Only someone who has lived a most privileged life could imagine that the world would be kinder if human bodies shed weight rapidly when working hard. It is kindly of the universe to have created bodies that compensate — conserve energy — when we exercise.
In Reynolds's imagined kindly universe, all the many human beings — throughout history and prehistory — who have struggled to find sufficient food would have had a harder time staying alive and putting strong effort into hunting, gathering, farming, and food storage and preparation. She's simply forgotten about these people and is thinking only of us privileged people of today who have all the food we want and put so little energy into acquiring it that we force ourselves into exercise programs solely to burn off the extra fat we no longer see as protection from starvation.
Ironically, if Reynolds's kindlier universe had existed all along, it's likely that someone —ages ago — would have died and ended the line of ancestry that resulted in her — and all of our — existence.
Let us honor the universe that has given us bodies with this wonderful capacity to compensate when we increase our energy consumption. And if we feel inclined to bemoan the extra fat we carry around and can't easily exercise off, let us recognize the immense privilege that fat represents. We live in luxury.
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I’ve rowed over 600,000 meters and haven’t lost any weight.
Science!
"We live in luxury."
Yes. We do. The world has never seen such luxury for more people than we have now. Much of it, if not all of it due to free market, or semi-free market policies in some countries carrying the world, kicking and screaming forward. Even China, easily the most fired up economic engine today, has yet to figure out how to feed billions of their people, but are able to buy food from us and Europe to subsidize their needs. Some day soon you will see images of fat Chinese people. It'll happen. Luxury does that.
We are blessed to have more than any human beings in history, yet if you listened to those on the Left, you'd think we were still living in the Dark Ages. They are working to get us back there.
If you want to lose weight you have to reduce your calorie intake. Exercise will make you fit but exercise alone will not make you lose weight.
These last 15 lbs to get under 200 are privileged bastards. As individual pounds they do not have my sympathy though my doctor did say yesterday that 10 lbs too many in your 70's is preferable to 10 lbs to few. I'll call it a push. Leftover pizza for breakfast anyone?
Excellent point. It highlights the damage we’re doing to ourselves on a massive scale by engineering food that specifically overcomes our natural appetite regulation mechanisms: the added salts and sugars, the highly refined grains and their combination represent a powerful force, one that appears to rival nature in this example. You can’t easily work yourself to thin, but with diet (not just or even mostly portion control) most people probably can achieve a healthier and lower weight. Widespread obesity is a relatively recent phenomenon, having grown fatter faster than our increasing rate of wealth or luxury.
Love this post. I have nothing meaningful to add besides saying that it is one of the many reasons I have read your blog since I was a student of yours a decade ago. Skillful thinking elucidated first thing in the morning. Thank you!
It's more like the US is drowning in the luxury of cheap industrial food like substances laced with salt and permeated with omega 6 poison oils that triggers lizard brain addiction, inflammation, autoimmunity, cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's, diabetes and pharmaceutical dependence. "Soma" is fast food and the obese addicts are the products delivered to the medical machinery for processing. It's the karma price paid for the way we treat factory farmed animals.
This way, NYTimes readers who are obese can read this article and feel like a victim of their own metabolism. While they eat another bagel with a schmear.
It's not my fault!
You say you hate the word "grok," but it's pretty clear that a lot of people don't 'grok' evolution. Deep down, one could infer by their statements anyway, many many people who purport to know better believe that we were created by a kind and loving God who made us all equal and the same, except for the ways that we can see with our own eyes. Not that we were shaped by our environments, and our needs as a sub-species, in a wilderness that cared not at all if we lived or died.
Unhealthy person eats 3000+ calories a day of mostly junk food, then does a 45min spin class in which they burn 500 calories and can't understand why they are not losing weight.
My 2 or 3 times/week 5 mile runs just barely offset my weekend cocktails and eating out.
The most effective weight loss plan I've ever undergone was the stress at the beginning of covid. Lost almost 10 lbs. in 2 months. Unfortunately more than half has returned.
IMO and experience, weight management is not keyed to exercise as much as food selection. While the Atkins and Keto diets are extreme, there is great value in focusing on protein and avoiding simple carbohydrates.
NO potatoes, NO white flour, NO white rice, NO white pasta, NO soda, NO fruit juice, and (sadly) NO beer. Your body turns easily digested carbs into fat if they cannot be used right now. Complex carbs such as whole oats (traditional oatmeal, cold or hot), whole wheat, and most whole fruits aren't the issue. Eat your fill, as they tend to fill you up quickly.
Eat as much meat, fish, eggs, dairy, nuts, and cheese as you like. Your body turns protein into new muscle and essential tissues. The body must work to process protein.
In my experience dietary fats (especially liquid fats like cooking oil/olive oil) mainly lubricate the digestion and don't turn into body fat. Depending on your personal cholesterol profile, saturated fats (e.g., butter, bacon, burgers, cheese) may or may not be an issue.
Finally, some foods irritate, inflame, or bloat the body rather than result in fat per se. These include lectins, per all peanuts raw or cooked, undercooked beans, some potatoes, etc. This can also include tannins such as dark chocolate, tea, dark fruits and berries, etc.
Amen!! Poor us, so well-fed that all our chronic diseases are those of surplus rather than deficiency.
I'm not saying self-discipline is easy or that I do it well or all the time... but how incredibly First World to wish that we were less efficient with our bodily bresources! Reminds me of when I first got a fitness tracker and would deliberately crisscross the grocery store instead of (as I'd done for years) arranging my list in aisle order, just to get the extra steps.
Indeed. Not to mention that losing fat is not the only, or even the most important, benefit of exercise. How about don't let your body become a weak and formless recepticle for your wandering mind. Preserve and enhance your physical strength, to whatever degree is reasonably possible. It provides life-long benefits.
On the other hand, stop judging me cuz I'm fat. I can't fix that with a minimum of effort.
Too much luxury, if you ask me.
Delta Variant Lady
Some women in this country have grown bossy
They call ‘em Karens ruined that name forever
And I whisper pleas while on my knees that they shut up
And take their moby act out on the road
But not my, no not my, delta variant lady
Yeah, she’s my, me oh my, delta variant lady
Please don’t ask how many jabs I’ve taken
Pfizer shots at Kaiser Permanente
When I think of masks I’ll grab a flask and toast her
We were closely touchin’, yes our heart was beatin’
Oh she’s my, yes she’s my, delta variant lady
And she’s my, me oh my, delta variant lady
America is a type 1 diabetic with stage 4 lung cancer. WTFU people!
Why kindlier and not just plain old kinder?
I think a fair amount of society's woes can be linked to us implementing policies and behaviors that assume man is an inherently noble, rational, and civilized being. We forget that for nearly all of the roughly 5,000 years of human civilization, life was harsh. We forget that civilization itself and the widespread trust and cooperation it requires is a relatively new occurrence in the tens and tens of thousands of years of modern man. And we forget all the millions of years of proto-man who had to rely far more heavily on fear, greed, and instinct for survival. We assume all that was left behind with the other beasts.
While current man may not be a beast We definitely are still animals.
One of the re-occurring themes in my US History class is to remind my students that they have won the lottery of life by being born in the US in the 21st century. the poor rest of them has, and will continue to have, a better, longer life with a higher standard of living than 99% of all humans who have ever existed.
For 290,000 years humans wandered in small tribes of hunter-gatherers. Civilization has only existed for 10,000 years, and the modern world for less than 100.
Running 5 miles a day will make a huge difference in weight loss.
They did a good job of restoring the statues. The Cleveland Museum of Art has a cast of Rodin’s The Thinker in its garden. It was damaged by a bomb in 1970, but not repairable, so they left it in place as is. I’ve always thought of it as a powerful symbol of the stupidity of violent meaningless political protest. I don’t know if the bomber was just a vandal or a political protester. I have always assumed the latter. Link to photo and info on the sculpture.
If you want to lose weight, you have to change up your diet. Cut the carbs, junk food, etc.
Work out to get stronger and improve your fitness, not to lose weight.
One of the wonderful benefits of aging is realizing the number of parts in your body as they gradually go wrong, one after another, or as they "weather" as it is more gracefully put these days. Anyhow, my immune system is weathering so I've lost wheat and, now, milk. I became allergic to milk, stopped drinking it and immediately lost 10 pounds. So easy. If I can just lose a few more food groups and get beyond meat to roots and the inner bark of trees, I'll have finally done something Our Betters approve of. But just as Our Betters propose a nice meal of air for a sufficiently weathered American uselessly using up resources for continual wrongthink, I'll slip like Norm MacDonald, beyond those voices to where my Real Better who I'll see unmasked has a banquet prepared in the sight of my foes. A banquet. There will be donuts. And cold milk. And then...
Americans (and much of the rest of the Western world) are fat because of our high carb, empty calorie diets and processed food consumption. The wife and I started on a low(er) carb diet on 8 January, basically giving up bread, potatoes, and rice altogether and restricting many other types of carbs, particularly sugars and grain-based snacks. That diet change and an hour of exercise a day (walking or biking) allowed us to pretty much effortlessly shed a pound or more a week without feeling hungry all the time. For us it's amounted to significantly improved health as well. We aren't going back to the carbs and processed sugars.
Both brain and body, people are constantly bemoaning as senseless, unfortunate, and/or dumb, adaptations that proved vital to our survival from the dawn of our species almost until today. And, frankly, it is remarkable how well our brains and bodies work in an environment so alien to the one they evolved to cope with.
"But the protesters had a theory of systemic racism, so the outward appearance of progressivism is part of the problem. To tear down the statues expresses outrage at the veneer of enlightenment that disguises and therefore facilitates the underlying evil."
Yet "we live in luxury".
What FUBAR people!
I've lost close to 30 lbs. since I retired 2.5 years ago. Intermittent fasting and increased physical activity did it for me.
It doesn't work for everyone.
And AA, your tone of disgust with the writer, Gretchen Reynolds, is well taken.
Weight and body comp is set by diet. You can make some of the lumps underneath bigger. But working out very hard for an hour burns only a few more calories than just sitting there. There are ways that you can work out that will increase how many calories you burn during the day though.
If you really want to lose weight you need to understand insulin resistance and insulin management. Cortisol, sex hormones etc.
Short and skinny of it it really is a smarter not harder thing as far as exercise and weight loss. If you want the biggest bang for the buck have one long session of medium to low heart rate exercise and 10-15 minutes of medium to low heart rate after each meal. ~60% of max. You can get this with a hard striding walk or slow jog. You should be able to talk with effort. Then once per day push your heart rate to 80-90% maximum for 2-5 minutes.
This pretty much goes for everyone.
How well it works for you is genetic. For weight loss if you just follow that pattern every day you will get 90+% of the benefit you would get with heavy anaerobic activity like HIIT or workouts that I do.
The short hard burst of high heart rate keeps the pipes cleaned out and triggers HGH release.
Your next step after comfortably doing this is to implement an autophagy management strategy. This involves fasting and learning how to listen to your body. Fasting works very well for both men and women. But women don't have to fast nearly as long to get the same benefits as men. But women's reproductive systems and hormonal processes will shut down if you go to far. Women will get the same benefits out of a 16-24 hour fast that men will over 72-120 hours but really really need to be careful not to go to far.
The benefits of autophagy go way beyond weight loss but just for weight loss it works just as well as any exercise. It has reversed progression of alzheimer's/dementia and shrunk cancer tumors.
Amen! I take flow yoga classes 3-5 per week (talk about luxury). Walk 4k to 10k steps a day. And do a variety of calisthenics and weights in short sets throughout the week. I'm not overweight, but I am not lean, athletic fit and carry a smidge of girth around the waist. I would have to suffer a lot more to look like a 40 something Olympic athlete. In cave man times I might would be dead already. Namaste to all.
The agricultural revolution is what made it possible. And it also made possible the Industrial revolution. Before in 1750 in the Western Europe it took 1 farmer to feed himself and 1 other. By 1900 one farmer could feed 4 other people we don't talk about it enough.
Losing weight has always been simple. But the simpliest things are the hardest. I've just gained back the 30 lbs i've lost in 2020. Too much good bread, cheese, etc. I'll go back to just coffee in the AM, no bread, and almost no carbs. Not eating that croissant in the AM will equal one hour of walking.
Honor the universe? Is that the PC way of saying thank God?
I enjoy living in a country and time when one of our biggest problems is that our poor people have too much to eat.
Walk three miles then eat one bagel. Even. It is that bad. Exercise only to improve the heart and strengthen the body. Eat less to lose weight.
Unless your exercise is very intense, you're not going to be able to control your weight without closely monitoring your food intake.
If you eat one extra donut over your normal food intake there's 195 calories that your body has the potential to absorb.
Running a mile only burns about 80 - 140 calories. 1 extra donut = 2 - 3 extra miles of running.
Nothing magic about the donut, same is true for eating two extra apples.
Weight loss is very simple in concept, it's very difficult to do. Lots of things are like that, but for some reason we want to make weight loss complicated and it isn't. Typically at this point a bunch of people will take about fat vs carbs or slow metabolisms or high fructose syrup or whatever, but those are all distractions from the fact it is absolutely physically impossible to gain more weight if you don't eat more calories than you burn. The hard part is knowing when you are doing that and wanting to lose weight badly enough to do what is very hard.
If you have gained a pound of fat, you have at minimum eaten 3500 calories more than you burned. Maybe a skinny guy you know can eat 7000 before he gains that pound, but the skinny guy, or the guy on paleo, or the guy not eating HFCS, all of them if they have gained a pound have for a fact eaten at least 3500 calories more than they burned, at minimum (they could have eaten more but could not have eaten less because fat does not magically appear out of thin air).
So if I'm so smart then why is it so hard to lose weight? I said it was simple, I didn't say it wasn't hard.
1. You can't easily measure the calories you eat or expend. Imagine trying to balance a budget where you don't know your income or expenses, all you can do is buy things without knowing prices, and if you get too far into debt somebody just shows up and repossesses your stuff. If money worked like calories, personal finance would be every bit as hard as weight management (and judging from what I see around me plenty of people find personal finance hard; there's just less play for fad "diets" in personal finance because it is too obvious what is going on).
2. Your body is built to want to eat and to store fat whenever you can.
It's hard to manage what is not easy to measure. You can measure your weight easily enough, but your weight is the outcome of your diet and exercise. It's very hard to measure the inputs and outputs of your diet and exercise. At the same time fundamental biological urges will make it hard to influence the calorie input, and time and physical constraints make it hard to manage the calorie output.
As the would-be immigrant from Bombay is said to have remarked, "I want to live in a country where even the poor people are fat."
I see that expression more and more, especially with younger women:thank the universe ... or, this is the universe trying to tell me blah blah blah. Seems easier for some to revere the impersonsal universe than seek a personal relationship with a loving God. The latter takes some effort.
Controlling weight is very much like controlling debt.
You can a) make more money / eat less and/or b) spend less / exercise more but for most people with a problem, both a) and b) need to pursued and both will be difficult.
And because people find them difficult to do, people want to complicate these things to make them not simple. But they are simple. Just hard.
We are beset with first world problems. Wow is us. How will we ever survive our prosperity?
"Losing weight has always been simple."
*********
I agree: I've done it dozens of times.
(hat tip to Mark Twain)
For the elite these days THIN IS IN. This attitude, however, is only about two generations old.
What's more, two million years of evolution, however, says ROUND SURVIVES.
Hmmm ... 70 thousand generations, or two generations? Which will you pick?
A wise personal trainer once told me, 'You can't out-exercise a bad diet.'
A good example was the first time I saw him. He said, 'Get on the treadmill and burn off 100 calories before we get going.'
How hard could that be? It took for fucking ever to get to 100 calories.
It is a lesson that I've kind of forgotten.
I worked my ass off on that treadmill and burned off less than a peanut butter cup.
It's not just about the weight. Exercise is good for blood pressure, glucose, lipids, brain, etc.
That said, I am now in excruciating pain from IT band syndrome in my right leg, while trying to recover from knee replacement in the left. Oh and some sciatica. At least my tennis elbow isn't acting up.
All my injuries were caused by sports or working out.
Makes you feel kinda stupid sometimes.
When I go shopping in a certain town where the shoppers are many different races and ethnicity, I like to look in the shopping carts of other people while waiting in line. Inevitably, the Hispanic women have fresh fruits and vegetables, some different meats, and of course rice and a package of beans. The Black women have potato chips, other snacks and candies, sodas (junk foods), and usually a package of chicken drumsticks, but no fresh vegetables or fruit. And, btw, the woman pushing this cart is usually overweight. I know this is an unscientific study but, nevertheless, it is my observation. Do public schools still teach Home Economics to instruct the students about the four food groups? My suggestion is drop the CRT and bring back the Home Ec.
Jaydub has already expressed what I've learned. Cut the carbs, cut the sugar, increase the exercise for fitness (I also think better after exercising due to the enhanced blood flow), and ignore the media as a stress reducer.
We've gone from a society that reinforces the positive (family, motherhood, fatherhood, faith, clean living, education, security) to a society that encourages degradation, poor education, addiction, broken homes, racism, and hatred.
"In theory — or in a kindlier, alternative universe — exercise would aid substantially in weight loss."
That's true, of course. In a kindlier alternative universe modern Western fat people would be able to lose weight easily, and hunter-gatherers would still be able to conserve calories while running around all day.
"In Reynolds's imagined kindly universe, all the many human beings — throughout history and prehistory ...etc"
But not in my imagined kindly universe.
I'm fascinated by the San people of South Africa whose women store their fat at a shelf on their buttocks.
Re: Enigma:
IMO and experience, weight management is not keyed to exercise as much as food selection. While the Atkins and Keto diets are extreme, there is great value in focusing on protein and avoiding simple carbohydrates.
In my experience -- and others may differ -- weight loss is purely a function of eating less. Exercise has never worked for me at all -- the time/effort required to compensate for the 100 calories in one extra bowl of rice is wildly disproportionate. Type of food may matter for health, but doesn't particularly affect my weight loss. Low carb, for example, isn't going to make me lose weight on its own because I can eat and enjoy unhealthily huge quantities of lean meat (at meals, as a snack between meals, etc) and nuts without getting tired of it, unless I make a specific effort to eat less (fatty cuts, though, do fill me up).
It's true that you don't 'need' to exercise to move the scale down, but it is also true that you can diet away muscle and end up with a lot of issues. I lost significant weight at the same time I was sort of laid up with a back problem, so did almost no exercise. I had to do a lot of PT to get myself back to normal (out of pain). Also exercise is like a little thumb on the scale in your favor.
---Your next step after comfortably doing this is to implement an autophagy management strategy. This involves fasting and learning how to listen to your body. [Achilles]
You mentioned you were doing this earlier this summer, iirc. Is that ongoing?
The universe is neither kind nor unkind. It is largely inanimate although not stable thanks to entropy. Wishing for a “kinder” universe strikes me as so childish that it’s no wonder the phrase stuck in Althouse’s craw, figuratively speaking.
A few years back I lost 20-lbs by restricting calories and running 5 miles per day. I found that calorie restriction was responsible for 2 out every three pounds lost.
I've been experimenting with all sorts of diets. Not to lose weight, but for performance. Right now, I'm limiting animal products to sardines, mackerel, salmon, goat milk, 10% fat cow yogurt, and grass fed butter. I have a couple tablespoons of olive oil for cooking and flavor. Veggies include onions lettuce spinach tomato peppers broccoli and cauliflower. Starches include rice potatoes and corn tortillas. Fruits include apples oranges peaches strawberry banana blueberry.
2500-3500 kcals/day on a 12/12 on off eating cycle.
I run and hike a total of 25-miles per week, swim 7-miles per week, do most of the household chores play with the grandkids etc.
I'm 61 yo 6'4" 198#. At 20 yo and stroked a heavyweight eight, I weighed 206#, when I got out of boot camp I weighed 188# and was weak as fuck.
To support my wife on a weight loss diet a month ago, I restricted my calories to 1500/day while maintaining my normal activities. I gave up on day 6 due to exhaustion weighing 188# and chowed down on 3500kcals and my weight the next morning was 198# which is my normal weight. Weird. Obviously it's water and glucose.
Michael said
Walk three miles then eat one bagel. Even. It is that bad. Exercise only to improve the heart and strengthen the body. Eat less to lose weight.
It is more than that. Your body carries about 5g's of glucose in your blood. You use about 1g of glucose per hour. That bagel is going to pummel your pancreas for several hours and stuff your liver with glycogen.
If you keep doing it your body will store the energy in fat. depending on your genetics we are all born with a certain number of fat cells. Some have more and some have less. This is a pretty straight line correlation to how fat people are and how hard it is for you to lose weight.
Our bodies are just not made to run on carbs. They can but it is essentially pancreas abuse.
You can go back and forth between fat based and carb based. It takes some conversion time either way. The appropriate term there is metabolic flexibility.
People who's diets are primarily fat based can get energy from carbs and from fats. It takes some time for the mitochondria to remember how to use fats for energy if you have abused your body into insulin resistance by eating bagels.
She did write that it would be an alternative universe.
I walked the John Muir Trail this past summer with a friend. He lost 16 pounds, I lost 10+. We backpacked all day, burning probably 5-6K calories, and we simply couldn't eat that much to compensate, even if we could have carried it all. The key is hours and hours of hard work, of whatever kind.
I'm sure I'll gain it back this year, as my body stores up the calories again for the next big life-threatening expenditure. Both the recreational trip and the after-trip weight gain truly are modern luxuries for which I'm grateful.
Building muscle mass can restore some of our youthful metabolisms and allow us to eat more calories without as much weight gain, but not by much. My wife is really disciplined at calorie moderation, which keeps her weight stable. I don't have her discipline.
“It's more like the US is drowning in the luxury of cheap industrial food like substances laced with salt and permeated with omega 6 poison oils that triggers lizard brain addiction, inflammation, autoimmunity, cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's, diabetes and pharmaceutical dependence. "Soma" is fast food and the obese addicts are the products delivered to the medical machinery for processing. It's the karma price paid for the way we treat factory farmed animals.”
And make you esp vulnerable to COVID-19. I asked my doctor a couple months ago why obesity, and esp morbid obesity, was so dangerous with COVID-19. His response was twofold, that the obese have chronic inflammations, which involve an immune response, and the adipose tissue in fat creates cytokines, and it is typically a cytokine storm (again, an immune response) that kills COVID-19 patients.
So, what we have now is a population gaining weight, putting on fat, as a result of being shut in, due to COVID-19, and that gained fat makes them even more vulnerable to COVID-19.
What was depressing to me was a picture of a mother sitting next to her very heavy 10 or so year old boy, who was struggling to breathe. Kids are mostly immune to the ravages of COVID-19, unless they have serious comorbidities, like that boy’s obesity. That mother allowed that to happen to him, bought him the junk food that he no doubt loved to eat, and was then terrified that he wouldn’t survive. We see that some here in NW MT, and esp with the less affluent Hispanic and Black families around our old house in W PHX, where overweight mothers, with several overweight children, are in the checkout line with a cart full of junk food. I struggle with my weight at 70, but that was accumulated almost entirely over the last 20 years. I spent most of my first half century fit and not overweight. These kids are facing the ravages of obesity even before they hit high school. And they will likely never overcome it.
"Wishing for a “kinder” universe strikes me as so childish that it’s no wonder the phrase stuck in Althouse’s craw, figuratively speaking."
Are you part of the universe? Are you kind? Or can the universe only be kind if every planet in even the remotest galaxies is kind to you? H/T Norm Macdonald.
Skimming the headline I saw the letter G, Reynolds and Exercise. Then reading our host's comments, I was thinking, uh-oh, what happened between her and Instapundit. Rechecking I see it is a different G Reynolds.
But regarding exercise and weight loss. You would think if you gained bulk through resistance training the larger muscles would require more energy to function. Given the same calorie input wouldn't someone lose some fat?
I have proof that my thyroid has been underactive for the last few years. My 30 lb weight gain has nothing to do with lounging around all day reading blogs and snacking constantly, no, nothing at all.
I've spent my first 60 years trying to gain weight, eating lots of the high calorie version of everything, and being active just for the fun of it. I've often wondered how my ancestors could have made it in time of scarcity. I'm really not happy contemplating a time of scarcity. I would not have made it home if I was in Bonaparte's army retreating out of Russia, I would be one of the first to be left on the side of the road in the snow.
The only way to efficiently burn calories on a treadmill is to run at a 7.5/8 MPH rate. That's a lot faster than it sounds - it the rate Don Shula required of his Dolphins when they reported to training camp. They had to run 1.5 miles in 12 minutes before practice, or have to try it again the following day until they could.
The other way is to significantly raise the elevation on the treadmill and then try to jog on it.
Otherwise it will take you all day. And who wants to do that?
“ Building muscle mass can restore some of our youthful metabolisms…”
Why do people think a body that burns fuel inefficiently is a better machine? You wouldn’t think of your car like that. If your metabolism burns fat slowly, it is doing what you would love to see in your car, operating efficiently.
I hope people are seeing what the new study showed! When you exercise, you don’t burn calories at the same rate as when you are sedentary. There is a compensating effect and the burning is only 75% of what had previously been calculated. What I am commenting on here is the positive value of this effect. The NYT author views it as a negative. I am dismayed by the failure to see the positive and how it would be a benefit to human beings living through hard times and even just normal times in the past.
If I slip into a Camus like despair over the indifference of the universe, I will encourage myself by remembering that the universe actually helps me not to starve to death... and also that Pop Tarts exist.
It's great that Humans were able to store fat in times of plenty and could run lean in times of want. But in the current age, we would like to be physically attractive and also eat a lot. Some people try to maximize their happiness by becoming a walrus and taking in mass quantities of food. Others live like monks and have beautiful bodies. I take the middle route.
It's really hard to get as thin as we want, but really easy to lose weight if you're fairly overweight. When I was 40, I was sedentary and ate too much. I took up daily walking (which evolved into jogging) at lunch time and cut the starchy portion of each meal in half. Within a year, I'd lost 25 lbs and it really was minimally difficult.
Now that I'm nearing 59, I weight lift on alternate days and still jog a couple of times per week. I weigh a bit more than I did before taking up weights, but I am physically stronger than I was at 40 but run more slowly.
I enjoy exercising, I enjoy being fit and I enjoy being able to eat a bit more due to exercise.
Muscle is the extra weight you want to carry into old age.
The cold hard facts of life have always been that if you want to lose a substantial amount of weight, you'll have to eat a lot less and move around a lot more.
The Universe is what it is and my disposition will have zero effect on it, would be my response if northern Tim’s query was sincere. But I think he misconstrued the import of my comment, or the meaning of the person I responded to. You see, she is contemplating a universe that’s “kinder” in her opinion with the tiny little tweak that shedding fat would be easier. That concept deserves mockery for its tendentiousness and how ridiculous it is to “imagine” a new Universe in all its glory being just a teency eency bit different than our existing universe.
Really? That’s her one thing in the entire universe that she’d change? A tweak to our metabolism? Seems if you’re going to engage with the immensity and complexity of this amazing universe and improve it you’d aim higher than increasing the rate at which humans burn fat. How about wishing for more kindness among people? World peace?
Nope. Let’s just metabolize fat a bit quicker, okay? Even then, how the hell is that a “kinder universe?”
I love my metformin, I feel lucky that I'm one of those who lost weight while taking metformin.
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