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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

#131

Post by lurking_swe »

jiriknesl wrote: post #101
lurking_swe wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sure, then you have a society deficient in nutrition because they got full on french fries lol. The problem is cultural, and also because of GREED. Companies make so much money off of selling you junk food, pharma makes a lot selling you pills, etc. It’s not a biological problem 99% of the time. You really want to solve this overnight? Simple: • force free healthy and delicious meals in public schools. regardless of…

This is a very cynical take. Companies are full of people. Those people want to do good things and want to help others. There are plenty of companies who sell vegetables, fruits, free-range eggs and beef, meal replacement shakes with full spectrum of macros & micros, packed foods for vegetarians, keto, paleo eaters. It's not particularly companies fault that someone buys a cheeseburger instead of omelette with tomato…

sorry for not clarifying.

I agree that at a micro level people are just trying to find a job and do the best they can. But the system as it’s designed drives these incentives. Have you seen the typical lunch that a japanese student eats every day? Not sure how anyone can look at the typical american child’s lunch and not feel shame and guilt. This is something the government could change if someone with power wanted to.

Please watch this if you haven’t: https://youtu.be/fze5s1SlqB8?si=Xo7kQH3ShfE0y3wz

That’s not some fancy or private school in japan. That’s a NORMAL school lunch.

Regarding advertising and foods, I was referring to heavily processed foods that are advertised on TV and elsewhere, targeted at kids that don’t know better. Cereals, junk snacks (doritos, chips, popcorn, etc). I am in my 30’s and I STILL remember how badly i wanted my mom to buy me coco puffs lol.

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

#132

Post by airlocksoftware »

lostmsu wrote: post #119
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

> Exercise improves sleep, improves cognitive function and make tasks easier and more enjoyable. Sleep maybe. My cognitive function is down for extended periods of time after prolonged exercise. I see no effect on exercising vs my life enjoyability except immediately after exercise I feel happy, because that torture is over and I can resume thinking.

Sorry for the unsolicited advice, but I wanted to share something that was counterintuitive and made a big difference for me.

Not sure what types of exercise you are doing or your background (I could be more specific if you shared, feel free to email me) but in general I find most untrained to moderately trained people exercise at too high an intensity most of the time. Feeling like exercise is torture, and having lower cognitive function afterwards are also strong indicators of this.

Most exercise should actually feel quite easy — perhaps an 80/20 split of easy exercise days to hard exercise days is ideal. For example, if you were running you might switch between running and walking to keep your heart rate at a pretty low level (zone 1 or 2) in some sort of structured program that ramps up intensity over time but keeps you in these lower heart rate zones 80% of your exercise time.

For me personally I started enjoying exercise and getting a lot more out of it after making most of it feel "too easy"!

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

#133

Post by georgeplusplus »

graemep wrote: post #112
georgeplusplus wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where exactly is the nuance in this? I pity the smoker more because they don’t have to smoke but feel compelled to smoke through addiction. You have direct control over how many calories you consume and it’s a basic human instinct to eat. Saying there’s nuanced steps inbetween is just a way to hand wave away someone’s laziness to not tackle the problem.

> I pity the smoker more because they don’t have to smoke but feel compelled to smoke through addiction. We all feel compelled to eat. A lot of cheap food does not satisfy hunger for as long as better food. Just cutting calories in can make you feel less able to do things, so you automatically cut back on exercise. People differ in many ways: metabolism, genetics, physical sicknesses, mental health, gut bacteria and…

>>>Just cutting calories in can make you feel less able to do things, so you automatically cut back on exercise.

As someone who has dieted by cutting and counting calories. This wasn’t true, I didn’t have the energy for high intensity workouts sure but I did have the energy to walk a mile or two and the result is the same loss of calories as 2 mile run. Walking just takes a bit longer.

The important thing was drinking a lot of water or gassy things to feel full to quiet the urge to snack.

Also Deleting junk food, sodas , and beer completely from my pantry. Having coffee without cream, Replacing them with low calories snacks like carrots, celery, bananas.

I dropped 15 lbs fairly fast.

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

#135

Post by pandaman »

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…

As somebody who had been outside all the time during childhood and hated exercise starting with the PE in school, I don't think your guess is well founded in reality. None of my childhood friends had been keen on exercise either and PE was not the most popular class in my school...

For me there is a huge difference of doing something that requires physical exertion in order to complete and doing pointless physical exertion for exertion's sake. I can skate on a board or skates, or ride a bike for hours because it's about skill and technique for me, I feel frustrated after running for a minute. Similarly I can free-dive whole day but swimming laps feels like a massive chore.

I believe some people can enjoy exercise but, judging by how many fit people are there - they are in small minority.

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

#136

Post by richardw »

azmodeus wrote: post #95
richardw wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yup related. I messaged you on LinkedIn.

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

#137

Post by johnnyanmac »

nathan_douglas wrote: post #111
yosame wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that it's harder to quit compulsive eating than it is to quit compulsive smoking. You can't go cold turkey on food

What does “going cold turkey on food” look like here? Because I’ve quit a pack-a-day-for-ten-years nicotine addiction, and I’ve dieted by slightly increasing exercise and slightly decreasing caloric consumption to produce a daily deficit of about 250-500 calories in line with mainstream medical recommendations, and I can tell you which I found harder… and it wasn’t drinking diet soda and walking around the block in t…

I suppose the cold turkey equivalent here is intermittent fasting. Disciplining yourself to ignore the most basic instincts of survival and eat at a specific time.

I never smoked nor fasted, so I can't really compare the two.

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

#138

Post by gwd »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #130
gwd wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Exercise sucks. Lots of people, including myself, love exercising. If nothing else, endorphins are a great natural "high". And I can tell that the rest of my system just works better when I'm working out regularly: I have fewer hunger attacks, I sleep better, I feel better. And, I just really like the feeling of picking up really heavy things (that being my current exercise of choice). From what I can tell, the "ex…

> Lots of people, including myself, love exercising. great, good for you and those people. but clearly most people don't . plus you cannot out-exercise a poor diet. doesn't matter how hard you go in the gym or on a hike if you slam donuts and pepsi all day.

> great, good for you and those people. but clearly most people don't.

If throwawaysleep had said, "Some people seem to like exercise, but I've tried all kinds of things and never found anything that wasn't a misery", I probably wouldn't have replied. But rather, they said, "Exercise is a misery" -- no exceptions or qualifications. They have acknowledged the importance of exercise, and seemed to indicate that they would be willing to do it for their own health if it were just boring or mildly annoying; but they believe exercise is always unpleasant. They seem to believe that everyone who does exercise regularly does so by just powering through the misery; but that this is realistically not an option for them.

So there's something they don't know, something they need to know -- exercise doesn't always suck. Lots of people exercise without having to "power through" any misery, because they've found routines they actually enjoy. And so, maybe there's a routine that they will enjoy as well. You're not going to look for something unless you know that it might exist.

> plus you cannot out-exercise a poor diet. doesn't matter how hard you go in the gym or on a hike if you slam donuts and pepsi all day.

I'm not sure where the donuts and pepsi are coming from. I don't know what happens if you take Ozempic while only eating donuts and pepsi; it's possible you could stay thin, but you definitely won't be healthy.

But since you raised it: Slim != healthy, and healthy eating !=> slim. It's possible to gain weight eating healthy most days and only eating really unhealthy once a month. And it's possible to have healthy muscles / cardiovascular system and still be overweight, or to have poor cardio and be slim. I'm pretty sure it's healthier to be overweight and cycle 20 minutes every day than to be slim and a couch potato.

If throwawaysleep is slamming donuts and pepsi all day, they should stop that for their health and well-being. But although it might slow the rate at which they gain weight, it probably won't make them slim.

Similarly, if they're overweight, while a normal, sustainable exercise routine will probably slow the rate at which they gain weight, or help them lose a bit, it probably will never make them slim. But they will be a lot healthier nonetheless.

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

#139

Post by cheschire »

alephnerd wrote: post #125
cheschire wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 poin…

You don't need an LLM for sentiment analysis. I also don't want to pay for scraping and data ingest costs out of my personal pocket. Feel free to do it if you want - it would make a nice blogpost.

I wasn't suggesting you need the LLM to perform sentiment analysis. The problem the LLM overcomes is generating the training data you need without having to trudge through massive amounts of material to mark a comment / thread with a 1 or a 0.

There's no scraping cost, the API is free. Your message, for example, is here: https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/40801233.json?pri...

Processing 10,000 threads is probably not more than a few dollars on OpenAI's GPT API.

The reason I don't do it is I don't see the trend you see.

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

#140

Post by graemep »

georgeplusplus wrote: post #133
graemep wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I pity the smoker more because they don’t have to smoke but feel compelled to smoke through addiction. We all feel compelled to eat. A lot of cheap food does not satisfy hunger for as long as better food. Just cutting calories in can make you feel less able to do things, so you automatically cut back on exercise. People differ in many ways: metabolism, genetics, physical sicknesses, mental health, gut bacteria and…

>>>Just cutting calories in can make you feel less able to do things, so you automatically cut back on exercise. As someone who has dieted by cutting and counting calories. This wasn’t true, I didn’t have the energy for high intensity workouts sure but I did have the energy to walk a mile or two and the result is the same loss of calories as 2 mile run. Walking just takes a bit longer. The important thing was drinkin…

> Also Deleting junk food, sodas , and beer completely from my pantry.

So you improved the quality of your diet significantly. That is very different from just eating fewer calories. I suspect that if you had not done this it would have worked.

> Replacing them with low calories snacks like carrots, celery, bananas.

Also improving your fibre intake, and other improvements in nutrition too.

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