The Myth of Moderate Exercise

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1827342,00.html

by adamdoupe • 18 years ago

35 66 18 years ago

> Research suggests that weight may largely be regulated by biology, which helps determine the body's "set point,"

So where did all the fatties come from? They didn't used to be here.

This is ridiculous. There are big, obvious changes in diet and exercise levels since the 70s that have correlated well with rising obesity.

ardit33• 18 years ago

I agree. White americans, are similiar to Europeans (more like a mix), yet they are a lot fatter. And how do you explain people in North California, or northern VA/DC/Maryland being a lot slimer than people just a state away.

It seems more a enviroment/culturual/city walkability thing

kingkongrevenge9• 18 years ago

The walkability and culture things are pretty critical, but my armchair opinion is that the biggest factor is fat consumption. Americans eat something like 20% as much fat as they did in the 40s, and the drop off since the early 80s has been fairly sharp. People are eating much less fat and much more starch, with all the insulin and fat storage implications that brings.

Across time and between nations now the role of fat is pretty clear. More fat, thinner people. The recent studies that have put people on high fat, low carb diets are unmatched. People lose the weight and keep it off when you tell them to cut the potatoes and eat butter instead.

jcromartie• 18 years ago

The DC metro area has one simple advantage over the surrounding areas: money. There's a very strong correlation between lower and lower-middle income people and obesity. There are too many complex relationships involved to even begin to draw conclusions.

natrius• 18 years ago

One theory says that the food you eat can affect your set point. High-calorie, strongly flavored foods that are easily digested (which make up most of the modern American diet) raise your set point. Breaking the flavor-calorie association with flavorless calories supposedly lowers your set point.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shangri-La_Diet

kingkongrevenge9• 18 years ago

> High-calorie, strongly flavored foods that are easily digested

I think French cuisine is WAY more flavorful and calorie dense, and they're thin.

noonespecial• 18 years ago

It does seem that the set point is movable. If you've been overweight for 20 years, there may very well be nothing that you can do about it.

An interesting (but very difficult to conduct) study would be an investigation into this particular rubicon of flab. How fat can you become for how long before it is impossible to go back.

ars2• 18 years ago

Well perhaps the food levels eaten during childhood determine the set point. By the time you're an adult it's too late.

albertcardona• 18 years ago

The number of fat cells becomes fixed by the end of adolescence. As a child, fatty cells proliferate, but remain rather small. Your daily food as a kid influences how many cells you'll end up having as an adult.

Kids nowadays have a horrible diet of sugary drinks and fatty pseudo-chocolate treats.

Fat cells are very much involved in total body weight control, both through enzymes and by hosting lipid-soluble hormones in their oil droplets. So an adult having a lot of fat cells is at a disadvantage in a McBurger world.

a-priori4• 18 years ago

"The number of fat cells becomes fixed by the end of adolescence."

Uh, reference? I think you're wrong there. From what I remember, new fat cells grow when weight is gained, and are "deflated", but mostly survive, when weight is lost.

a-priori4• 18 years ago

That paragraph in the article really got on my nerves, because the whole idea of a "set point" for weight is wrong. There is no set point for weight. The only reason people think there is one is because it's a nice, neat hypothesis. Unfortunately, it is directly contradicted by evidence.

Your body does not try to return to a some weight, but rather resists changes in weight. Given constant diet and exercise, weight will asymptotically settle at some value and stay there. Make a significant change to diet and/or exercise, and the asymptote changes accordingly.

flipbrad5• 18 years ago

your theory is one theory, and it's the view held by society. does not hold that the set point theory is invalid. I would not be at all surprised if your (extremely complex) body system had an 'equilibrium' weight which it will attempt to normalise itself at, at the translational, post-transcriptional or homonal level. likely a mix of both.

dejb• 18 years ago

> Within a few months, most of the participants had resorted to exercising as much as they chose to. That left researchers with a slightly different data set than they had planned for...

This self-selection tends to invalidate the study I think. It is possible that the people who chose not to exercise much were exactly the ones who needed it the most. The people who chose to exercise a lot are more likely to have been fitter in the first place.

edw519• 18 years ago

This self-selection tends to invalidate the study

Not to mention the fact that almost no treatment of a "study" in popular media distinguishes between correlation and causation. There is a difference, a fact lost on almost everyone these days.

[I lost .4 pounds last Thursday commenting on Hacker News. Therefore, typing causes weight loss :-) ]

kingkongrevenge9• 18 years ago

If I read correctly all they even looked at was light treadmill exercise. Yeah, you have to do that for hours to impact the body. You have to burn through glycogen stores to really get anywhere. It's different for more intense sessions and strength training, though. They can be short and have impact beyond calorie arithmetic.

fallentimes3• 18 years ago

Yankee apologists are bad enough. Now we have fat people apologists. It really isn't hard: exercise moderately, take walk breaks, get enough sleep, consume primarily vegetables then fruit then meat/carbs. Eat five small meals a day and focus on lower calories.

kingkongrevenge9• 18 years ago

Who the hell could eat primarily vegetables? You'd be on the shitter half the day.

Also, a fruit heavy diet is particularly bad for weight loss. Humans don't deal with fructose too well.

fallentimes3• 18 years ago

I do and I'm not. You should eat a lot more vegetables than fruit - I should have articulated that better.

I'm not saying you have to follow such a diet, but the fattie excuses are laughable when solutions are right in front of them. For more information on diet: http://www.lesmills.com/files/globalcentral/Consumers/Health...

menloparkbum2• 18 years ago

It depends on the vegetables. I eat mostly vegetables, chicken and fish and don't have that problem.

william42• 18 years ago

Yankee apologists?

ars2• 18 years ago

Did you actually read the article? Rather than "It really isn't hard" what you wrote does not work.

streblo• 18 years ago

I don't understand why people think staying fit is such a god damn mystery. Exercise a few hours a week, eat a well balanced diet, get enough sleep. How hard is that?

omouse• 18 years ago

bike shed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_of_the_bikeshed

michaelneale• 18 years ago

Yeah its not that hard. Just have to make time. I have been trying lately more intense training, which seems to work well for me both fitness and good use of time (as sessions are shorter and more intense).

sgibat• 18 years ago

People lack critical thinking skills and the power to change their emotional schema, the way they deal with events in their lives. They are a product of their environment. So where on the giant can we attack with the greatest work/reward ratio? Education? Media? I don't know. Human beings are some crazy ass animals yo.

jamiequint• 18 years ago

Perhaps the problem is that the study only considered exercise is moderate.

<antecdote> I've found high intensity exercise for short periods of time (20-40 minutes, 3-4 times a week) has far more effect for me personally than moderate exercise (45-60 minutes, 5-6 times a week) I've seen more personal improvement doing CrossFit (www.crossfit.com) than I ever did previously going to the local gym. </antecdote>

aantix• 18 years ago

I have had a similar experience.

Lately I have been doing interval swimming where I swim one lap freestyle as if my life depended on it, and then another lap doing the backstroke as fast as I can. I am going 100% the whole time.

I rest for a few minutes and as soon as I feel I've got my breath slightly back, I do it all over again.

Not sure what it is about getting the hard pumping that hard for short intervals, but I've lost weight in the process.

The thing about it is there is no way to become content. You see a lot of cardio people churning away at the same rate on the treadmill as they were doing last week.

But with my interval swimming, I am going 100%. You are always pushing full throttle; there's no allowance for contentment.

http://www.quitrunning.com/interval-training-swimmers.htm http://www.marksdailyapple.com/sprint-training/

llimllib• 18 years ago

read the whole article. They tried to get some of the women to do high intensity exercise, but they couldn't stick to the protocol.

> Jakicic and his colleagues originally designed their study to measure whether weight loss could really be achieved and maintained through moderate-intensity exercise... or whether it was preferable to engage in shorter bursts of more vigorous-intensity activity... The problem was that not enough of the women stuck with their assigned exercise categories for the researchers to gather enough meaningful data. Within a few months, most of the participants had resorted to exercising as much as they chose to. That left researchers with a slightly different data set than they had planned for

(FWIW I'm all about HIIT, but I don't know how you can get people into it once it becomes inconceivable to do high-intensity work.)

dmfdmf2• 18 years ago

Read the book "Good Calories, Bad Calories" by Gary Taubes. The scientific evidence supports the theory that carbos, especially refined carbs and sugars, are the cause of obesity and a raft of modern ailments. The most striking comment was that input (eating) and output (exercise) are dependent variables... something that these eatless/exercisemore approaches ignore.

me2i81• 18 years ago

Or watch this lecture by Taubes: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/event_details.php?webcastid=2121...

dmfdmf2• 18 years ago

Damn! Realplayer....

xlnt2• 18 years ago

Just don't eat when not hungry.

Most people eat large quantities of food all at once. Stop half way and wait 20 minutes and you might not be hungry anymore. If you eat too quickly then you don't know at what point you'd eaten enough to satisfy your hunger.

dominik3• 18 years ago

This only works for people who have their "hunger point" properly calibrated to when they should actually stop eating.

Some folks don't stop feeling hungry until well after they should have stopped eating, leading them to eat way too many calories.

John Walker explains this concept in his "The Eat Watch" chapter here: http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/eatwatch.html

xlnt2• 18 years ago

So how do you move it down? Fast for a few days?

dominik3• 18 years ago

A good read that provides a hacker's look at dieting:

The Hacker's Diet by John Walker

http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/

scott_s4• 18 years ago

I'm in good shape. To some people, it's a bit of a mystery how I'm much more physically fit than they are. They know I go to the gym, but, hey, they go to the gym sometimes, too, so what's the deal? Here's the secret:

I work really, really hard.

When I go to the gym, I push myself as far as I can take it mentally and physically that day. Some days it's more than others. But overall, I work much harder in the gym than most people I know.

Treat your exercise time as something to excel it, not a chore to do. It can make a world of difference.

gnaritas3• 18 years ago

Except it is a chore, it's not fun. If we could just take a magic pill and instantly be in shape, I can't imagine anyone still choosing to exercise, thus, chore!

scott_s4• 18 years ago

It's a chore to you, and I'm sorry for that. So find something fun.

That you can't imagine anyone still choosing to exercise says a lot about how you think about it. Going through a good workout is the same for me as solving a hard problem.

The Myth of Moderate Exercise

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