5 ms·

Lifestyle is more than just diet, there's the activity level, sun exposure, and different things in the water. I think we should just start saying that gray cu

Lifestyle is more than just diet, there's the activity level, sun exposure, and different things in the water. I think we should just start saying that gray cubicles are bad for the microbiome and roll with that.

asdff 3y ago
You'd have to uproot how the western world works to get us back to how we evolved to be healthy and survive on this planet. Finding time to get your 8 miles of walking a day in would be hard enough. We probably spend way too much time thinking a day as well with the 8 hour day. Think about how often a white collar worker does nothing but sit all day and gets home exhausted from the mental drain and stress: that can't be very healthy and is really far off from early modern human behavior as well. Stuff like a deadline you are stressing over is a very modern concept too, probably takes years off your life but what do you know we live by them and pretend like we are being productive and healthy while burning the wick at both ends. By the time you actually get the time to live like how you are supposed to live, you are old, in retirement, fragile from a lifetime of inactivity, and can't make up for your years lost of good physical health that you had to spend at a desk growing lethargic instead.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 3y ago
  > Finding time to get your 8 miles of walking a day in would be hard enough. I frequently do 6 mile walks with my dog, 8 miles would only be about 3 hours. Considering how much time people spend planted in front of a TV each day on average that shouldn't be that hard to hit. Tell you what, have the corpos give me an extra 1.5hrs each day and I'll give up 1.5hrs of TV and then we'll have enough for that 8 miles. We really need to take back our time from the exploitation class. A lot of problems go away if you work fewer hours a week, but there exist very few jobs that will pay anywhere near a livable wage for that. Like, I could easily survive on half my income if only someone would give me back half my time for it, but that just isn't an option.
  - valval 3y ago
    Nobody is exploiting you. Get that toxic mindset out of your head and you'll be happier and better off. Quit your job today and start providing a service for other people if that's what you will. Another thing, 3 hours a day spent on walking alone seems like a waste of time to me. Walking is a terrible form of exercise, it's meant to save energy. You could run for 20 minutes a day and do strength training for another 30 minutes to an hour and never be in bad shape in your life.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 3y ago
      > Another thing, 3 hours a day spent on walking alone seems like a waste of time to me. Good job I'm not you then.
    - ngai_aku 3y ago
      > Another thing, 3 hours a day spent on walking alone seems like a waste of time to me. Walking is a terrible form of exercise, it's meant to save energy. I don’t doubt that there are diminishing returns, but I don’t think it’s fair to say that “walking is a terrible form of exercise.” I was just reading _Built to Move_, and they contend that one hour of intense exercise followed by an otherwise sedentary lifestyle does not make you healthy. Walking might not be the best cardiovascular activity, but it is good for your hips, alignment, digestive tract, promotes healthy sleep schedule, etc.
    - lkuty 3y ago
      Walking fast with a steep slope is a good way to exercise I think. Andrew Weil even wrote that walking is a complete form of exercise: you don't need anything else to be a good athlete. But I guess it is a long hard walk, not a short easy one. I walk regularly and I found that it was really demanding if I do that in the woods with regular slopes. And sometimes I run a little bit, alternating walk and run.
- StopTheWorld 3y ago
  > You'd have to uproot how the western world works to get us back to how we evolved to be healthy and survive on this planet. To take it literally, it is impossible for eight billion humans (current world population estimate) to live as migratory hunter-gatherers on earth, even if the planet was terraformed back to how it was ten thousand years ago. It's highly unlikely even eight hundred million people people can live like this. In fact, it's possible there are not enough resources that even eighty million can live like this. So aside from the terraforming, world population would probably have to shrink to less than 1% of what it is currently.
  - asdff 3y ago
    Exactly, carrying capacity of the land has changed thanks to how much of the biomass we are able to take advantage of. You don't get 8 billion humans on earth plus the abundance of flora and fauna from premodern times for free, its gotta come from somewhere and in this case we scorched a lot of the earth and disrupted a lot of flora and fauna for the agriculture that feeds 8 billion. What changes the equation a little bit though is when we mine or extract resources like fertilizers and oil from below the surface of the planet. That is now adding nutrients and more energy to the system that wasn't around at least in premodern times. All that oil is old biomass anyhow, so burning it and adding it back to the atmosphere would potentially make it available again for species that take advantage of carbon fixation, if we give these species room to accumulate this biomass out of the atmosphere. It's kind of interesting to think about how even with today's combustion engine tech, we could solve our climate change crises and set the earth to whatever greenhouse gas level we'd like, if we merely strove to balance this system by growing out sufficient biomass.
  - soco 3y ago
    I don't think many people want to live like real hunter-gatherers so let's come back to the goal of having a healthy (or healthier) lifestyle while still enjoying some joys of modern living. We agree that stress at work or living stuck in chairs should be replaced, but replaced by... what? How can we have jobs and still live healthy? Now this is for me the discussion worth having.
    - 3y ago
- paulcole 3y ago
  > You'd have to uproot how the western world works This is one of the things a lot of people say they want but almost nobody really wants. But the truth is that we like the way the western world works too much to give it up. We like getting Amazon packages the same day we order. We like TikTok. We like pushing a button and getting a car to come pick us up. We like making a ton of money for stressing over deadlines and sitting in meetings run by pointless MBAs.
  - defrost 3y ago
    Speak for yourself - I've yet to do any of the things you've listed in 60 years and none of them sound appealing. AKA "What do you mean 'We' Kemosabe?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7h9V4aKlJw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7h9V4aKlJw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNAY05mhuDE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNAY05mhuDE
    - paulcole 3y ago
      Sorry, I wasn’t thinking of you specifically. I meant “We” as in Western Society as a whole.
      - safety1st 3y ago
        I also don't like most of the things you mentioned here yet I don't feel we need to roll back Western society to be healthy. Sample size of one but I went from overweight/high blood pressure to the picture of health at 41 pretty much just by lifting weights twice a week and replacing the most egregious fat bombs in my diet with protein. I feel like people have a tendency to way overcomplicate this stuff.
      - defrost 3y ago
        Oddly enough I consider myself part of western society despite having grown up surrounded by hunter gathers ( coastal, riverine, and desert ) and worked with many others (equatorial highlands, etc). Even today, largely surrounded by industrial scale agricultural farming in the Western Australian wheatbelt (making frequent trips into the Murchison quiet zone for radio astronomy work) I don't see much of what you talk about despite people here using cutting edge tech in farming and many doing FiFo (fly in | fly out) work on largely automated mines that in toto shift almost a billion metric tonne per annum. Western Society has some interesting slices to it that many miss due to being locked into their own bubble horizons.
- cyberneticist 3y ago
  I have been walking 90 minutes a day for a month and feel amazing. I just realized that with remote work, 30-60 minutes a day is just not enough activity. Of course, we can't realistically go back to the paleolithic but there is a sense that you can't afford to not get a baseline of physical activity in. No one is more productive being out of shape. You don't get less stressed from being less physically capable. If a person can't find time in a day for enough physical activity but they are reading this then maybe they are making a poor trade off with their time.
bmitc 3y ago
Hunter gather societies were healthier and had more leisure time than the early agrarian societies. See *Against the Grain".

asdff 3y ago

You'd have to uproot how the western world works to get us back to how we evolved to be healthy and survive on this planet. Finding time to get your 8 miles of walking a day in would be hard enough. We probably spend way too much time thinking a day as well with the 8 hour day. Think about how often a white collar worker does nothing but sit all day and gets home exhausted from the mental drain and stress: that can't be very healthy and is really far off from early modern human behavior as well. Stuff like a deadline you are stressing over is a very modern concept too, probably takes years off your life but what do you know we live by them and pretend like we are being productive and healthy while burning the wick at both ends. By the time you actually get the time to live like how you are supposed to live, you are old, in retirement, fragile from a lifetime of inactivity, and can't make up for your years lost of good physical health that you had to spend at a desk growing lethargic instead.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 3y ago
> Finding time to get your 8 miles of walking a day in would be hard enough. I frequently do 6 mile walks with my dog, 8 miles would only be about 3 hours. Considering how much time people spend planted in front of a TV each day on average that shouldn't be that hard to hit. Tell you what, have the corpos give me an extra 1.5hrs each day and I'll give up 1.5hrs of TV and then we'll have enough for that 8 miles. We really need to take back our time from the exploitation class. A lot of problems go away if you work fewer hours a week, but there exist very few jobs that will pay anywhere near a livable wage for that. Like, I could easily survive on half my income if only someone would give me back half my time for it, but that just isn't an option.
- valval 3y ago
  Nobody is exploiting you. Get that toxic mindset out of your head and you'll be happier and better off. Quit your job today and start providing a service for other people if that's what you will. Another thing, 3 hours a day spent on walking alone seems like a waste of time to me. Walking is a terrible form of exercise, it's meant to save energy. You could run for 20 minutes a day and do strength training for another 30 minutes to an hour and never be in bad shape in your life.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 3y ago
    > Another thing, 3 hours a day spent on walking alone seems like a waste of time to me. Good job I'm not you then.
  - ngai_aku 3y ago
    > Another thing, 3 hours a day spent on walking alone seems like a waste of time to me. Walking is a terrible form of exercise, it's meant to save energy. I don’t doubt that there are diminishing returns, but I don’t think it’s fair to say that “walking is a terrible form of exercise.” I was just reading _Built to Move_, and they contend that one hour of intense exercise followed by an otherwise sedentary lifestyle does not make you healthy. Walking might not be the best cardiovascular activity, but it is good for your hips, alignment, digestive tract, promotes healthy sleep schedule, etc.
  - lkuty 3y ago
    Walking fast with a steep slope is a good way to exercise I think. Andrew Weil even wrote that walking is a complete form of exercise: you don't need anything else to be a good athlete. But I guess it is a long hard walk, not a short easy one. I walk regularly and I found that it was really demanding if I do that in the woods with regular slopes. And sometimes I run a little bit, alternating walk and run.
StopTheWorld 3y ago
> You'd have to uproot how the western world works to get us back to how we evolved to be healthy and survive on this planet. To take it literally, it is impossible for eight billion humans (current world population estimate) to live as migratory hunter-gatherers on earth, even if the planet was terraformed back to how it was ten thousand years ago. It's highly unlikely even eight hundred million people people can live like this. In fact, it's possible there are not enough resources that even eighty million can live like this. So aside from the terraforming, world population would probably have to shrink to less than 1% of what it is currently.
- asdff 3y ago
  Exactly, carrying capacity of the land has changed thanks to how much of the biomass we are able to take advantage of. You don't get 8 billion humans on earth plus the abundance of flora and fauna from premodern times for free, its gotta come from somewhere and in this case we scorched a lot of the earth and disrupted a lot of flora and fauna for the agriculture that feeds 8 billion. What changes the equation a little bit though is when we mine or extract resources like fertilizers and oil from below the surface of the planet. That is now adding nutrients and more energy to the system that wasn't around at least in premodern times. All that oil is old biomass anyhow, so burning it and adding it back to the atmosphere would potentially make it available again for species that take advantage of carbon fixation, if we give these species room to accumulate this biomass out of the atmosphere. It's kind of interesting to think about how even with today's combustion engine tech, we could solve our climate change crises and set the earth to whatever greenhouse gas level we'd like, if we merely strove to balance this system by growing out sufficient biomass.
- soco 3y ago
  I don't think many people want to live like real hunter-gatherers so let's come back to the goal of having a healthy (or healthier) lifestyle while still enjoying some joys of modern living. We agree that stress at work or living stuck in chairs should be replaced, but replaced by... what? How can we have jobs and still live healthy? Now this is for me the discussion worth having.
  - 3y ago
paulcole 3y ago
> You'd have to uproot how the western world works This is one of the things a lot of people say they want but almost nobody really wants. But the truth is that we like the way the western world works too much to give it up. We like getting Amazon packages the same day we order. We like TikTok. We like pushing a button and getting a car to come pick us up. We like making a ton of money for stressing over deadlines and sitting in meetings run by pointless MBAs.
- defrost 3y ago
  Speak for yourself - I've yet to do any of the things you've listed in 60 years and none of them sound appealing. AKA "What do you mean 'We' Kemosabe?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7h9V4aKlJw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7h9V4aKlJw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNAY05mhuDE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNAY05mhuDE
  - paulcole 3y ago
    Sorry, I wasn’t thinking of you specifically. I meant “We” as in Western Society as a whole.
    - safety1st 3y ago
      I also don't like most of the things you mentioned here yet I don't feel we need to roll back Western society to be healthy. Sample size of one but I went from overweight/high blood pressure to the picture of health at 41 pretty much just by lifting weights twice a week and replacing the most egregious fat bombs in my diet with protein. I feel like people have a tendency to way overcomplicate this stuff.
    - defrost 3y ago
      Oddly enough I consider myself part of western society despite having grown up surrounded by hunter gathers ( coastal, riverine, and desert ) and worked with many others (equatorial highlands, etc). Even today, largely surrounded by industrial scale agricultural farming in the Western Australian wheatbelt (making frequent trips into the Murchison quiet zone for radio astronomy work) I don't see much of what you talk about despite people here using cutting edge tech in farming and many doing FiFo (fly in | fly out) work on largely automated mines that in toto shift almost a billion metric tonne per annum. Western Society has some interesting slices to it that many miss due to being locked into their own bubble horizons.
cyberneticist 3y ago
I have been walking 90 minutes a day for a month and feel amazing. I just realized that with remote work, 30-60 minutes a day is just not enough activity. Of course, we can't realistically go back to the paleolithic but there is a sense that you can't afford to not get a baseline of physical activity in. No one is more productive being out of shape. You don't get less stressed from being less physically capable. If a person can't find time in a day for enough physical activity but they are reading this then maybe they are making a poor trade off with their time.

bmitc 3y ago

Hunter gather societies were healthier and had more leisure time than the early agrarian societies. See *Against the Grain".