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Vigorous Exercise, Cognitive Decline, and High Blood Pressure

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Re: Vigorous Exercise, Cognitive Decline, and High Blood Pressure

#91

Post by mnw21cam »

globular-toast wrote: post #30
throwawaysleep wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The barrier to exercise isn’t money in most cases. It is that exercise is misery. Exercise sucks. I am overweight. I much prefer Ozempic (and pay a substantial premium for it) vs lifestyle change. So do millions of other Americans who are shelling out for it. You would basically need to economically torture fat people to the point that exercise is less horrible than your incentives. I’m paying 8K a year to avoid exer…

That's good because exercise wouldn't solve your problem anyway. You'd just be a fat guy who exercises. Exercise isn't a misery when you aren't fat. To lose weight you eat less. Unfortunately we've decided treating food addiction with pills and removing organs is the way to go rather than targeting the addictive stuff itself. Kinda like treating heroin addiction by removing arms.

Yeah, there are studies that show that eating less is much more effective than exercising more for losing weight.

There are other studies that show quite often the most effective way to eat less is to fast every now and again. And that's because if you're trying to diet by eating a small meal, your stomach/brain is going to be yelling at you all the time that you're hungry and you should eat some more, but if you fast, after 16 hours or so that urgency goes away and you stop feeling as hungry. Fasting sounds a lot more scary than it actually is. The record fast length is 382 days [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Barbieri%27s_fast

Re: Vigorous Exercise, Cognitive Decline, and High Blood Pressure

#92

Post by bregma »

badpun wrote: post #70
throwawaysleep wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The barrier to exercise isn’t money in most cases. It is that exercise is misery. Exercise sucks. I am overweight. I much prefer Ozempic (and pay a substantial premium for it) vs lifestyle change. So do millions of other Americans who are shelling out for it. You would basically need to economically torture fat people to the point that exercise is less horrible than your incentives. I’m paying 8K a year to avoid exer…

Have you tried walking? Just by walking one or two hours every day, you should burn enough calories to steadily lose weight. The health benefits of just walking are numerous: staving off musculosceletal degeneration (it will get to you quite quickly if you don't exercise at all - just look at astronauts), better sleep, improved mood and mental clarity. If you can walk in nature or at least peaceful and green urban en…

A couple of hours every day?

I spend 8 hours a day sleeping and 8 hours a day at work. Anther 4 hours in meal prep and consumption, personal hygiene, commuting, and mandatory household chores. That leaves 4 hours a day in elective time. Now you suggest I dedicate 50% of that time in non-productive exercise where I'm stuck with my own thoughts and no other mental stimulation while being physically uncomfortable?

Or once a month I could go to the doctor and get a shot.

I can see the appeal of Ozempic.

Now mind, I'm not overweight, but I do have diabetes and mild hypertension controlled through diet and, until my old dog "went to sleep" recently, regular exercise. I don't like the diet and often resented the twice daily long walks in all kinds of weather but still prefer that over chronic medication, especially one delivered through a means the gods did not give you an orifice for. My choice, but I respect other people's choices.

Re: Vigorous Exercise, Cognitive Decline, and High Blood Pressure

#93

Post by hnhg »

gwervc wrote: post #74
gniv wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in France there seem to be a lot of subsidies for physical activity. For example, each town has a swimming pool, used by kids and adults alike, with very cheap membership. Then there are the associations, each focused on an activity -- tennis, badminton, pilates, etc. If you pay in September for the year, it's again quite cheap. There are of course typical gyms, but the associations are much more popular afaict.

It's cheap only for a few sports. The martial art I'd like to do is at least 200€/year in the few clubs of my town, plus additional fees for administrative stuff like license and "passport". And then membership is often based on somewhat calendar years starting in September, so if you don't register exactly at this moment the cost per month is even higher.

What is expensive to you? 200EUR works out to a few euros a week. That is fantastic value compared to anything I have experienced in other EU countries in this decade.

Re: Vigorous Exercise, Cognitive Decline, and High Blood Pressure

#94

Post by cheschire »

alephnerd wrote: post #63
thefz wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes I wonder if commenters in this forum will do anything to try to disprove that exercise is good for health.

There is an undercurrent of skepticism and contrarianism bordering on anti-intellectualism on this forum - especially with those accounts started after the pandemic. This is just one of dozens of studies that have shown that good cardiovascular health (a side effect of "vigorous" exercise) has a downstream positive effect on health. And I personally can attest to that - the days I don't vigorously exercise (run, swim…

This should be quantifiable. Use an LLM to help identify this undercurrent you’re referring to in maybe 10,000 conversation threads using the API from the footer. A thread being a reply to a topic, and a singular chain of replies.

Then use that to train an RNN for sentiment analysis based on the values you’ve just described.

Then run the entire HN corpus through your RNN and chart the values over time.

For bonus points, incorporate the score of replies in the weighting of values.

Re: Vigorous Exercise, Cognitive Decline, and High Blood Pressure

#95

Post by azmodeus »

richardw wrote: post #77
keiferski wrote: post #4

I am no expert on the public health system and so I'm more than willing to be educated/corrected here, but I have the following impression: There is more money to be made by stakeholders treating health problems than there is in preventing them. And so there is a lot more money and effort invested in developing pharmaceutical and treatment solutions than there is in preventing the problems they treat – even though th…

Insurance/banking company I worked for has made billions from incentives. Exercise, getting preventative tests, driving slower, reducing dangerous credit behaviour. Works in their market (might not in yours) and the clientele has self selected, so now they have a huge client base who largely follow incentives, which reduces their risks massively. If you drive fast you go elsewhere. That’s half the secret. It’s harder…

Did they operate in Germany? If you can name them, I would like to check them out?

Reminds me of Vitality health insurance in the UK

Re: Vigorous Exercise, Cognitive Decline, and High Blood Pressure

#96

Post by CalRobert »

jiriknesl wrote: post #76
CalRobert wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, one clear market-based solution would be pricing transportation appropriately. If people were allowed to not pay for car infrastructure (via parking minimums, restrictive zoning, taxpayer-funded highways, etc. et.) and take their bike and train instead there would be a strong price signal to encourage the healthier activity. I moved to the Netherlands a year ago and have already lost 9kg (about 20 pounds) witho…

This policy would be too unrelated to health. You can have a sedentary person who works from home and orders takeaways. You can have a person who has a car who goes to gym 4 times per week, hikes during weekends and plays tennis 2 times per week and eats healthy food. There is no reason to tax the second person more than the first one.

Well, we're talking about population-level health here, not individuals. And, in general, places where it's easier to get around using your own body have healthier people. Our current tax policy actively disincentivizes this - literally collecting _less_ tax could result in better health outcomes if it meant narrower, safer streets (which are cheaper to build and maintain), less parking (parking spots can cost tens of thousands of USD/EUR depending on where they are, and more insidiously, often displace housing), etc.

Re: Vigorous Exercise, Cognitive Decline, and High Blood Pressure

#97

Post by CalRobert »

throwawaysleep wrote: post #6
keiferski wrote: post #4

I am no expert on the public health system and so I'm more than willing to be educated/corrected here, but I have the following impression: There is more money to be made by stakeholders treating health problems than there is in preventing them. And so there is a lot more money and effort invested in developing pharmaceutical and treatment solutions than there is in preventing the problems they treat – even though th…

The barrier to exercise isn’t money in most cases. It is that exercise is misery. Exercise sucks. I am overweight. I much prefer Ozempic (and pay a substantial premium for it) vs lifestyle change. So do millions of other Americans who are shelling out for it. You would basically need to economically torture fat people to the point that exercise is less horrible than your incentives. I’m paying 8K a year to avoid exer…

I used to be 280 pounds (127kg). My BMI was 38 and I was in horrible shape. People told me I needed to go to the gym, take up running, etc. - and that advice, while well-meaning, was mostly bad.

For me, what I needed was to swim and bike more. I loved those things. Running hurt and was miserable. Weight lifting was horrible. Team sports were a misery.

But I could happily bike (on a recumbent in particular) for ages, at my own pace.

When I sold my car, started riding a bike everywhere, and started a volumetric diet (don't eat tiny meals, eat big ones of low-calorie-density foods) I dropped to about 200 pounds.

And I stayed there for a long time (over a decade) until I moved somewhere I could do this even better - the Netherlands - and I've lost another 20 pounds. And I just ride my bike around. I don't go to a gym (I do get a swim in a couple times a month though).

Riding my bike in suburban California was, indeed, torture, but only because it's a horribly-designed place. In nice places it's a delight.

Re: Vigorous Exercise, Cognitive Decline, and High Blood Pressure

#98

Post by nabla9 »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #83
nabla9 wrote: post #62

Difference is just 5.8 per 1000 person-years. The effect size is very modest. You spend more time in exercising than increase your lifespan. The metaphor is literal, you are running from death and disease, and death is running faster. What we need is review studies ranking lifestyle and health regimes by their effect size and combined effect sizes. Almost certainly combining two effective regimes increases the life-…

Living longer but less fit is no prize. It's also misery to shuffle around and wheeze through every minute of your life. Exercise improves sleep, improves cognitive function and make tasks easier and more enjoyable. Everything about your life improves. I bicycle, and I enjoy it. It is one of the reasons I want to live longer .

Good for you. But this is not about you.

I feel the same, but this is not about me.

For people who read this and don't exercise, may not feel it enjoyable, it's often uphill all the time. They don't like exercise. Maybe being just thin and losing weight would be better, or doing non-vigorous exercise. We don't have much information. We make stories going off the tangent on some studies.

Re: Vigorous Exercise, Cognitive Decline, and High Blood Pressure

#99

Post by simonbarker87 »

cladopa wrote: post #88
simonbarker87 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the topic of time. I’m a fitness person, I love it and have made it large part of my none professional life. One of the most annoying things I hear fitness people say is: We all have the same 24 hours. Yeh no, people don’t and telling them that isn’t helping. What’s better is to accept people have different lived and see how exercise can be snuck in. Getting off the bus two stops early to get a 10 minute walk for…

I am also a fit person. When I hear someone tell me that they don't have time for doing exercise I do not respond, I just listen and watch. I almost always will see the same person in the next days watching TV, or social media or playing video games for hours. I do minimal high intensity exercise every single day, it is just routine, because I am busy. Everyone can learn that. In fact I see the biggest number of bett…

Sure, and you’re right in plenty of cases. But likewise if your day to day is hard, stressful and has a decent amount of worry then once you’ve got the kids to bed at 8:30 the will power required to do some exercise is monumental. Quite frankly their will power points are gone for the day.

So, instead try to find a way to squeeze exercise in as part of daily life (essentially habit stacking)

Re: Vigorous Exercise, Cognitive Decline, and High Blood Pressure

#100

Post by CalRobert »

branko_d wrote: post #31
throwawaysleep wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The barrier to exercise isn’t money in most cases. It is that exercise is misery. Exercise sucks. I am overweight. I much prefer Ozempic (and pay a substantial premium for it) vs lifestyle change. So do millions of other Americans who are shelling out for it. You would basically need to economically torture fat people to the point that exercise is less horrible than your incentives. I’m paying 8K a year to avoid exer…

I’ll hazard a guess: you never liked exercise, even as a kid? If that’s the case, I’ll hazard another guess: you lived in an environment where you couldn’t just go out and play whenever you wanted? I might be completely wrong in my guesses, and I apologize if I am. But I strongly believe that all kids are naturally predisposed for physical activity, and it’s the duty of the society to let them do that in an easy and…

Hard to let your kids play outside when there's 2500kg Dodge Rams going 80kph in the streets.
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