261–270 of 376 posts
I have one bit of specialized weight training advice. We all spend entirely too much time in front of our computers, typically hunched or slouched back, deep in thought. Ten years of doing this professionally led to shoulder/neck problems, culminating in a pinched nerve between my C6 and C7 vertebrae. It improved with physical therapy, but was never truly fixed, and has bothered me off and on for two years now, despi…
I have one bit of specialized weight training advice. We all spend entirely too much time in front of our computers, typically hunched or slouched back, deep in thought. Ten years of doing this professionally led to shoulder/neck problems, culminating in a pinched nerve between my C6 and C7 vertebrae. It improved with physical therapy, but was never truly fixed, and has bothered me off and on for two years now, despi…
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Is this sarcasm that hackers don't like being healthy or a kind of pun about AI algorithms?
Its not necessarily that they have a problem being healthy, all things considered I would prefer that too. The problem is that it takes time and is boring. I don't care if it means I live a few years longer since I will be too old and infirm to be able to hack.
Besides, the energy benefits right now and the impact that has on how much you can hack is far more easily noticed than the potential lifespan differences.
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There's no way I'd try to pull the rep max on a free barbell that I would on a smith machine Why not? So long as you're not being stupid, a spotter and/or the safeties built into the cage/rack or bench should do fine.
You'd be almost guaranteed to fail the lift. Smith machines let you use higher weight because you don't have to spend energy stabilizing the barbell. With safety bars failing isn't a huge deal, it's just pointless.
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It's relatively easy to test though. You can look at life expectancy figures of hunter gathering cultures (which are a useful proxy for pre-agricultural cultures) that don't deal with modern issues, or didn't deal with them at some point that we have pretty good data on. For example the life expectancy in Papau new Guinea was flat lined at just over 30 until about 1940. You can see similar trends in other non-agraria…
Doesn't infant mortality greatly skew life expectancy? I thought I remembered reading that it's the single biggest thing we've done to increase life expectancy, meaning if a hunter-gatherer reaches adulthood, they don't have an especially short lifespan compared to a developed country.
The other component of that is of course that we're all fat and out of shape today because we eat foods that cavemen never had access to.
One measure of health is of course weight, but so is life expectancy. If we follow a life-plan where we're around some normal weight but die at 30 I'm not sure that's a great plan. We evolved to die around 30, most research into aging agrees with this (some say ~40), and that's "natural" I suppose, but I think I reject that notion that we should only do things in the modern world that fit what we were required to do a million years ago because it's what we evolved to cope with and eek out 3 or 4 decades of life.
Another is infant mortality, we evolved to reproduce pretty fast because we evolved to maintain population with lots of dead infants. We also evolved to produce slightly more males than females since men die faster, which is okay since fewer men can reproduce with more women.
We also evolved to be able to bear children in our early teens, to grow beards, hair and nails, and to have bad eyesight in some large percentage of the population. Should we lower the age of consent to 13? Not shave or cut our hair or nails ever and not wear glasses?
I'm not sure any of these notions work today, but extending the central argument out:
If we should eat like our ancient ancestors did since we evolved to eat like that and therefore it must be healthy, should we not live like our ancient ancestors did since therefore that must be equally valid by the "it's all natural so it's good" principle?
While that will help, I would not call someone who exercises at that level "fit" or "in shape". I'd call him something less than out of shape.
There are a lot of weight-lifting people who have convinced themselves that weights are the key, and that aerobic exercise is an afterthought.
Here's the funny thing, though: how many fat weight-lifters have you met in your life? I've known plenty.
How many fat runners have you ever met?
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Not only that, but our "nature" has changed considerably since those times. Evolution has been far faster, likely 100 times faster the past several thousand years than it was before civilization. 15,000 years ago, nobody was lactose tolerant, nobody had blue eyes and who knows what else was different.
Actually, everybody was lactose intolerant 15,000 years ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactose_intolerant#History_of_g...
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Poor people eat carbs. Poor people eat fast food. Good food is cheaper than McDonald's, but you have to be able to cook.
Fast food and carbs are equivalent: Potatoes, white flour, and sugar. The meat/vegetable content is negligible.
Again, good meat and produce (raw materials for cooking) are also accessible for less than it costs to eat out.
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> don't eat boxed foods or foods that went through multiple stages of processing What's wrong with cheese, or butter? Or sauerkraut and pickles? All processed food. Also, powdered mashed potatoes and puffed rice are just conveniently preserved starch. They're perfectly healthy. The "processed food" and "mostly plants" stuff is just marketing psychology that taps into SWPLs' inner hippie. The real diet rules aren't my…
A couple years ago I worked on a market research contract for a food grower that tried to answer the opposite, "what does all natural mean" (or some set of synonyms)? Turns out it's virtually impossible to define it. Here was one of the exercises we went through: 1) Take an orange, grown in the wild without being touched in any way by the hand of man. 2) If you eat that orange, are you eating something that's "all na…
The In Defense of Food argument is not so much about whether or not the food is still "natural" at that point. The point is you are throwing out much of the orange, and there is probably stuff in the part you are throwing away that is good for you.
Pollan talks about how at one point a scientist thought he had isolated all of the necessary parts of nutrition: proteins, fats, and carbohydrates.
Then they discovered vitamins. Oops. If you actually believed what that first scientist said, you probably died of scurvy.
So, let's take our food stuff made from proteins, fats, and carbohydrates and inject some vitamins in them! Should be all good now, right?
Except, we continue to discover stuff in the food that grows out of the ground and on trees that turns out to be good for us. (I forget the more recent examples he mentions in his book, but you get the idea.)
So your choice is basically to take the chance that the scientists have finally found all the parts of plants and animals that are good for us, synthesized or extracted them, and injected them into that box of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs you are eating. Or you can just eat the actual plants and animals and be done with it.