sw104

The entire experience made me feel like the fitness industry is bordering on fraud with the promises.

The fitness industry is very broad and is by no means just about weight loss. There's a large amount of people who are a normal weight, but not "fit" (ie. skinny fat).

It has been established for a long time that weight is generally diet based ("abs are made in the kitchen" etc), and every diet under the sun is some variation of CICO. Nobody is hiding it, nor is it a secret. It's just hard, and it takes work.

That said, exercise can boost weight loss. If you run 5 miles, you burn 500-ish extra calories which can be used to eat more or accelerate weight loss. I burn around 1500-2000 extra calories a day as a semi-professional athlete (3/4 hours per day).

Having lost a similar amount of weight (12kg) in a similar timeframe (2-3 months) last year, it's important to realise that a big portion of the initial weight loss upon a sudden diet change is water weight. You're probably eating less salt, which means your body isn't retaining as much water (which is very heavy in the body). It's important to keep doing something (like your resistance training) so your body doesn't burn off muscle mass as well, and it's important to ensure that the diet is sustainable, and as a side note, at some point weight loss will hit a slowdown or plateau somewhere above your target weight. Keep at it!

A lot of people lose a lot of weight, then go back to their former habits and put it all back on, plus extra. You have to be careful and make sure the changes you make are sustainable. Unless you're a very heavy weight, it's better to steadily lose weight than lose it very quickly, as this makes it more sustainable.

Exercise can make weight loss more sustainable because it can give you different goals that take your mind off of the number on the scales. For example, if you take up running and work up to 5k, 10k, half marathon, marathons, and improving your own time, you can stay slim without really thinking about it, and reap the benefits of better cardiovascular health and a stronger body.

I'm surprised your doctor/nutritionist expresses shock at the weight loss. If they have a rough idea of what you eat, they shouldn't be shocked. I'd advise finding another.

All that said, great job on the weight loss so far! What's your end goal if you don't mind me asking?

"The dose makes the poison".

According to the WHO, there is no level of alcohol consumption that is good for the health.

OP sounds like he doesn't get anything out of drinking anymore, so I guess he doesn't even want to crack open a bottle for special occasions. He's realised he only lives once, so he kicked the booze.

As somebody who's never drunk, the only thing I think I've ever missed out on is the social lubrication element, but that just made me find people who are more like-minded.

I'm not sure how it's counted (whether it includes forcibly migrated), but according to Statista, Russia currently holds the majority of non-internal Ukrainian refugees.

The lifting heavy weights just ensures you retain muscle during weight loss, doesn't it?

While weight loss is mostly diet, if you did want to use exercise to burn additional calories, cardio would do more than weight training. I burn up to 1000 calories in an hour of very strenuous cycling (from normal weight), which I doubt I could ever do lifting dumbbells and barbells.

I've always used weight training during weight loss to try and tell my body to retain muscle and target fat primarily.

Where I live in Northern England, buses are (amongst other reasons) mostly hampered in their reliability by delays and cancellations caused by sharing roads congested with cars.

Here there's an almost palpable attitude of disgust towards using the bus. Almost a me versus the plebs attitude. The car represents the people's private island.

It would be slightly improved if people moved from tank-like SUVs to smaller cars, even better improved by embracing 1/2 seat cars (which will never happen because the design isn't conformist, see the Smart Car), and most improved by people putting their ego aside and taking the bus.

For a country hitting 2/3 of adults being overweight and obese, it may be a perk that public transport doesn't provide A-to-B delivery and instead people get a 5 minute walk somewhere in their day.

Instead it looks like self-driving cars will win out due to people's behaviour.

The most precious IP you own, which you drop in the form of 50-100 fallen hairs every day, and is smeared on everything you touch.

People submit more weaponizable (behavioural) data to Facebook, Google and HN every day.

Privacy nuts are always going overboard about things that mean very little.

Genetic data sounds important but in the bigger scheme of things, it's probably the least manipulatable data about a person on the internet.

My genetic data is less weaponizable than if I uploaded hundreds of pictures of myself and my shared my social graph to Facebook, if I shared my political opinions on Twitter, if I commented/posted on Reddit boards of my interests and hobbies. It's also less weaponizable than the multitude of "invisible" data that I feed to Google, my incompetent local government, service providers, every shop that is shipping something to my home address.

I lose genetic data everywhere I go, every day. 50-100 hairs fall of my head, and I leave fingerprints on everything I touch. I "lose privacy" every day by walking into somebody else's photo/video/TikTok, and by mishandling of it by poor government/business entities.

Life's too short.

Don't know why you're being downvoted. Walkin' isn't really slang but most people use walking/hiking interchangeably.

Hiking is just more official/more serious, like 'running' as opposed to 'jogging'.

Stop eating them. Forgive me for the cynical take but "ultraprocessed" isn't stuff that just slips in without you realising, is it?

It's garbage like crisps, biscuits, cakes, chocolate bars, burgers, sandwiches, fast food, takeaway food, ready meals.

If we're talking about regular sounding foods which have been tampered with, these are surely simply "processed" foods.

somebody choosing to smoke/chew/dip tobacco which may eventually cause them serious health conditions and death

In a crowded street, somebody's choice to smoke tobacco isn't just causing them serious health conditions.

I don't advocate banning smoking (Brits seem to love banning things they disagree with). I'm fine with people smoking so long as they do it in an isolated area where it's just harming them. It would be better if they didn't (especially to ease the burden on the healthcare system and spending), but that's their prerogative. I'm just as much an NHS burden if I break my leg doing sport.

I don't know where you're from, but in the UK, over £50 billion is spent on it each year.

If you've seen anybody who lives for Friday / Saturday night and a Sunday hangover, it fits the consumerist image pretty neatly. Many (obviously not all) are slaves to alcohol.

We've all heard the wine'o'clock jokes from middle aged women in the office, people struggling to complete "Dry January" and similar challenges, colleagues talking about how excited they are to get a drink when they get home.

These people are held under the thumb of a handful or two alcohol companies. In many cases, it's simply a wasted weekend and quite a sum of wasted money, especially when you can't remember any of it.

My experience is that drinkers are incredibly boring people.

Team sport, or any sport for that matter.

All of the friends I've made have been through competitive sport, the gym, running, team sports.

The cause is too much food/the quality of the food people eat.

Exercise plays a small role in weight loss / management, but people should still do it for the other benefits.

While I agree with your overall comment, the last sentence really isn't necessary. This isn't Reddit.

This is usually labelled quite literally as a "whole foods diet", meaning that the foods you eat are "whole" in themselves and not composed of other refined food. To me, it's the only diet that makes any real sense.

We live in a crazy ultra-processed food world. Even just standard processed food can be pretty bad for you (bread, rice) in certain quantities and a lot of people see that stuff as being baseline, the way you'd view whole foods.

Congratulations on the weight loss!

A select minority in the local council didn't care, but the citizens and those who protested (and got arrested) over this overwhelmingly did.

Since the protests, the council stopped cutting the trees down and reversed course.

Sheffield has more trees per person than any other city in Europe. Around 4.5 million trees for a population of 600,000 (7.5:1).

Not to one-up you, but Sheffield in South Yorkshire has even more trees. I visited recently and was taken aback by how much coverage there was for a city center, coming from Leeds, which seems to hate trees.

If I remember correctly, London has around 8.5 million trees (for a population of almost 9 million, 1:1 tree:person) and Sheffield has around 4.5 million (for a much smaller population of less than 600,000, 7.5:1 tree:person). Sheffield has more trees per person than any other city in Europe.

Sheffield council tried to cut down thousands of trees a few years ago and it caused massive backlash, protests and arrests.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheffield_tree_felling_protest...

Bad schools are generally in bad areas.

A few years ago, primary age students going into high school from my home village were going to be split between two secondary (or high) schools, as not every student could be accounted for in the closer school.

The closer school was a decent high school in an affluent town across from my village. Decent teachers, grades, no drama.

The other was a poorer high school in a rough and downtrodden town. The town has higher crime, including crime which reaches students (anti-social/troubled kids, more bullying, even cases of knives being brought into school).

This is a classic pattern in the UK. Well off/decent towns within spitting distance of formerly well-off towns which used to be industrially important and are now in stagnation, with poor job prospects, crime, anti-social behaviour, poor maintenance, nothing to do, and nothing to help.

Worse average grades, worse teachers (due to high turnover from teachers being pushed out by bullying), more potential to get in trouble, and worse life potential.

Not sure how this should be worded to not be construed in a funny way, but the kids from my village would have been the only white kids in the school in the rougher town, so you can imagine how that may amplify the effect the school would have on them.

Unsurprisingly, parents protested and many sold up and moved in order to avoid the "bad school" in question and get into a better school catchment area.

If you know West Yorkshire, you probably know exactly which towns I'm talking about. Such is the reputation of both towns and their respective schools.

Not sure why you're being downvoted for stating this.

To add to what you said, environmentally it's awful. Where I live it, most of the food deliveries were bicycle based a few years ago. Now it's all cars, mopeds and e-bikes (the best of a bad bunch) as anything less makes the delivery driver less competitive against the others.

The bikes/e-bikes ignore traffic lights and flow, causing close-calls and collisions in pedestrian areas (where they pick up the food).

None of the economic, environmental and moral (laziness) waste can possibly be justified for the sort of rubbish that is being sold on a takeaway app. It's always just junk like burgers, chips, and cakes.

When you say it allows you uninterrupted work, are you talking about overtime or have you moved towards eating delivered food during working hours?

I couldn't imagine eating takeaways during my lunch break or snacks during the workday. What sort of food is it?

In New York, if I’m coming to the door to meet the delivery, then I may as well just walk the 1/4 block to get it myself.

Then people in this situation should do that.

Is it really that hard to have a smartphone and just not install addictive/time-wasting apps on it?

I think my daily average screen time is 10 minutes (according to Digital Wellbeing), with less than 10 unlocks. Advantage being that I'm available/able to call somebody in an emergency or I can use the utilities on it when required (maps, translation).

Do they not have any purpose for their lives beyond consumption?

A lot of people have no purpose in their life beyond consumption. Truly, this is it.

If people put the tiniest fraction of work into their fitness, their personality, their intelligence or any other character-building activity or experience instead of working away to buy trinkets and tokens of vapid displays of wealth, we may actually get somewhere as a species.

Exercising is hard, as is resisting junk food, as is reading a book compared to watching TV, or throwing yourself into a new situation. It's so much easier to not do that stuff, sit in an office and collect a paycheck and redirect that money towards things we think make us better than each other.

Personally, I'm way more impressed with the people I know who run 100km+ a week, workout hard and study hard, than people who walk around wearing designer clothes or showing off the things they've bought. The latter sounds sort of pathetic.

Not really sure where you're going with this line of thought. I stand by my point.

Many people do purely use these cars for no purpose besides them being a status symbol, or to be more secure on the road (which could be suggestive of a non-confident or bad driver).

The roads are getting more dangerous and the climate is taking a bigger hit as a result of these cars being on the road. I'm sure once in a while they're useful for transporting things, but that point fails to come across when the bulk of the time that isn't the case, and it's just one person in an otherwise empty SUV driving to work.

Very defensive reply.

Many people use Range Rovers to simply drop their kids off at school, to drive to work, or to transport groceries.

If you're really for people leading active lifestyles, maybe those such people should get their kid to walk to school.

Range Rovers are a disease in the UK.

A brand which had it's origins in the military and farming, which has now been repurposed to drop kids off at a school.

It's also the most frequent car I see which is sped around and overtakes with zero concern for other road users. The people driving them seem to not understand the size of their car and either pass over-cautiously or tunnel through everybody else whenever the road is partially obstructed (parked cars in towns and villages).

The modern Range Rovers no longer even work for their original purpose. They're not sturdy enough to last on a farm, just fashion symbols.

When I question if humanity will tame itself and step down from destroying our world in the pursuit of comfort and consumerism at all costs, the first thing I think of is a white Range Rover Discovery.

For every person that travels and has great experiences, there's many who get nothing out of it, waste their time, and set themselves back.

Travelling is a bit of a meme. SOME people of a certain character can get a lot out of it, but most are just consuming in a different way. They just don't realise they're being played.

My sister spent a handful of years backpacking and travelling around the other side of the world. It did nothing for her. She came back to her home country and has been struggling to find a job ever since. The countries she visited (the typical ones) didn't provide any "enlightenment".

As a single woman in India, one of her taxi drivers called her foolish for visiting the area by herself, and she spent the majority of the time in a hotel or a taxi.

Having to physically go to a gym gives you lots of excuses not to go vs having VR in the living room. The travel time is also a time sink.

It's often argued that the act of physically going to the place is what makes you do it. Personally, I know that I probably get more use out of the static bike at my gym than most people get out of the Peloton collecting dust in their own home.

The path of least resistance also curves around working out within the confines of your own home. If you struggle going for a run or going to the gym, putting on the clothes and forcing yourself out of the door is 99% of the act.

There's a similar parallel with working from home. Sometimes the change of environment and the mood of that environment is what compels people to move between resting/exercising/working mode.

Of course, for the gym in particular, it does also depend on what the journey to the gym is like as well as other factors (weather, traffic etc.)

"he believes Black Box solves the fitness problem that’s always been thorniest: getting people to stick to their workouts."

This might be a wildly unpopular opinion, but I personally feel if somebody requires VR/video game to be bolted onto exercise in order to stick with it, they're probably not going to stick with it.

I also can't see how the people that use VR/video games as their primary/sole exercise source don't transfer the supposed monotony of exercise which they are trying to avoid, over to the video game, eventually.

I run and go to the gym almost every day and have gotten it into a habit which reinforces itself (wanting to cover more distance, faster pace, heavier weights). I don't think I could replace running, swimming, the gym with a VR game like table tennis or Beat Saber and get anywhere near the same intensive workout, and I doubt I could play these games daily for more than a month without just getting fed up of the game, as you would with any standard video game.