from just walking around the office. Luckily, I don't have a problem exercising on a daily basis, whether it's just walking outside or hitting the gym.
Losing weight is an entirely separate issue for me though. After hard-core lifting sessions, I'm eating way too many calories.
I work from home, so it's doubly bad for me - I don't even have to walk to a car, just the couple steps from bed to my office.
I went to Boston for Red Hat Summit last week and it amazed me just how exhausted I was after all the walking to/from the train stations and around the convention. I used to bike every day to/from work when I was just a couple years younger and never felt as sore and tired as I did every day during the event. I really need to start getting out more, even just walking to the coffee shop 1/4 mile away on occasion and working from there.
I live in the desert where going outside in the summer is intolerable. What's helping me immensely while working from home is playing some VR games throughout the day. If I want something light I play a few rounds of archery in Holopoint. If I want to max my heart rate very quickly I'll do boxing in Thrill of the Fight.
When I visited Houston I felt like I was being held hostage. I love living in a city because it makes it really easy to be active. Time spent in Houston feels like it's being spent in the most hostile suburb on the planet.
If it's practical for you, consider getting a dog. Dogs need to be exercised every day so it forces you to get out and walk or run at least a couple miles every day. And by "dog" I mean a real dog, not some fragile inbred abomination that can't handle a run around the block.
And don't have a yard, or if you do, don't allow letting the dog into the yard be a stand in for taking the dog for a walk. Obviously that defeats the point for you, but it also doesn't do the dog any favours either.
My large inbred abomination (Bernese Mountain Dog, cute, cuddly, overbred) has never lived anywhere with a yard, so gets real walks.
My wife and daughter would love a dog, but we rent and already have a couple cats so it's not really in the cards right now (the cats alone aren't an issue, but trying to get the OK from the landlady for another animal isn't in the cards).
I highly recommend doing a basic weightlifting program. I find lifting weights, and the goal setting/tracking involved, to be much more engaging than cardio exercises.
If you don't have access to weights, get a pull-up bar and some pushup handles.
I saw a huge improvement to my overall health and physique doing a basic pull-up and pushup program.
I have a membership to the local YMCA, but only have an opportunity to go once a week since I live in your typical unwalkable/no-public-transit suburban area and don't have a drivers license. Used to go a couple nights a week when my daughter still napped and stayed up until 9PM since we could go as a family and have dinner afterward, but now she's in bed by 7:30/8:00 and there isn't enough time.
Another year or two and things will be looking different again, for the moment getting some exercise on a daily basis is still a better spot than where I'm at.
> Americans don't seem to have unique physical traits that cause them to gain weight, we just don't have healthy habits
A diet of hyper-palatable, nutritionally void processed food will do that.
Eat real food. Meat, fish, nuts, fruits, veggies, maybe some carb-dense grains (I like rice) here and there when your body can take advantage of the extra glucose, and you'd be surprised how easy it is to both manage your hunger and your weight.
Yes, there's a systemic issue here. Just as we don't say "Users just need to be smarter!" when a substantial segment of the population is having difficulty accessing our programs, we shouldn't say "Eaters just need to eat fewer calories!" when OVER HALF of the population is getting sick on the food supply.
Try to buy something healthy at your conventional grocer. It's generally tucked away at the far extremities of the aisle if it's there at all, and you normally have to bypass several fake "healthy" options that are really just slightly different formulations of the primary recipe. You have to really hunt just to find something as simple as a loaf of bread that isn't infused with extra sugar. Some loaves that bill themselves as "wheat" are still mostly white bread, etc. There is a large array of deceptive tactics used to get people to buy the more addictive formulations when they think they're buying healthier ones.
IMO this is a technology problem. We have sufficient technology to bring a steady supply of maximally-desirable foods, which, unfortunately, tend to have the least nutritional value. This creates perverse incentives across the marketplace because grocers, suppliers, distributors, and farmers all want to sell more, which means they will always favor the higher-calorie options, because human biology always favors it. It's a really bad place to stall at a technological stasis.
Instead of fighting chemistry and biology and berating those who fall victim not only to their own strong physical inclinations but also to a barrage of marketing tactics designed to trick them into continuing to buy addictive-but-unhealthy foods when they're explicitly trying not to do so, we need to develop technology that makes broccoli maximally-desirable without changing its basic nutritional and caloric properties, or technology that infuses maximally-desirable foods with nutritional and caloric properties akin to maximally-nutritious foods.
I don't think most people are compulsive overeaters. There's a myth among some naive people that every overweight person has a stash of 40 SNICKERS bars constantly at hand and that they eat 10 of these per day. This is not true except in the most extreme cases. The truth is that most people eat reasonably normal amounts and types of foods.
I would actually take it one step further than technology as the root of the problem. That technology was developed because market competition made each of the producers have to differentiate their products, which has manifested itself in a bar-raising game. The easy optimizations have all been done already, and now these companies optimize for flavor, since nutritional value won't make customers return to your products. The companies are playing a psychological and physiological game with us, they know it, and they spend millions doing so.
I agree, but I don't blame them. Survival depends on market performance. If customers aren't buying what they're selling, they have to make something customers will buy.
I don't think the solution is to constrain the food companies. That's a hardcoded workaround at best, and the potential ramifications do not seem pleasant. We can't turn back the hands of time; the fact is that the demand is there, and while minor attempts to curb demand like a junk food tax may help a little bit, the core issue is that our bodies crave those foods at a fundamental level. Our bodies punish us for wasting what it interprets as a valuable food store by making us extremely uncomfortable. Creating a black market for Doritos is unlikely to provide real social benefit.
We need to find a way to fix the technological state of having the ability to create unnaturally hyper-caloric foods, which our bodies love, but not the ability to properly dispose of the excess calories. We need to a) make our bodies love low-or-no calorie foods (and Splenda et al are great innovations in this space, though obviously not complete); b) make our bodies dispose of excess calories in a healthy manner, instead of putting them into excessive fat stores (this may be something like a medical device or drug that 'consumes' the calories on behalf of the digestive system); c) make high-calorie foods filling and nutritious, so that one Milky Way provides satiation and nutritional benefits that align with its calorie count.
Frankly, this is bunk. If it's calories in and calories out, then there is an exact number of daily potato chips one can calculate for each person to achieve and maintain an ideal weight. You'll get just as fat on "real food".
That's technically true, though anecdotally, my body def responds differently to whole vs processed foods. Even if the cals and macro nutrients (Protein/Fat/Carbs) remain the same.
If you eat 200 calories of sugar, your body will turn it into fat, and you'll be hungry in 20 minutes, suffer mood swings, migraines and eventually diabetes. If you eat 200 calories of protein, fats and slow carbs, you'll be full, and you'll be able to function until the next meal.
And likewise you could take a knife and cut out belly fat. It is possible. However it has significant negatives that make it unlikely that people will follow through with the idea. I totally agree that if a person is successful at eating only 1000 calories of sugar per day then they will lose weight. But they wont be successful.
Calorie restriction diets feel like holding your breath for 6 months straight. Then as soon as you can't take it anymore, you exhale and instantly gain it all back. It's horrible. Nobody's will can hold out for that long.
Some people are happy eating whatever diet keeps them at an ideal weight. Some people never will be, and it's a form of torture.
If the goal is to "solve the obesity epidemic", it doesn't matter if it works for a small number of people. The reality we must wake up to is that calls for people to eat less will never, ever be successful at solving the problem.
> You could eat nothing but 1000 calories of pure sugar a day and still lose weight
Yes, if you were locked in a room and passed exactly 1000 calories of sugar cubes and water every single day. Most of us live in the real world with food all around us, easily available, and responsibilities to stay on top of. It's really easy to say "this diet is making me feel terrible, I'm just going to eat what I want so I won't be so cranky to my kids".
This is like saying that all that matters to your bank account balance is dollars in and dollars out. It's obviously true in the most trivial sense, but it's not useful advice. There are countless other factors that affect the amount in and amount out.
If someone is trying to increase their bank balance which advice is more likely to help them: "Just increase your dollars in or decrease your dollars out" or "Get a roommate, move to a less expensive neighborhood, cook your own food instead of eating out"?
I wonder how this "middle age weight" gain interacts with practices such as intermittent fasting, keto diet, 1-meal a day. These practices impact metabolism.
I also wonder if FDA recommendations of calories per days should be split not just by sex, but also by age.
The FDA recommendations are mostly bogus since activity level and base metabolic rate differ enough between otherwise normal people to make some people fat on the recommended amount of calories and others too skinny.
Ignoring the fact that the FDA already says its recommendations are for an average person, it doesn't matter because people don't track calories anyway. Generally people eat WAY too much for their sedentary lifestyles.
> While the enzyme is known for its role in DNA repair, their studies show it also slows down metabolism, making it more difficult to burn fat.
Already known factor and a completely misleading sentence. All this means is that you have to consume less to get the same results. We already knew that metabolism slows down as you age. It's a factor in BMR (base metabolic rate) TDEE (total daily energy expenditure) calculation.
Sadly, articles like this mostly give overweight people another excuse, rather than a greater understanding of their predicament.
You're misreading this. The novel claim isn't that metabolism slows down during middle age, but that DNA-PK levels increase during middle age and the enzyme negatively effects metabolism.
"...treatment with DNA-PK inhibitor protects against aging-associated decline in metabolism and physical fitness without increasing DSBs [double-strand breaks]... The most likely explanation for this paradox is that the ... DNA-PK inhibitor, like most inhibitor drugs, is a partial inhibitor at physiological doses. The residual DNA-PK activity may be sufficient to protect against the level of DNA DSBs generated naturally."
I predict plenty of knee-jerk "We've found the fountain of youth" reactions to this. I instead think doctors should tread carefully here. This enzyme is present for a reason. While eliminating it may "cure" certain ills it may cause others (like cancer).
PSA: Every legitimate long term study of non surgical weight loss shows that it doesn't happen for the vast, vast majority of people.
1) ["In controlled settings, participants who remain in weight loss programs usually lose approximately 10% of their weight. However, one third to two thirds of the weight is regained within 1 year, and almost all is regained within 5 years. "](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1580453)
2) Giant meta study of long term weight loss: ["Five years after completing structured weight-loss programs, the average individual maintained a weight loss of >3% of initial body weight."](http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/74/5/579.full)
3) Less Scientific: [Weight Watcher's Failure - "about two out of a thousand Weight Watchers participants who reached goal weight stayed there for more than five years."](https://fatfu.wordpress.com/2008/01/24/weight-watchers/)
4) [The reason why it's impossible seems to be that although calories in < calories out works, the body of a fat person makes it extremely difficult psychologically to eat less.](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/magazine/tara-parker-pope-...) This is borne out by the above data.
Moreover, you won't find any reputable study on the web where the average person lost 10%+ of their body weight and kept it off for five years. Not even one.
The study people sometimes bring up is the national weight control registry. But it is a heavily self selected group of people who have already lost significant weight before joining - therefore weeding out most of the failure rate. And even then, only 20% of their audience lost over 10% of their initial body weight and kept it off for one year.
So, how do those of us that manage it do it. Is it really is exceedingly rare, is it even useful studying us? According to weight watchers me and one other person out of the thousand did it. Everyone else failed. (I cut 40% weight, 12 years later, kept 25% (or more!) body fat from original cut).
At a high level I radicalized my life style. I have ups and downs, but I be and a runner and a lifter and I have run hundreds of miles e every year since. It was complete and sort of stark, but I endured.
My theory as to why people fail -- There is no such thing as will power. Everyone thinks there is and that they aren't strong enough and that is why they failed. I think in the very short term there is will power. Hours for most. Once your higher level thinking is overrun you lose.
My hand wavy theory based on my experience and knowledge; you have to believe in something with enough intensity that your brain you can't talk to gets on board and accepts its reality. You have to fight it and use tricks to move around out of sight to where the higher level you gets what it wants. This is not a linear path.
Environment. Its easy to overcome the psychological issues of eating when you are happy and relatively healthy already and in a safe environment. Put yourself in a hyper-competitive environment with high risk and low reward ratios and you can watch everyone start having food issues. That seem initially seemed to be just tech, but no increasingly is America at large.
> That seem initially seemed to be just tech, but no increasingly is America at large.
That doesn't seem to be the case at all, in my experience. In fact, out of all the white collar industries my friends and I are involved in, tech makes a healthy lifestyle the easiest by a loooongshot. This is part of a cultural feedback loop that also involves people's habits: probably 95% of the tech workers I know regularly exercise and are opinionated about their diet.
This may be a regional thing though; I live in the second fittest city in the country.
There is, but most people don't understand how it works. According to recent neurological studies, it's a lot like a muscle. In the long term, you exercise it and it gets stronger. In the short term - and this is the important part - it can become depleted. If your work requires a lot of will power (including focus, discipline, initiative) then you'll have little left for other parts of your life.
This is really what I think a lot of people mean when they say they come home tired. They're not physically tired, they're not low on energy, but they are low on will. Therefore they tend to settle for the easy or familiar, such as watching Netflix instead of exercising or eating junk instead of cooking real food. I can often feel the pull myself, but the fact that I understand and recognize what's happening helps me resist/manage it.
And as with any mental model there are potential pitfalls such as when you tell yourself your willpower has been depleted. You then have an excuse to slack off http://www.nirandfar.com/2016/11/the-way-you-think-about-wil.... I agree it's hard to make the right choice when your tired, but the way you think about it will also affect your behavior.
It is easiest for me to just pretend it does not exist. I guess it is sort of philosophical (again). When there is no will, decisions are made using a different system of values and alignment with goals. I don't need "will power" when my environment pushes me in the right direction and the choices, the ones I want are naturally aligned with multiple other aspects of my life and less healthy or negative choices are far out of alignment with that. It requires constantly remembering, setting, and working towards those goals (fitness, life, and other).
We obviously aren't just subject to the whims of our environment, we make choices and can decide things, but after a lot of reading on AI / neuroscience, and just being alive longer I am becoming convinced the environment and your perception of it is the single biggest factor. It goes beyond happiness toward fundamental outlook and beliefs.
I think you're referring to the ego depletion hypothesis. It has been extensively studied but not reliably reproduced in a consistent way. So I wouldn't count on those studies.
I do believe it is a muscle, but it doesn't explain how people can make extreme choices. Going from say, binge drinking and unhealthy eating to no drinking and perfectly healthy eating the next day. If you don't have a template for healthy eating, of course, that is practically never going to happen, but if you have some general idea of healthy eating and have practiced it before it becomes very easy to change over. (How did someone practice healthy eating before, bit of a chicken and egg?)
I would argue that you have done that trickery of your mind I mentioned. Self awareness, recognition of meta-thought patterns, alignment of other systems in your brain with your "ego" or consciousness. Those tools let you make choices that are theoretically not possible if your will is entirely depleted and you are subject to the whims of lower level systems. It is in this area where radicalizing life style, having big goals and ideas that excite you and, say, require physical health, or really learning deeply on some topic, can pull you through. You have tricked or overridden those underlying systems that would push you towards a lazy or consumptive habit towards a more generative habit. The big goal may require high degree of physical health, or deep knowledge on some topic. It really helps to be able to achieve it in small, observable chunks (getting a little fitter every day/week, learning a little more, etc.).
There is clearly something to the whole ego depletion concept, it is, at least, a helpful mental model to observe the act of becoming mentally tired and acknowledge it. I really do believe in decision fatigue. I have tried to (radically) cut decisions out of my life (what to wear, etc.). So that I can make decisions about the most important things, my work goals, family goals, big picture stuff. Despite ego depletion being a tricky mental model, it is obvious everyone gets tired. Most good developers, even after years of consistent hacking will still only have 3-6 deep hours in them on any given day. That's it. Only (rather extreme, IMO) outliers can, say, code intense for 12 hours with the same quality of the first few. Most of us require sleep, mental digestion, and problems get solved somewhere in the depths of our mind outside of the view of our consciousness. Then we return and the problem is solved in the shower or in flashes of "insight" (which would just be whatever system in your brain finally getting the message through to your consciousness... the pieces finally got connected).
How does this happen? We have no will, yet in our sleep our brain is clearing out memories and getting our systems tuned up for the next go. Is this "actual" thinking? Or is it really the equivalent of compacting a database so that the higher level systems can now just see more clearly? It is super complex. There are so many questions about the way deep thinking and problem solving works, how we create things that we set out to create, overcoming obstacles. Ego depletion is like a local maxima or tactical part of the bigger picture of getting what you want and building / solving.
So what is will power? Is there ego that we deplete? I don't know, but I know straight up higher level conscious thinking about every decision to achieve a desired outcome are practically impossible for most people. That means other systems and processes work as the primary agents of change in our lives, and willpower is at best a passenger giving you advice and helping you out once in a while.
In my entirely unscientific opinion the big dividing line is exercise. Those that don't exercise have a much smaller margin for caloric error and it doesn't take much to tip them back into a surplus.
That is certainly part of how I managed it. I could eat a much higher volume of food (mentally satisfying), while still being in a deficit. I knew after a long run I could gorge and still be in a deficit.
My guess is that a big reason a lot of people fail is due to the way food is marketed and sold. For example, the Extra Long Cheeseburger at Burger King is $3.99. They are currently running a deal, though, 2 for $5.
A lot of people who go in there and want to eat a single Extra Long Cheeseburger are going to see that and say "No freaking way am I paying $3.99 for one, when I can get TWO for $5". We have a natural tendency to compare per unit pricing, and see it as buying just one means paying $3.99 per unit, but going for the 2 for $5 means just $2.50 unit, and we tend to see the regular price as a rip-off compared to the sale price.
Yes, this is not rational, but this is how people work.
Similar thing with Subway, which ran a deal where most foot long subs were $6 all February. That made it real hard for many people who normally bought a 6" to do so. When your normal 6" is $5.89, and you can double the size for an extra $0.11, it is very very hard to stay at 6".
Another good illustration was an experiment I saw. The experimenters got to play with the pricing and availability of drinks in a movie theater. The theater normally sold a small drink for something like $1, and a large for something like $3. The large was much larger than the small, but the small (which was still kind of big) was by far the best seller. So then they added a medium, that was about 25% of the way between the small and large in size, but cost something like $2.75.
Note that objectively the medium is a terrible choice. It cost 2.75 times as much as the small for only 25% of the soda, and it only cost $0.25 less than the large but gave much less soda.
So guess what happened? No, people did not buy the medium...but now most people bought the large!
I'm not sure exactly where I saw this one. I think it might have been on the National Geographic channel, on the show "Brain Games". If not, it was on a similar show on the Science Channel or one of the other Discovery network channels.
Psychologists and behavioral economists have learned a lot about how we make purchasing decisions, and the marketing departments of probably every major (and a lot of minor) food companies follow that work closely and put it into practice. Most of us don't have a chance against that.
It is almost like you have to disconnect from reality to make good decisions. Like, just sit down and make a food list with only your brain, and only buy that stuff.
I know it is just a kids movie, but the world in Wall-E a Disney movie from 2008, is terrifyingly realistic now, and I thought it was at least sort of a joke.(For anyone not familiar, Wall-E is an animated movie portraying a "kid friendly" dystopian future where the humans are all really fat, can barely move, have abandoned earth for a space station, and robots do everything for them. They have hovering chairs and perform no physical exercise and earth is basically a wasteland full of trash. The protagonist is a trash collecting robot on earth that accidentally brings a plant, of which there previously were none, onto the spaceship the humans live on causing the plot to drive forward)
I now think the autonomous car, ultra marketed, consumer society we are building actually ends up very close to this.
Studies are helpful I suppose, but I wonder if the study showing how the vast majority of people can lose weight will appear in 2050 after the death of the peer reviewers?
Edit: That is, long after it is helpful to any of us.
While there are many "unfair" variables at play, your weight is one of the few parameters you can control in your life. You won't get more hair, rich parents or strong health. You can't get taller, smarter or good at writing comments. But you can always decide not to be overweight, or even be in good shape. (but being an asshole fet shamer is also a decision)
Why is other peoples weight so important for you? You choose to spend time in gym focusing about how you look like instead of doing something useful, learning new things or working or simply spending time with your children.
Serious, despite all stereotypes, male dominated tech site seems to put way more importance on look and talks way more about dieting then female dominated sites I frequent. When did the switch happened and dudes started to be like that?
There are very few things in my life that are as productive as the gym. It helps my memory, my mental well being, my cognition and my health. I'm unsure of why you don't consider exercise to be useful. Can you explain? Below I have included a quote and link to a study that looks into exercises effects on cognition. As for people's zealousness for exercise on this site, I think its a result of people wanting to help others. For many, getting into exercise was the single best decision they felt they've made in their life. And since almost anyone can make that change, and do it for free, they're trying to spread the news. If I spend the time to recommend something as small and inconsequential as an application to someone, it seems absurd that I wouldn't recommend something like exercise. But that's just my two cents
"The evidence accumulated so far indicates that exercise is a strong promoter of cognitive health in humans. "
It isn't really a new explanation, the explanation is still "your metabolism slows and you can't eat like you're 22 anymore". It's a tough adjustment to make and I'm not even that old yet. The best thing I've found that actually works is a mostly plant-based diet.
This is potentially about more than weight gain. The DNA-PK-mediated pathway they've discovered looks an awful lot like something you'd design to control senescence.
The DNA-PK inhibitor used, NU7441, is orally active and the press release even calls it drug-like. The human-equivalent dose based on bodyweight is about 3g/day (three pills worth). The actual HED is probably smaller. Currently very expensive.[1]
87 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 61.6 ms ] threadI'm glad the article finished with the above paragraph because while the study is interesting, Americans don't seem to have unique physical traits that cause them to gain weight, we just don't have healthy habits. I wonder what the weight gain in the same time period is in different regions of the world
Most other societies make walking (including to and from public transit) and bicycling much bigger parts of their transportation landscape, rather than designing new communities to make driving as easy as possible and other means of transportation impossible, either intentionally or implicitly.
so instead, spend that time in a car, and that time again at a gym. what wealth!
A decent paced 5k burns like 400 at most
And cosmetics are what really matters in these discussions, because that is how you are ultimately judged and categorized.
In the real world exercise is important for regulating appetite which has a much larger impact. Remember, evolution was not optimizing for people to sit around all day long. So, feedback systems are dependent on activity.
You'd be surprised how many steps you get from just walking around the office. Luckily, I don't have a problem exercising on a daily basis, whether it's just walking outside or hitting the gym.
Losing weight is an entirely separate issue for me though. After hard-core lifting sessions, I'm eating way too many calories.
I went to Boston for Red Hat Summit last week and it amazed me just how exhausted I was after all the walking to/from the train stations and around the convention. I used to bike every day to/from work when I was just a couple years younger and never felt as sore and tired as I did every day during the event. I really need to start getting out more, even just walking to the coffee shop 1/4 mile away on occasion and working from there.
Honestly, I think Houston might actually be hell.
My large inbred abomination (Bernese Mountain Dog, cute, cuddly, overbred) has never lived anywhere with a yard, so gets real walks.
If you don't have access to weights, get a pull-up bar and some pushup handles.
I saw a huge improvement to my overall health and physique doing a basic pull-up and pushup program.
Another year or two and things will be looking different again, for the moment getting some exercise on a daily basis is still a better spot than where I'm at.
I went from doing 10 pushups, no pullups to being able to bang out 100+ pushpus and 50+ pullups over the course of a day.
I can now do prob 50+ pushups and 10+ pullups in one set. Took me less than a year to get here.
I was the kid in MS/HS that coudn't even do one pullup!
Unfortunately, obesity is a global epidemic, and it is not showing signs of slowing in, as far as I can tell, in any developed nation.
A diet of hyper-palatable, nutritionally void processed food will do that.
Eat real food. Meat, fish, nuts, fruits, veggies, maybe some carb-dense grains (I like rice) here and there when your body can take advantage of the extra glucose, and you'd be surprised how easy it is to both manage your hunger and your weight.
Try to buy something healthy at your conventional grocer. It's generally tucked away at the far extremities of the aisle if it's there at all, and you normally have to bypass several fake "healthy" options that are really just slightly different formulations of the primary recipe. You have to really hunt just to find something as simple as a loaf of bread that isn't infused with extra sugar. Some loaves that bill themselves as "wheat" are still mostly white bread, etc. There is a large array of deceptive tactics used to get people to buy the more addictive formulations when they think they're buying healthier ones.
IMO this is a technology problem. We have sufficient technology to bring a steady supply of maximally-desirable foods, which, unfortunately, tend to have the least nutritional value. This creates perverse incentives across the marketplace because grocers, suppliers, distributors, and farmers all want to sell more, which means they will always favor the higher-calorie options, because human biology always favors it. It's a really bad place to stall at a technological stasis.
Instead of fighting chemistry and biology and berating those who fall victim not only to their own strong physical inclinations but also to a barrage of marketing tactics designed to trick them into continuing to buy addictive-but-unhealthy foods when they're explicitly trying not to do so, we need to develop technology that makes broccoli maximally-desirable without changing its basic nutritional and caloric properties, or technology that infuses maximally-desirable foods with nutritional and caloric properties akin to maximally-nutritious foods.
I don't think most people are compulsive overeaters. There's a myth among some naive people that every overweight person has a stash of 40 SNICKERS bars constantly at hand and that they eat 10 of these per day. This is not true except in the most extreme cases. The truth is that most people eat reasonably normal amounts and types of foods.
A good article on this: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary...
I don't think the solution is to constrain the food companies. That's a hardcoded workaround at best, and the potential ramifications do not seem pleasant. We can't turn back the hands of time; the fact is that the demand is there, and while minor attempts to curb demand like a junk food tax may help a little bit, the core issue is that our bodies crave those foods at a fundamental level. Our bodies punish us for wasting what it interprets as a valuable food store by making us extremely uncomfortable. Creating a black market for Doritos is unlikely to provide real social benefit.
We need to find a way to fix the technological state of having the ability to create unnaturally hyper-caloric foods, which our bodies love, but not the ability to properly dispose of the excess calories. We need to a) make our bodies love low-or-no calorie foods (and Splenda et al are great innovations in this space, though obviously not complete); b) make our bodies dispose of excess calories in a healthy manner, instead of putting them into excessive fat stores (this may be something like a medical device or drug that 'consumes' the calories on behalf of the digestive system); c) make high-calorie foods filling and nutritious, so that one Milky Way provides satiation and nutritional benefits that align with its calorie count.
Check out Salt Sugar Fat if you haven't read it yet. Good stuff: https://www.amazon.com/Salt-Sugar-Fat-Giants-Hooked/dp/08129...
The quality of your calories absolutely matters.
You could eat nothing but 1000 calories of pure sugar a day and still lose weight
http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/
Calorie restriction diets feel like holding your breath for 6 months straight. Then as soon as you can't take it anymore, you exhale and instantly gain it all back. It's horrible. Nobody's will can hold out for that long.
Some people are happy eating whatever diet keeps them at an ideal weight. Some people never will be, and it's a form of torture.
Yes, if you were locked in a room and passed exactly 1000 calories of sugar cubes and water every single day. Most of us live in the real world with food all around us, easily available, and responsibilities to stay on top of. It's really easy to say "this diet is making me feel terrible, I'm just going to eat what I want so I won't be so cranky to my kids".
One tends to regulate itself, while the other requires strict (and rarely followed) calorie counting.
If you eat hyper palatable food that makes you hungrier, you'll eat more. Pure and simple.
If someone is trying to increase their bank balance which advice is more likely to help them: "Just increase your dollars in or decrease your dollars out" or "Get a roommate, move to a less expensive neighborhood, cook your own food instead of eating out"?
I also wonder if FDA recommendations of calories per days should be split not just by sex, but also by age.
Already known factor and a completely misleading sentence. All this means is that you have to consume less to get the same results. We already knew that metabolism slows down as you age. It's a factor in BMR (base metabolic rate) TDEE (total daily energy expenditure) calculation.
Sadly, articles like this mostly give overweight people another excuse, rather than a greater understanding of their predicament.
Lower weight, better athletic performance, but increased DNA damage leading to other problems (I'd guess cancer being high up on that list).
It might be. There is no way to know whether it is there for a (good) reason or not. Evolution doesn't work that way.
1) ["In controlled settings, participants who remain in weight loss programs usually lose approximately 10% of their weight. However, one third to two thirds of the weight is regained within 1 year, and almost all is regained within 5 years. "](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1580453)
2) Giant meta study of long term weight loss: ["Five years after completing structured weight-loss programs, the average individual maintained a weight loss of >3% of initial body weight."](http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/74/5/579.full)
3) Less Scientific: [Weight Watcher's Failure - "about two out of a thousand Weight Watchers participants who reached goal weight stayed there for more than five years."](https://fatfu.wordpress.com/2008/01/24/weight-watchers/)
4) [The reason why it's impossible seems to be that although calories in < calories out works, the body of a fat person makes it extremely difficult psychologically to eat less.](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/magazine/tara-parker-pope-...) This is borne out by the above data.
5) [The only thing that does seem to work in the long term is gastric surgery.](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1421028/)
Moreover, you won't find any reputable study on the web where the average person lost 10%+ of their body weight and kept it off for five years. Not even one.
The study people sometimes bring up is the national weight control registry. But it is a heavily self selected group of people who have already lost significant weight before joining - therefore weeding out most of the failure rate. And even then, only 20% of their audience lost over 10% of their initial body weight and kept it off for one year.
At a high level I radicalized my life style. I have ups and downs, but I be and a runner and a lifter and I have run hundreds of miles e every year since. It was complete and sort of stark, but I endured.
My theory as to why people fail -- There is no such thing as will power. Everyone thinks there is and that they aren't strong enough and that is why they failed. I think in the very short term there is will power. Hours for most. Once your higher level thinking is overrun you lose.
My hand wavy theory based on my experience and knowledge; you have to believe in something with enough intensity that your brain you can't talk to gets on board and accepts its reality. You have to fight it and use tricks to move around out of sight to where the higher level you gets what it wants. This is not a linear path.
That doesn't seem to be the case at all, in my experience. In fact, out of all the white collar industries my friends and I are involved in, tech makes a healthy lifestyle the easiest by a loooongshot. This is part of a cultural feedback loop that also involves people's habits: probably 95% of the tech workers I know regularly exercise and are opinionated about their diet.
This may be a regional thing though; I live in the second fittest city in the country.
There is, but most people don't understand how it works. According to recent neurological studies, it's a lot like a muscle. In the long term, you exercise it and it gets stronger. In the short term - and this is the important part - it can become depleted. If your work requires a lot of will power (including focus, discipline, initiative) then you'll have little left for other parts of your life.
This is really what I think a lot of people mean when they say they come home tired. They're not physically tired, they're not low on energy, but they are low on will. Therefore they tend to settle for the easy or familiar, such as watching Netflix instead of exercising or eating junk instead of cooking real food. I can often feel the pull myself, but the fact that I understand and recognize what's happening helps me resist/manage it.
We obviously aren't just subject to the whims of our environment, we make choices and can decide things, but after a lot of reading on AI / neuroscience, and just being alive longer I am becoming convinced the environment and your perception of it is the single biggest factor. It goes beyond happiness toward fundamental outlook and beliefs.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion
I would argue that you have done that trickery of your mind I mentioned. Self awareness, recognition of meta-thought patterns, alignment of other systems in your brain with your "ego" or consciousness. Those tools let you make choices that are theoretically not possible if your will is entirely depleted and you are subject to the whims of lower level systems. It is in this area where radicalizing life style, having big goals and ideas that excite you and, say, require physical health, or really learning deeply on some topic, can pull you through. You have tricked or overridden those underlying systems that would push you towards a lazy or consumptive habit towards a more generative habit. The big goal may require high degree of physical health, or deep knowledge on some topic. It really helps to be able to achieve it in small, observable chunks (getting a little fitter every day/week, learning a little more, etc.).
There is clearly something to the whole ego depletion concept, it is, at least, a helpful mental model to observe the act of becoming mentally tired and acknowledge it. I really do believe in decision fatigue. I have tried to (radically) cut decisions out of my life (what to wear, etc.). So that I can make decisions about the most important things, my work goals, family goals, big picture stuff. Despite ego depletion being a tricky mental model, it is obvious everyone gets tired. Most good developers, even after years of consistent hacking will still only have 3-6 deep hours in them on any given day. That's it. Only (rather extreme, IMO) outliers can, say, code intense for 12 hours with the same quality of the first few. Most of us require sleep, mental digestion, and problems get solved somewhere in the depths of our mind outside of the view of our consciousness. Then we return and the problem is solved in the shower or in flashes of "insight" (which would just be whatever system in your brain finally getting the message through to your consciousness... the pieces finally got connected).
How does this happen? We have no will, yet in our sleep our brain is clearing out memories and getting our systems tuned up for the next go. Is this "actual" thinking? Or is it really the equivalent of compacting a database so that the higher level systems can now just see more clearly? It is super complex. There are so many questions about the way deep thinking and problem solving works, how we create things that we set out to create, overcoming obstacles. Ego depletion is like a local maxima or tactical part of the bigger picture of getting what you want and building / solving.
So what is will power? Is there ego that we deplete? I don't know, but I know straight up higher level conscious thinking about every decision to achieve a desired outcome are practically impossible for most people. That means other systems and processes work as the primary agents of change in our lives, and willpower is at best a passenger giving you advice and helping you out once in a while.
A lot of people who go in there and want to eat a single Extra Long Cheeseburger are going to see that and say "No freaking way am I paying $3.99 for one, when I can get TWO for $5". We have a natural tendency to compare per unit pricing, and see it as buying just one means paying $3.99 per unit, but going for the 2 for $5 means just $2.50 unit, and we tend to see the regular price as a rip-off compared to the sale price.
Yes, this is not rational, but this is how people work.
Similar thing with Subway, which ran a deal where most foot long subs were $6 all February. That made it real hard for many people who normally bought a 6" to do so. When your normal 6" is $5.89, and you can double the size for an extra $0.11, it is very very hard to stay at 6".
Another good illustration was an experiment I saw. The experimenters got to play with the pricing and availability of drinks in a movie theater. The theater normally sold a small drink for something like $1, and a large for something like $3. The large was much larger than the small, but the small (which was still kind of big) was by far the best seller. So then they added a medium, that was about 25% of the way between the small and large in size, but cost something like $2.75.
Note that objectively the medium is a terrible choice. It cost 2.75 times as much as the small for only 25% of the soda, and it only cost $0.25 less than the large but gave much less soda.
So guess what happened? No, people did not buy the medium...but now most people bought the large!
I'm not sure exactly where I saw this one. I think it might have been on the National Geographic channel, on the show "Brain Games". If not, it was on a similar show on the Science Channel or one of the other Discovery network channels.
Psychologists and behavioral economists have learned a lot about how we make purchasing decisions, and the marketing departments of probably every major (and a lot of minor) food companies follow that work closely and put it into practice. Most of us don't have a chance against that.
I know it is just a kids movie, but the world in Wall-E a Disney movie from 2008, is terrifyingly realistic now, and I thought it was at least sort of a joke.(For anyone not familiar, Wall-E is an animated movie portraying a "kid friendly" dystopian future where the humans are all really fat, can barely move, have abandoned earth for a space station, and robots do everything for them. They have hovering chairs and perform no physical exercise and earth is basically a wasteland full of trash. The protagonist is a trash collecting robot on earth that accidentally brings a plant, of which there previously were none, onto the spaceship the humans live on causing the plot to drive forward)
I now think the autonomous car, ultra marketed, consumer society we are building actually ends up very close to this.
Studies are helpful I suppose, but I wonder if the study showing how the vast majority of people can lose weight will appear in 2050 after the death of the peer reviewers?
Edit: That is, long after it is helpful to any of us.
Serious, despite all stereotypes, male dominated tech site seems to put way more importance on look and talks way more about dieting then female dominated sites I frequent. When did the switch happened and dudes started to be like that?
"The evidence accumulated so far indicates that exercise is a strong promoter of cognitive health in humans. "
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3951958/
Nothing else would remotely come close.
The new part is identifying the cause and specific enzyme etc.
As you put it its an almost tautological description of the situation, which is not what the article is about.
The DNA-PK inhibitor used, NU7441, is orally active and the press release even calls it drug-like. The human-equivalent dose based on bodyweight is about 3g/day (three pills worth). The actual HED is probably smaller. Currently very expensive.[1]
1 http://www.selleckchem.com/products/nu7441.html