6 ms·

This is such an important point. I know some people who have made great efforts such as exercising more or quitting alcohol, but for whatever reason they claim

by ra88it 9y ago

This is such an important point. I know some people who have made great efforts such as exercising more or quitting alcohol, but for whatever reason they claim to not perceive the purported benefit of their effort. I don't know how to help them, because for me, if I need more exercise, I perceive the "benefit" (mood improvement, etc.) usually almost immediately, like 5 minutes into it. When I cut out alcohol, I perceive improvements within 24 hours. It unsettles me to imagine if this was not the case.

agumonkey 9y ago
This is why culture/education is important. You can rediscover this on your own but it may mean hitting bottom to actually try other strategies. Or you can rely on experience of others. Or at least a system that let you fall a bit and then give you incentives to go the other way.
kd5bjo 9y ago
Regarding exercise, I may be able to provide some insight as I've gone through this transition over the past few years. Most likely, they're looking for the wrong benefits: As a society, we tend to center our advice to overweight people around "losing weight." It's a useful long-term diagnostic, but terrible as a day-to-day guide. The maximum safe rate of weight loss is 1-2 lbs/week, but your weight can easily fluctuate by 5 lbs through the course of the day -- even when doing everything right, you still have to go back a month to reliably find higher scale readings. As people chase scale readings, they tend to pass straight through the enjoyable activity range without noticing and into the range that requires burning willpower to continue. The trick is to focus on activities that are inherently enjoyable, and work on improving them. Lots of people that kill themselves running on the treadmill would be better served by a leisurely stroll outside. Eventually, they'll add in some jogging just because they feel like it, and they've started on an improvement path that's long-term sustainable.
- agumonkey 9y ago
  Good point. It's an important factor. If I may add one pinch of advice though: it's also important not to run for pleasure only, that's the reason people are overweight in the first place; eating on a couch is 100% pleasure. Some times you have to overcome a pain barrier. And very often in life it is so. Not to turn people into masochists but it's important to know.
  - kd5bjo 9y ago
    Well, yes and no. With me, as I started to get more active, I voluntarily pushed into those pain barriers because they weren't that bad, and made me feel amazing the next morning. Similarly, my eating habits improved primarily because eating junk makes me feel sluggish for a while, robbing later activity of its enjoyment. I sometimes still make that choice, but I usually pick activity instead. Most importantly, through the whole process, I never had to force myself to do something I didn't want to. Instead, I put myself in positions where I want to do things that have a long-term benefit, for short-term reasons.
    - agumonkey 9y ago
      I had moments of deep mental resistance, anything is a damn burden. I believe lots of people feel the same and have a few very high psychological barriers.
      - kd5bjo 9y ago
        True; I was lucky enough to be able to find a path through the maze that goes around most of my mental barriers. There’s no guarantee such a path will exist, and even if it does, it’ll be different for everyone.
        agumonkey 9y ago
        IMO that's another thing you learn with time. There's no sure path.. you oughta crack through. Which is a bit paradoxical since you actually lack willpower but it's the only way. It's like todolists.. I have thousands of them. Nothing happens. At times I just roll up my sleeves, in a very thin anger, and just go through chores and duties. Now that I internalized that notion I'm much more willing to do things rather than procrastinate and day dream about how I would/should/could. I'm not 100% proactive, far from that, but I know I'll be much happier if I do be (sic).
- scarface74 9y ago
  If people want to lose weight, the worse advice you can give them is to "exercise to lose weight". Exercise has little to no effect on losing weight. You have to exercise at such a level of intensity and duration to make any meaningful difference that most people can't or won't do it. Losing weight is almost entirely about what you eat. As I said in another post, I was a part time fitness instructor for 12 years and I would exercise intensely between teaching and my own personal workouts 10 hours a week. But it didn't take "willpower" because it was harder to get out of exercising (I had to find a sub), it was part of my social life and I was getting paid to stay in shape. How many people could handle that level of effort? Even now, to see any effects from exercise on losing weight and keeping what I would consider a fairly normal caloric intake, I exercise 2 hours/four days a week and trending toward 3 hours/four days a week. How many people can actually do that? I also have a separate room in our house reserved for exercise equipment so I don't have to find time to go the gym - a treadmill, elliptical, and soon a magnetic rower and adjustable weights. When all is said and done, I'll have about $5000 worth of equipment in my house. I would never recommend most people spend money on exercise equipment at home unless they are already an avid exerciser. There are a lot of good reasons to exercise that should be emphasized but so wouldn't even mention "weight loss" as one of them.
  - AnatMl2 9y ago
    I would disagree on this point. Although I am not very experienced in exercising, from time to time I start to jog or go to the gym for a couple of months and the only reason I do this is to get into shape; losing the weight was always a part of it. After all, there is a reason why thousands and thousands of people go to the gym only to lose weight. I'm not saying that exercising is only for this and of course it brings lots of health benefits, but I cannot neglect the fact that after 3-4 months of gym I get in a perfect shape and lose 8 lbs minimum.
    - kd5bjo 9y ago
      Getting in shape is an excellent reason to go to the gym, but it has surprisingly little to do with losing weight. The two are correlated, and weight is easy to measure, but your fitness can improve much faster than your weight can come down. In my case, I was better off paying attention to how my tennis game was progressing than anything else — winning a point I wouldn’t have been able to touch a month ago is much more motivating than the 1% weight change over the same period.
- 0xcde4c3db 9y ago
  I have no doubt that the issue you describe happens, but people have also had the experience that there simply isn't any "enjoyable activity range" to begin with. This could be some abnormality in interoception, which researchers are finding is much more common than previously thought (it was previously regarded primarily as an ASD symptom, but as much as 15% of the general population might be affected depending on how abnormality is defined and assessed).
  - cheshire_cat 9y ago
    > but as much as 15% of the general population might be affected depending on how abnormality is defined and assessed Do you have any links to research on this topic?
    - 0xcde4c3db 9y ago
      I should probably start bookmarking this stuff. To be clear, the connection to exercise resistance/intolerance is my own speculation. Most of the actual research so far is focused on the relationship between abnormal interoception and aspects of mental illness. A lot of this is also pretty preliminary; as far as I can tell, there's not yet much consensus on even a rigorous definition of which sensory functions qualify as "interoceptive", let alone validation of methods to measure it. That being said, interesting articles include: Alexithymia, not autism, is associated with impaired interoception [1] “Lacking warmth”: Alexithymia trait is related to warm-specific thermal somatosensory processing [2] Alexithymia: a general deficit of interoception [3] Alexithymia Is Associated With a Multidomain, Multidimensional Failure of Interoception: Evidence From Novel Tests [4] [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4962768/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4962768/ [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5595273/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5595273/ [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5098957/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5098957/ [4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5824617/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5824617/
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

by ra88it 9y ago

agumonkey 9y ago

This is why culture/education is important. You can rediscover this on your own but it may mean hitting bottom to actually try other strategies. Or you can rely on experience of others. Or at least a system that let you fall a bit and then give you incentives to go the other way.

kd5bjo 9y ago

Regarding exercise, I may be able to provide some insight as I've gone through this transition over the past few years. Most likely, they're looking for the wrong benefits: As a society, we tend to center our advice to overweight people around "losing weight." It's a useful long-term diagnostic, but terrible as a day-to-day guide. The maximum safe rate of weight loss is 1-2 lbs/week, but your weight can easily fluctuate by 5 lbs through the course of the day -- even when doing everything right, you still have to go back a month to reliably find higher scale readings. As people chase scale readings, they tend to pass straight through the enjoyable activity range without noticing and into the range that requires burning willpower to continue. The trick is to focus on activities that are inherently enjoyable, and work on improving them. Lots of people that kill themselves running on the treadmill would be better served by a leisurely stroll outside. Eventually, they'll add in some jogging just because they feel like it, and they've started on an improvement path that's long-term sustainable.

agumonkey 9y ago
Good point. It's an important factor. If I may add one pinch of advice though: it's also important not to run for pleasure only, that's the reason people are overweight in the first place; eating on a couch is 100% pleasure. Some times you have to overcome a pain barrier. And very often in life it is so. Not to turn people into masochists but it's important to know.
- kd5bjo 9y ago
  Well, yes and no. With me, as I started to get more active, I voluntarily pushed into those pain barriers because they weren't that bad, and made me feel amazing the next morning. Similarly, my eating habits improved primarily because eating junk makes me feel sluggish for a while, robbing later activity of its enjoyment. I sometimes still make that choice, but I usually pick activity instead. Most importantly, through the whole process, I never had to force myself to do something I didn't want to. Instead, I put myself in positions where I want to do things that have a long-term benefit, for short-term reasons.
  - agumonkey 9y ago
    I had moments of deep mental resistance, anything is a damn burden. I believe lots of people feel the same and have a few very high psychological barriers.
    - kd5bjo 9y ago
      True; I was lucky enough to be able to find a path through the maze that goes around most of my mental barriers. There’s no guarantee such a path will exist, and even if it does, it’ll be different for everyone.
      - agumonkey 9y ago
        IMO that's another thing you learn with time. There's no sure path.. you oughta crack through. Which is a bit paradoxical since you actually lack willpower but it's the only way. It's like todolists.. I have thousands of them. Nothing happens. At times I just roll up my sleeves, in a very thin anger, and just go through chores and duties. Now that I internalized that notion I'm much more willing to do things rather than procrastinate and day dream about how I would/should/could. I'm not 100% proactive, far from that, but I know I'll be much happier if I do be (sic).
scarface74 9y ago
If people want to lose weight, the worse advice you can give them is to "exercise to lose weight". Exercise has little to no effect on losing weight. You have to exercise at such a level of intensity and duration to make any meaningful difference that most people can't or won't do it. Losing weight is almost entirely about what you eat. As I said in another post, I was a part time fitness instructor for 12 years and I would exercise intensely between teaching and my own personal workouts 10 hours a week. But it didn't take "willpower" because it was harder to get out of exercising (I had to find a sub), it was part of my social life and I was getting paid to stay in shape. How many people could handle that level of effort? Even now, to see any effects from exercise on losing weight and keeping what I would consider a fairly normal caloric intake, I exercise 2 hours/four days a week and trending toward 3 hours/four days a week. How many people can actually do that? I also have a separate room in our house reserved for exercise equipment so I don't have to find time to go the gym - a treadmill, elliptical, and soon a magnetic rower and adjustable weights. When all is said and done, I'll have about $5000 worth of equipment in my house. I would never recommend most people spend money on exercise equipment at home unless they are already an avid exerciser. There are a lot of good reasons to exercise that should be emphasized but so wouldn't even mention "weight loss" as one of them.
- AnatMl2 9y ago
  I would disagree on this point. Although I am not very experienced in exercising, from time to time I start to jog or go to the gym for a couple of months and the only reason I do this is to get into shape; losing the weight was always a part of it. After all, there is a reason why thousands and thousands of people go to the gym only to lose weight. I'm not saying that exercising is only for this and of course it brings lots of health benefits, but I cannot neglect the fact that after 3-4 months of gym I get in a perfect shape and lose 8 lbs minimum.
  - kd5bjo 9y ago
    Getting in shape is an excellent reason to go to the gym, but it has surprisingly little to do with losing weight. The two are correlated, and weight is easy to measure, but your fitness can improve much faster than your weight can come down. In my case, I was better off paying attention to how my tennis game was progressing than anything else — winning a point I wouldn’t have been able to touch a month ago is much more motivating than the 1% weight change over the same period.
0xcde4c3db 9y ago
I have no doubt that the issue you describe happens, but people have also had the experience that there simply isn't any "enjoyable activity range" to begin with. This could be some abnormality in interoception, which researchers are finding is much more common than previously thought (it was previously regarded primarily as an ASD symptom, but as much as 15% of the general population might be affected depending on how abnormality is defined and assessed).
- cheshire_cat 9y ago
  > but as much as 15% of the general population might be affected depending on how abnormality is defined and assessed Do you have any links to research on this topic?
  - 0xcde4c3db 9y ago
    I should probably start bookmarking this stuff. To be clear, the connection to exercise resistance/intolerance is my own speculation. Most of the actual research so far is focused on the relationship between abnormal interoception and aspects of mental illness. A lot of this is also pretty preliminary; as far as I can tell, there's not yet much consensus on even a rigorous definition of which sensory functions qualify as "interoceptive", let alone validation of methods to measure it. That being said, interesting articles include: Alexithymia, not autism, is associated with impaired interoception [1] “Lacking warmth”: Alexithymia trait is related to warm-specific thermal somatosensory processing [2] Alexithymia: a general deficit of interoception [3] Alexithymia Is Associated With a Multidomain, Multidimensional Failure of Interoception: Evidence From Novel Tests [4] [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4962768/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4962768/ [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5595273/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5595273/ [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5098957/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5098957/ [4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5824617/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5824617/

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]