61–70 of 207 posts
Disclaimer: this post is going to go into some of my personal experiences with weight loss, fitness, and reddit. In March 2012, not all that long ago, I was considered obese. Living a life primarily behind the computer screen while leading an engineering team at a rapidly growing startup (over 100% growth in the last year alone) left little time for me to consider my fitness. I'd eat trash -- burritos four or five ti…
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You would be surprised, but the overweight people doing marathons still do less than 50 mpw. I am meaning a consistent 50 throughout the year -- not "peaking" at it. If you know some counterexamples personally, I'd be very interested in hearing about them -- it would be an unusual situation.
I know several personally, but I hate using personal anecdotes as evidence. These people religiously run 45-55 miles a week (slightly below your number, I know, but there is nothing magical about those last 5 miles). They also run a slow 50. But, they still run around 50 a week and they are overweight. The point being there is nothing magical about running long distances and being lean, IMO. Someone could (and like I…
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 formely fat peers.
In the future, you will be able to go online, fill out a questionnaire, and for a small monthly fee receive one of several pre-programmed diet and exercise programs, complete with local gyms that are part of the program and can help you perform your exercise requirements. A local food store will also be part of the program, with a special aisle of diet food for you to buy from. The solution comes from tailored, marketed, cult-of-the-self products that suck you in for long enough to make a dent.
The problem I see with the fitness portion is creating a fitness product without real user engagement. You've seen it before plenty of times: CrossFit. P90X. Tae Bo. Yoga. The Brazilian Butt Lift. They can all pretty much work to get you in better shape, but there's nothing keeping a random person engaged in it enough to continue for long. For someone starting out for the first time, they have to have an enormous amount of motivation to continue once they see how difficult it will be to begin.
To my mind, the easiest way to get people stuck on fitness is to Facebook it. Make it addictive and interesting, and make them obsessed with how they are doing. Give them micro stats. Gimmicks and social fluff to turn it into a game. Anything to keep them hooked, to the point where the exercise is just a small component to them. The diet becomes the same, giving lots of interesting variables and an infinite number of simple user-friendly options to continue getting healthy while being obsessed with a new toy.
If it's done right, they'll have gone weeks with the program, eating right, and working hard, and suddenly find they've made some noticeable gains. The rest takes care of itself. The revolution comes when people don't really notice that they're being healthy.
I've lost a ton of weight (no pun intended) by being an active member of r/loseit. Nothing else. That community helped me achieve my goals. It is just an amazing place.
"Nothing else." I find this doubtful.
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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…
"Carbs" is such a vague word there are complex carbohydrates and simple carbohydrates, a blanket statement calling both "carbs" is generalizing.
This is why nobody should be taking fitness advice from random non-professionals on the internet
Disclaimer: this post is going to go into some of my personal experiences with weight loss, fitness, and reddit. In March 2012, not all that long ago, I was considered obese. Living a life primarily behind the computer screen while leading an engineering team at a rapidly growing startup (over 100% growth in the last year alone) left little time for me to consider my fitness. I'd eat trash -- burritos four or five ti…
I have a similar disclaimer: personal weight loss, no reddit. The main point of this post: I was under the impression that high-protein diets are not healthy over the long term. That such diets lead to health problems because of the high protein content. I agree that less intake, more exercise is vague advice, but aren't nutritionists a better source of advice? It doesn't seem difficult to find more nuanced advice on…
For high-protein are you referring to protein and kidneys? Bones?
"I'm perplexed by people who initiate insane diets that deviate from the dietary habits of humans for thousands of years;"
The Inuit, Athabaskans, the Siberians, and Masai, and many other groups of people are keto or close.
"I agree that less intake, more exercise is vague advice, but aren't nutritionists a better source of advice? "
The ADA is unfortunately sponsored by many fast food companies like Coca Cola. My own story is that I started the course track in undergrad to become a dietician, but switched out because I was frustrated with it. I was mildly overweight at the time, but my main problem was continuous GI issues (IBS and GERD). The school dietician (who was VERY overweight and a professor for some of my nutrition classes) told me to eat more fiber, low fat, and that I could control my symptoms with medication if that didn't work. It didn't work and the medications I had to go on had significant side effects.
Thanks to googling and messing around on Pubmed, I found some small promising studies with low-carb and GI problems and decided to try them for myself, even though they violated the typical advice for my condition (low-fat, high fiber). And it worked really well. And I also lost weight. And felt awesome.
Later on the internet the FODMAPs concept for GI problems, which is hilariously popular with Australian dietitians, but unheard of in the US until recently because US curricula is so miserable outdated and slow to change. FODMAPs is a diet that restricts certain types of foods that ferment in the colon. And because it only restricts certain carbs, I have been able to broaden my diet significantly.
In the end, I have more time to hack my own condition and read random crap on the internet than any dietician or doctor ever will.
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…
That was my methodology for fixing my condition that I was told was incurable. I looked at pubmed for any study at all on the condition, even animal studies. And if there was anything promising that was not dangerous to do, I tried it.
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…
There are quite a few things in the above so I won't touch on them all. Though, I must ask...what is your goal? My belief is that nearly everything in how someone eats, worksout and approaches fitness and health should be decided AFTER they understand what their goal is. Nearly all the studies above seem to have no idea what they are actually testing (the goal). Right now I am an amateur powerlifter and bodybuilder.…
Hardcore males doing CR for health and longevity, pushing it as far a they can go, average about 1700 - 1900 a day. At 6+ foot and 120 pounds.
5 foot female might hit 1100 or 1200, sure.
Keep in mind that's an average though. If you cheat once a week or two weeks you could easily eat a 1200 calorie diet on the other six days and have it work out the same.
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…
Cardio really should be a minimum of an hour per day, at least 5 days a week if weight control is the goal
First of all, who the hell has time to do a minimum of five hours of cardio per week? Some people have families or businesses to run. Getting a runner's high may be great for you, but you in no way need to spend an hour doing just cardio for effective weight loss.
My reasoning? The better your body performs, the quicker you see changes in it. Doing just an hour of cardio a day will not create a body at peak performance. You might be able to run a marathon, but you also might not be able to do a push-up. This is not your whole body working at peak performance. So you're missing out on vital conditioning by using all that time for cardio.
On top of that, you can get similar gains in endurance and cardiovascular fitness by doing a variety of high intensity workouts, and they need not last longer than 30 minutes (IMO) if done at top speed. I have no way to prove this other than the theory that lots of muscles trained to perform both slowly and quickly and at intervals of rest and high performance is going to have an overall greater conditioning effect than an hour of the same muscles doing the same thing at approximately the same pace.
I'll leave the meatheads to expound the virtues of resistance/weight training on strengthening the muscles needed to do such a demanding cardio workout in the first place.
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It is not a joke. Firstly, meta-analysis are generally amongst the worst things to go off (study selection makes it very difficult to control for a researcher's expectations). The link you provided doesn't even say how much cardio the subjects were doing. Secondly, the studies I cited were massive and far better controlled than most. Feel free to offer a link to a larger and better controlled on if you can. Thirdly y…
Friedenreich found that the test group lost more weight than the control group as well via. cardio. Yet I posted it in support of my argument anyway. Why? It took an average of 35 hours of cardio to lose 1 lb of fat. I'm not saying that it does not cause weight loss. I am saying that it's ineffective. Of course cardio will cause some weight loss vs. doing absolutely nothing. Of course it's good for your health. No on…