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Obesity and Fitness Are Revolutionized By Reddit, Not Doctors

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Re: Obesity and Fitness Are Revolutionized By Reddit, Not Doctors

#121

Post by wisty »

btilly wrote: post #106
hnriot wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do, and I don't have a problem finding 20 minutes to run every day. Become better at time management before posting nonsense like that.

Let me guess, your spouse isn't in a medical residency? Before I had kids, I never had trouble finding time to exercise and had little sympathy for people who did. Since I've had kids my ability to exercise has varied with life circumstances. At the moment it is very hard for me because my wife is in a medical residency, so most of the time I'm an only parent to small kids. In particular in periods when I exercised,…

Not many people's spouses are in medical residency, and have children who are too young to be left unsupervised for 20 minutes.

Even if you broaden it a bit (single parents, spouse in the military on deployment, etc) you are not looking at 90+% of the population. And most people looking after small children are pretty active anyway (due to all the lifting, running around, and so on).

Re: Obesity and Fitness Are Revolutionized By Reddit, Not Doctors

#122

Post by nazgulnarsil »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #63

Obesity and Fitness are not revolutionized by a forum full of people telling you what worked for them. The revolution comes when people find what works for themselves. So far, it's very far away. News flash: Most people don't go on Reddit. gasp Calm down. I'm sorry I frightened you. But it turns out you don't get a revolution by a small number of people who use a particular forum looking for fitness tips from their f…

It's called fitocracy. :)

Re: Obesity and Fitness Are Revolutionized By Reddit, Not Doctors

#124

Post by alinajaf »

xiaoma wrote: post #19

From reading the article I get the impression that the author isn't that familiar with the scientific literature at all. The evidence he presents against the usefulness of cardio for weight loss compares a group of weightlifters against a group of runners who ran only 20km per week and they still lost marginally more weight than the weightlifters! Cardio really should be a minimum of an hour per day, at least 5 days…

> Japanese people traditionally ate (and many still do eat) rice at every single mean, lunch, breakfast and dinner?

Agree with the majority of your comment but I think the above could be attributed to their smaller portions.

Re: Obesity and Fitness Are Revolutionized By Reddit, Not Doctors

#125

Post by davidtanner »

abalone wrote: post #35

Not surprising that this is an unscientific article. What evidence is presented that "ignoring the fitness advice of doctors" achieves "better results"? Anecdotal evidence, that's what. 1 dude. The author even cites a "completely unscientific, but accurate chart." That says it all.

How strong have you ever known anyone to get by following the advice of doctors?

Re: Obesity and Fitness Are Revolutionized By Reddit, Not Doctors

#126

Post by kmfrk »

petercooper wrote: post #34
kmfrk wrote: post #16

I think the main appeal of communities like this is that there is a central place to cheer on people who are trying to get into improving their health. You see something similar going on at Pinterest, which, for all its scientifically debunked advice, tries to encourage and inspire people to work out. It doesn't matter how good your workout and diet regimen looks on paper, if you have to multiply that result with an…

I was thinking this. That is, even if a lot of the advice is bunk, as long as it's not harmful, anything that gets people actually thinking "Yeah, I can do this!" and giving it a go has to be valuable. For example, if my prime goal in life were to get as many people coding as possible, I'd rather have an eager but bad VBScript developer I could train up than someone who doesn't really care about programming either wa…

Since fitness people usually start from a very, very bad level of exercise and dieting, you'd have to do some seriously stupid stuff for the net effect of your regimen not to be a big improvement regardless. Compared to programming or anything else, it's not that important to use the perfect way to improve most of the time. Especially when all the research happens at the cost of actually doing what you set out to.

So what if you can't burn fat from targeted areas on your body, when your overall weight decreases and will eventually shed that tummy fat you've been bothered by.

This is one of the reasons I like Hacker News as a community a lot. I think it sometimes makes starting a company sound way too easy (and buzzwordy), but there are a lot of people here who would never have started their companies, if they hadn't found a community here to cheer them on.

Re: Obesity and Fitness Are Revolutionized By Reddit, Not Doctors

#127

Post by tomjen3 »

mmaunder wrote: post #100

"When it comes to weight loss, creating a caloric deficit is the most important thing that matters; eating less, not moving more, is the most realistic way to do so." What? Please read Gary Taubes "Good Calories, Bad Calories" or "Why we get fat". He is one of the leading thinkers in nutrition and is worshipped by other gurus like Tim Noakes (who wrote the runners bible Lore of Running). Taubes spends the first third…

I have read Christians "refuting" evolution too.

I give a guy who doesn't thermodynamics (one does not refute that in a popsci book) the same credit.

If he had really discovered something important, he would not be worshipped. He would present evidence to other researchers, who would confirm his experiments, etc.

Re: Obesity and Fitness Are Revolutionized By Reddit, Not Doctors

#128

Post by creamyhorror »

beagle3 wrote: post #101
creamyhorror wrote: post #95

What's very inspiring are the body transformations posted by members of forums. Just check out the ridiculous before-and-after shots on the following thread from the SomethingAwful Forums' fitness subforum: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=333... Threads like these are what inspire people to radically change their lifestyle, start lifting weights, and stay motivated. They go on to keep fitness…

> Dietary cholesterol - probably not as bad as previously assumed, but having >6 eggs a week actually increases your risk of heart disease/events. Do you have a reference? I've been unable to find one (or for that matter, anyone who's actually seen one). I have found examples to the contrary: e.g. http://www.sherdog.net/forums/f15/88-year-old-man-eats-25-eg... (anecdote aside, it has other references as well)

I went back and read the source paper carefully, and realised this was a mistake on my part. The relevant study:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10217054

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After adjustment for age, smoking, and other potential CHD risk factors, we found no evidence of an overall significant association between egg consumption and risk of CHD or stroke in either men or women. The relative risks (RRs) of CHD across categories of intake were less than 1 per week (1.0), 1 per week (1.06), 2 to 4 per week (1.12), 5 to 6 per week (0.90), and > or =1 per day (1.08) (P for trend = .75) for men; and less than 1 per week (1.0), 1 per week (0.82), 2 to 4 per week (0.99), 5 to 6 per week (0.95), and > or =1 per day (0.82) (P for trend = .95) for women.

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At face value this seems to imply increased relative risk (1.08) of >=1 egg per day, and that's what I concluded. But reading the results section of the paper, I came across this:

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Because of the relatively strong correlation between consumption of eggs and bacon, we further adjusted for bacon intake. The adjusted RRs across categories of egg consumption are less than 1 per week (1.0), 1 per week (1.00), 2 to 4 per week (1.04), 5 to 6 per week (0.78), and 1 or more per day (0.93) (P for trend=.36) for men; and less than 1 per week (1.0), 1 per week (0.81), 2 to 4 per week (0.96), 5 to 6 per week (0.91), and 1 or more per day (0.78) (P for trend=.73) for women. Additional adjustment for other foods including whole milk, fish, beef as main dish, chicken, or cereal had little impact on the results.

----

So it looks like 5-6 eggs/week actually resulted in the lowest relative risk of heart disease, at least when the effect of bacon is accounted for. >=1 egg/day resulted in lowered risk as well. It's quite telling that bacon raises the relative risk significantly while meats, milk, and cereals did not.

So, sorry I posted misinformation, and thanks for pointing this out. I hope this post helps elucidate the current state of research for anyone reading. I'm actually happy, because I've been eating 5 eggs/day on-and-off lately and was reluctantly considering reducing my intake. Now I get to continue eating dem eggs! (At least, one or two a day...)

Re: Obesity and Fitness Are Revolutionized By Reddit, Not Doctors

#129

Post by _delirium »

neutronicus wrote: post #41
_delirium wrote: post #10

What's missing in this article is mention of actual scientific evidence. I can believe that traditional nutritional recommendations are on flimsy ground, but replacing them with new cargo-cult ideas isn't necessarily better. Do these newer recommendations have good science behind them? My lurker experiences in /r/fitness are quite mixed; they seem like nice people, but the specific diet plans are very heavy on anecdo…

I'm actually thankful for the focus on near-term goals rather than living to 75 instead of 70.

I don't mind that people are interested in bodybuilding/fitness, but if it's positioned as a replacement for traditional nutritional science, that's not the main goal of nutritional science. And personally it's not my interest: I don't really care about bodybuilding/fitness, but I do care about minimizing my risk of serious health problems. It's not clear to me that the two goals even result in the same recommendations; it's quite possible that there are diets that are good for short/medium-term muscle building which are not good for, say, long-term organ health. At least, I would want to see scientific evidence one way or another.

Re: Obesity and Fitness Are Revolutionized By Reddit, Not Doctors

#130

Post by _delirium »

fingerprinter wrote: post #38
StavrosK wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is it that both Atkins and Taubes got so fat on very low carb diets while Japanese people traditionally ate (and many still do eat) rice at every single mean, lunch, breakfast and dinner? Because eating a lot will make you fat, and eating a little will make you thin. Whether you eat proteins, fat or carbs, you can gain or lose weight depending on how much you eat. I haven't studied it very much, but just eating…

No way. Try getting fat eating just protein. It is so incredibly hard. Just try it. Now, try getting fat eating nothing but fat+protein. Hard, but much easier than just protein. Now, try getting fat eating just carbs. Easy. Now, try getting fat eating carbs+anything. Easy. A "calorie is a calorie" isn't true now and never has been. It was a very simple model. Our understanding has changed and we now know much more. F…

> Now, try getting fat eating nothing but fat+protein. Hard, but much easier than just protein.

This one isn't hard at all. I unwittingly gained a bunch of weight in one period because I was busy at work and too lazy to make proper food, so I just ate a lot of peanuts as snack food, 'cause I'd heard they're somewhat healthier than other snack foods. Peanuts are basically nothing but protein+fat, but I gained a bunch of weight because they're so calorie-dense (one 8-oz bag has like 1500 calories). I'm not 100% sure, but I think the fat+salt aspect might promote overeating; I can't imagine eating enough walnuts, say, to gain weight, but I can munch on salted/roasted peanuts all day.

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