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How Men’s Bodies Change When They Become Fathers

parenting.nytimes.com

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Re: How Men’s Bodies Change When They Become Fathers

#231

Post by rdtwo »

tlear wrote: post #176
paultopia wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was wondering this too. Every new parent seems to report that they basically don't sleep for a year or two. That has got to account for a lot of the biological changes in parenthood. (Honestly, I'd really want to know about likelihood of dying in a car accident or other heavy machinery sleep-deprivation-induced-screwup.)

It is the martyrdom story that is dumb. There are two of you there is absolutely zero reason for both not to have decent sleep. First couple weeks sure after that.. get a second bed, couch whatever. Separation of concern works way better one takes care of the kids other takes care of $$.

Seems easy when you aren’t living it. Maybe one day you will find out that things aren’t so simple

Re: How Men’s Bodies Change When They Become Fathers

#232

Post by fatnoah »

agent008t wrote: post #132

So, reading this thread is making me really not want to have children. Seems like one would have to be completely insane to voluntarily sign up for that. People that have children. Do you think it was honestly a good idea in retrospect, and if so, why? If your wife had been on the fence about having children, would you have preferred to go child-free, in retrospect?

It's a great question. My son is 11. If you'd asked me when he was 3 or 4, I may have said it wasn't worth it. Now, I 100% feel it was worth it. It's a pain, forces you to change your life priorities, but overall it's made me into a better person as I try to embody the attitude and behaviors that he'll want. There's also nothing better at washing away the stresses of the day than the gigantic hug I get when I walk in the door.

Re: How Men’s Bodies Change When They Become Fathers

#233

Post by rdtwo »

drewg123 wrote: post #149
pricees wrote: post #20

I was hoping this would explain my weight gain but I suppose I have to accept that replacing daily workouts with 3 bowls of ice cream and magic shell may be the culprit.

When my son was born, he didn't sleep well, so I didn't either. My wife has a career and I was an equal partner in his care. It didn't help that I was working 80+ hours a week on something that was key to the success of the small company I worked for. Add in stress eating, and cutting out exercise due to perceived lack of time, and I gained 10-15lbs a year until my son was 4 or 5. My son is 13 now, and its only in th…

Honestly idk how it’s possible to afford the extra hour and a half for gym 3 days a week as a dad with a toddler

Re: How Men’s Bodies Change When They Become Fathers

#234

Post by leonroy »

rdtwo wrote: post #233
drewg123 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When my son was born, he didn't sleep well, so I didn't either. My wife has a career and I was an equal partner in his care. It didn't help that I was working 80+ hours a week on something that was key to the success of the small company I worked for. Add in stress eating, and cutting out exercise due to perceived lack of time, and I gained 10-15lbs a year until my son was 4 or 5. My son is 13 now, and its only in th…

Honestly idk how it’s possible to afford the extra hour and a half for gym 3 days a week as a dad with a toddler

Honestly, you won’t. But until your kid is in full time school a 20-30 minute workout even everyday is eminently doable. Run around the local park, pull ups on a bar in the door way, press-ups, lots of exercises you can do to stave off muscular and skeletal atrophy which is what most of us at desk jobs literally suffer from due to chronic inactivity.

Re: How Men’s Bodies Change When They Become Fathers

#235

Post by swsieber »

koolba wrote: post #202
jly wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Logically this makes sense but it can be tricky to implement successfully for everyone. For breast-fed infants, it may be the case that mom has to be more frequently involved in the overnight care. It makes sense for dad to get as much sleep as possible in this case, but that can lead to resentment and other issues. My wife and I traded off as you indicated but that was no picnic, either. We found it easier to split…

> Logically this makes sense but it can be tricky to implement successfully for everyone. For breast-fed infants, it may be the case that mom has to be more frequently involved in the overnight care. It makes sense for dad to get as much sleep as possible in this case, but that can lead to resentment and other issues. Embracing marriage as a team sport goes a long way to avoiding petty resentment. It's also standard…

Yes. And post-partum anxiety and depression as well as chronic sleep deprivation go a long way to engendering petty resentment, as well as other insecurities that could be mitigated by the presence of the other spouse at night.

I have a leg up working from home though - I just take the baby at the start of the day for several hours so my wife gets another good sleep cycle or two in, which makes my wife a lot more open to me sleeping in a different room.

My snoring contributes to that too though - my baby sleeps better without me in the room!

Re: How Men’s Bodies Change When They Become Fathers

#236

Post by skohan »

sweeneyrod wrote: post #212
skohan wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I have also found intermittent fasting to be an excellent tool in the toolbox when I want to reduce a bit of body-fat. As you say, for me it's easier to follow a simple rule-based diet like time-restricted eating than it is to track and measure calories and macronutrients. I also had success with a ketogenic diet, but in my experience that's a bit harder to stick to, since there's a lot of hidden carbohydrates i…

> I know a lot of people have subjectively good experiences with multi-day fasts, but I saw a talk where the presenter showed evidence that long fasts (more than 72 hours) can cause long-lasting metabolic changes which weren't recovered even several years later. I thought one of the benefits of fasting was long-lasting metabolic changes (for the better).

So my understanding is that there are positive changes associated with spending time in a state of ketosis, which is brought on by fasting as well as extremely low-carb diets: especially in the case of people who are already suffering insulin-related metabolic damage (like diabetes, prediabetes, or insulin insensitivity), there's evidence nutritional ketosis can help to halt or reverse that damage.

What the talk I linked in the other comment talks about is something different: there's evidence that prolonged periods of severe calorie restriction can make your metabolism's bias move more toward storing calories and away from expending energy.

Re: How Men’s Bodies Change When They Become Fathers

#237

Post by thisone »

knolan wrote: post #146
thisone wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

always interesting to see the differences in commute times per vehicle. Where I am now, it's just over 7 miles to work, cycling is generally faster than the bus, bus is much faster than car (bus lane for > 50% of the journey).

It’s been interesting as my commute changed from 7km to 18km to 22km in the last year. The 7km commute was a no brainer by bike. It took a leisurely 20 minutes where as the car would be much the same with lots of tedious traffic. Bus wasn’t an option on this route. When I changed job my commute was 18km across the city. The car route involved a toll on a congested motorway or through stop start city congestion. The b…

lots of ebikes around nowadays. I only get annoyed at them when they pass me going up the harder hills. And that's because I'm jealous of them, not actually annoyed!

our bike club members assure me that an ebike isn't all easy sailing. I believe them! With how heavy the ebikes can be, you can't just be sailing along on the battery, not putting in any effort, and expect to go very far.

Re: How Men’s Bodies Change When They Become Fathers

#238

Post by magduf »

geggam wrote: post #156
stephencanon wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people hit hardest by this are women. Society places much, much higher expectations on the wrt motherhood than it does for fathers. I know a huge number of women who love their kids but deeply mourn their lost independence and career opportunity they might have had without them, to say nothing of the profound physical impact of carrying a pregnancy. Women understand these issues really well, they just don’t feel…

Many women I know wish society wouldnt pressure them to work so they could stay home and be a mother. The current economic situation in the US is prohibitive to this family structure as well. The combination of those two things is a huge problem in our society.

A lot of this is stuff Americans have done to themselves. They all want a huge house in the suburbs with two huge gas-guzzling SUVs in the garage, so that necessitates both parents working to pay for all this largesse.

If Americans lived in dense cities with small living quarters and took public transit to work, they wouldn't need to spend so much money on housing and transportation, and they wouldn't feel the need to women to work full-time to keep up this lavish and unsustainable lifestyle.

Re: How Men’s Bodies Change When They Become Fathers

#239

Post by isodude »

thisone wrote: post #237
knolan wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s been interesting as my commute changed from 7km to 18km to 22km in the last year. The 7km commute was a no brainer by bike. It took a leisurely 20 minutes where as the car would be much the same with lots of tedious traffic. Bus wasn’t an option on this route. When I changed job my commute was 18km across the city. The car route involved a toll on a congested motorway or through stop start city congestion. The b…

lots of ebikes around nowadays. I only get annoyed at them when they pass me going up the harder hills. And that's because I'm jealous of them, not actually annoyed! our bike club members assure me that an ebike isn't all easy sailing. I believe them! With how heavy the ebikes can be, you can't just be sailing along on the battery, not putting in any effort, and expect to go very far.

My parents use ebike to ride 30km with ease. It's a game changer.

Re: How Men’s Bodies Change When They Become Fathers

#240

Post by magduf »

anonu wrote: post #159
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #42

Looking into the T drop in fatherhood, the original study seems to account for self reports of 'sleep quality' but I wonder if sleep deprivation is not still a confounder in this finding. Annedoctally as a recent father of a 6 month old, I would likely self report a good sleep quality in a questionnaire. However, objectively I know I sleep about 5 hours 30min yesterday evening, which would be sufficient sleep 'depriv…

Correct. The same applies for post-partum depression which many attribute to an increase in new hormones in the women's body. But how much of this effect is attributable to simple sleep deprivation?

You gotta wonder how much all of this is due to sleep deprivation. None of these things make any sense evolutionarily, either PP depression or fathers losing their testosterone. So how much is due to things that are a product of modern society, rather than biology?
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