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The problem with exercise is everything in modern life is set up to discourage it. The economy is all about paying money to make your life easier. We design our

The problem with exercise is everything in modern life is set up to discourage it. The economy is all about paying money to make your life easier. We design our cities to require cars. Work schedules and commutes eat into free time. Screen based entertainment displaces more active pastimes, etc. Then our body instinctively hoards calories like a squirrel hoards nuts, because evolution takes thousands to millions of years and this era of abundant calories and sedentary lifestyles emerged in the last few decades. It doesn't matter how potent it is if nobody wants to take it.

ijidak 2y ago
That's why I feel GLP-1 meds are the game changer we need. Our bodies are insanely efficient at using and saving energy. They fact that I can walk for an hour or more on the calories from a single snickers bar is depressing. Ha. And the body is convinced a calorie shortage is around the corner, but in modern society calorie shortages never occur. I think GLP-1 medications, and other medications that attack hunger signals at the source are the only viable long term solution.
- koljghu 2y ago
  Exercise and GLP-1s are very different interventions. To liken them appears fallacious. Exercise is much more than weight loss; it is heart health, bone health, immune health, etc. You can walk an hour on the calories of a candy bar, but you’ll get malnutrition relying solely on candy bars. Healthy nutrition requires more than eating less. If someone develops an injection that makes you want to cook yourself some whole foods then we’ll be talking.
  - aydyn 2y ago
    They are different but two sides of the same coin > Healthy nutrition requires more than eating less. Except in specific cases, this is mostly not true. Food in the modern era is very nutrient dense. This is why vitamin pills are mostly a placebo; you're getting an overabundance of nutrients in your diet already. The first principal component of healthy nutrition is simply _eating less_. Eating less reduces your risk of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, injury when you are older, and on and on. Calories in calories out as they say.
jmyeet 2y ago
Take that to its logical conclusion: the key problems are car-dependence and, well, capitalism. We completeely design our cities around cars. Just the act of walking 30 minutes a day makes a huge difference. If you can get that just going about your day, then it's kind of built into your life, almost "free". But walking (like every other form of exercise) has to be an intentional activity in a car-centric city. Car-dependence didn't just happen. It was intentional and relates heavily to economic segregation. So what about capitalism? Well, leisure time, from the perpsective of capitalism, is lost revenue. Where once you needed 1 full time job, now you need 2 plus 3 "side gigs". Housing costs, student loans, education costs, your cars and student loan debt are all designed to keep you working, creating wealth for someone else.
- Gigachad 2y ago
  Moving inner city and getting rid of my car changed my life. I walk every day now, lost the excess weight and live a lower stress life. It’s hard to overstate how poisonous cars are to your physical and mental health.
  - blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
    Cars are great for mental health. They let people access a lot more things in less time. And plenty of people drive cars who are in fine physical and mental health.
    - Gigachad 2y ago
      They don’t actually allow you to access more things in less time. They reshape cities to spread things further out so you spend the same time accessing the same things, but you get there by sitting in traffic rather than walking or riding a bike. When I used to live in the suburbs it would take me 15 minutes to drive to the supermarket. Now I can walk there in 5 minutes. Walking is faster and healthier than driving.
      - tsimionescu 2y ago
block_dagger 2y ago
I've found that training yourself to enjoy the feeling of hunger (intermittent fasting) is a boon to weight loss. Another tip: fully chew your food, and eat slowly. Don't try to satiate yourself at every meal. It takes a lot of effort at first, but it's very effective. You start to respect food (and your own body's processes) much more.
- MrMcCall 2y ago
  I like to say, "Make hunger your friend." That is the way to begin the process of getting a little hungry and then appreciating it as it grows. Taking that extra time then makes finally eating more enjoyable, in my experience. And your tip on fully chewing food is subtle but powerful. It's very much in the spirit of being more engaged in the moment, where gratitude settles us down and keeps our worries at bay, for at least some small moments.
  - ehnto 2y ago
    Also helps stop you choking to death. A non-trivial issue, in the context of increasing isolation in modern society.
- 1209412comb 2y ago
  You can just eat calorically less dense food a.k.a more veggie. Fasting is very hard, and also dangerous if you faint while driving.
  - block_dagger 2y ago
    I've never fainted from caloric restriction. If you faint when you fast, get checked for an underlying health issue.
  - f1shy 2y ago
    Fasting for less than 24hs should bot be a problem. If it is, there is something wrong that has to be checked.
  - hilux 2y ago
elevaet 2y ago
> It doesn't matter how potent it is if nobody wants to take it. Nobody? I can't agree, lots of people want to, and do "take" exercise. Most of my friends are super active and they look good and feel good and are living really healthy lives. It's true that a lot of society is set up such that we can totally avoid exercising, but on the flip side we've probably never had more access to great ways to be fit that are tailored to personal interest, aptitudes, needs. Sadly I agree that most (north Americans at least) are extremely under-exercised, but it is a choice.
- D13Fd 2y ago
  It’s a “choice,” but the extremely strong default is a sedentary lifestyle. Many people have to actively fight that default to overcome it, day in and day out, and it’s hard.
asveikau 2y ago
> The problem with exercise is everything in modern life is set up to discourage it. That sounds like a problem with modern life rather than a problem with exercise.
zfnmxt 2y ago
Modern life enables the most effective exercise (really "training" is the correct word) in the history of humanity. There is no more potent stressor (in regards to the degree of adaptations that result---I guess getting shot in the face is a more potent stressor, but it's hard to recover from) than weightlifting. For example, you can radically change your physiology just doing a single (hard) set of 5 deadlifts a week. Spending just ~30 seconds a week under acute stress can take a human male who cannot lift 185 lbs to one who can lift 405 lbs in a number of months. It's radically, stupidly, unreasonably, and absurdly effective. We have the most understanding and most effective tools to take advantage of the adaptive mechanisms of our bodies than ever before. I think people think that "exercising" has to be this pervasive, incessant thing that invades every facit of life and requires constant discipline. Even the linked article hints at this---walk 45 minutes daily, stand all the time, etc. All that shit constitutes (for all but the most untrained) extremely small stressors that are rapidly adapted to (and hence no longer do anything but maintain your existing level of fitness) and that take a lot of time (and can be rather uncomfortable, like standing for hours). More is not better. If you disrupt homeostasis with one set of 5 deadlifts, you've disrupted homeostasis! The adaptation is in motion. It doesn't matter that it only took 30 seconds. And unlike standing or walking, it's easy to effectively increase the stress to reap more adaptations: add weight to the bar. (To be clear, I'm not discouraging walking/standing/Zumba/whatever---they're all better than doing nothing and they can complement weightlifting. I'm just pointing out that there are much more efficient ways to rapidly accrue useful stress (well, I'd argue the amount of useful stress you can accrue from walking or Zumba or whatever is limited because the activities themselves can't be effectively scaled to result in more stress) and if you were to choose only one, the choice should be weightlifting.) Deadlifts are life's panacea. You should be doing them.
- econ 2y ago
  Yeah, it's pretty wild. One can also do 10-20 seconds of cardio a few times per week and have real results.
- sawmurai 2y ago
  Agreed, it’s like doing static HTML instead of an SPA for a simple website. It’s not glamorous, it’s not exciting but it’s incredibly efficient. I have been lifting for 18 years now and it’s become like brushing my teeth: I just do it without thinking much about it. Just basic stuff - squats, bench, deadlift, few vanity additions. The older I get the more I see how much my peers physically suffer without it.
econ 2y ago
That's right, convenience is the enemy! We should start some kind of movement and convince others in the least productive way. I know, it sounds like a lot of work. There is one more funny twist to the picture you've painted. What little physical labor we have left is piled onto as few people as possible while others are dying in cubicles.
scelerat 2y ago
The hardest part about exercise is the mental aspect of pushing past the inertia of habit and comfort. As Dr Ashley says in the OP, if you can just walk 30-45 minutes five or six days a week, you're already doing your health a great service. The hard part isn't the walk itself, it's the motivation to start, and the discipline to make it part of a routine. Once you have ingrained exercise into your routine, it becomes easy. Not exercising feels uncomfortable; feeding your body with things which do not support your more healthful state will feel more innately uncomfortable. Once you establish a routine of exercise, you have the basis for a virtuous cycle.
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  > feeding your body with things which do not support your more healthful state will feel more innately uncomfortable. Getting used to exercise every day will in no way make you like McDonald's less.
tzs 2y ago
> The problem with exercise is everything in modern life is set up to discourage it Psychologically manipulative gamification can address that. Soon after I got an Apple Watch the reminders and rewards for the activity rings got me to make sure to close all three of them daily. That was 2063 days ago and I've not missed a day. Before I got the watch I rarely deliberately exercised. I would choose stairs over elevators, and for a while I would do a 10 to 15 leisurely bike ride a couple times a week (but that stopped about a year before I got the watch due to problems with my bike that weren't worth fixing), but other than that it was mostly sitting at my desk or on my couch for me. I'd get in about a mile of walking during normal daily activities and maybe 2500 steps. Those are both 2.5x to 3x as much after the watch. What's interesting is that there were no days during that 2063 (and counting) streak where I had to force myself to continue. I got sick occasionally with a cold or a flu (or something flu like--I never got sick enough with flu like symptoms to actually go get tested to see what it was), but never bad enough that I just wanted to stay in bed until it was over. In the several years before that I would maybe once a year get something that would leave me with no will or energy to get out of bed for a day or two. So something seems to have changed, and increased exercising seems like a decent candidate.
thefz 2y ago
America is not the world and plenty of cities are designed around people.
pjc50 2y ago
The article mentions the difference in health outcomes between bus drivers and bus conductors. An outcome that is effectively dictated by the employer. And of course, since then, one of those jobs has been eliminated: the one that required more exercise.
ratmeadow 2y ago
Yep, you hit the nail on the head. I think a similar train of thought with mental health. Every time there's a new study on how terrible chronic stress is, or how many years of life chronic loneliness loses you. Well how about - radical thought incoming - we stop constructing a society where we are increasingly exploited and isolated? "Oh but the free market" (or whatever other excuse) we bemoan. Crap, yeah, guess as long as someone makes a dollar, the wellbeing of millions doesn't matter...
- Herring 2y ago
  Well you saw how those millions recently voted in the US. I've largely stopped worrying about this. Slavery took hundreds of years to get phased out, and Europe took hundreds of years to mostly-stop going to war. I only have a couple decades to my life. I got a nice exercise bike, which I use for 30m most days. I got one for my parents too, but my mom refused to use it and promptly got a heart attack. Can't win them all. I do what I can, but I've stopped trying to lift mountains.
- illiac786 2y ago
  Toure really contributing to the problem here. Hearing people complaining about the state of the world is stressful for everyone and causes people to isolate even more. I recommend to be constructive and make actionable recommendations, and have a positive tone. I know it’s not easy in the current state of affairs though. “ stop constructing a society where ….” really doesn’t tell anyone what you think we should do. And I agree with you btw, I think the root cause is, we have anonymised too much, revenue is the only thing that matters, because before that, there were things like traditions, shame, ethic, etc. but they went all out the window when money making became possible anonymously via funds, VCs, etc. You can switch to child labor to save 0.1% margin because, guess what, no one is responsible anymore: the shareholders, these anonymous mass, want it.
  - ratmeadow 2y ago
    What you say is true. Although I'm conflicted on whether a 100% positive approach is best. Thing is, we're currently doing a pretty shit job of building a good society, and it needs to change ASAP, for our benefit and the benefit of the planet. I'm partly of the mindset that people need a huge wakeup call. While we are humming and hahing and saying "no don't worry, it's not THAT bad", the world probably doesn't get any better. Bad actors prey on complacency. How long do we need to wait for cost of living to soar, inequality to increase, mental health to decline, etc until we take a hard stance and put a stop to it? You and I may be in the privileged position to take a nonradical stance and ultimately still live decent lives. Also, I think many people don't think we are headed in the wrong direction, or are generally uneducated about the topic. Blissful ignorance... during which they continue being good consumers to keep the hamster wheel spinning. We are sleepwalking into some sort of societal disaster. You're probably right that people need to be addressed with a positive tone. But it's hard.

ijidak 2y ago

That's why I feel GLP-1 meds are the game changer we need. Our bodies are insanely efficient at using and saving energy. They fact that I can walk for an hour or more on the calories from a single snickers bar is depressing. Ha. And the body is convinced a calorie shortage is around the corner, but in modern society calorie shortages never occur. I think GLP-1 medications, and other medications that attack hunger signals at the source are the only viable long term solution.

koljghu 2y ago
Exercise and GLP-1s are very different interventions. To liken them appears fallacious. Exercise is much more than weight loss; it is heart health, bone health, immune health, etc. You can walk an hour on the calories of a candy bar, but you’ll get malnutrition relying solely on candy bars. Healthy nutrition requires more than eating less. If someone develops an injection that makes you want to cook yourself some whole foods then we’ll be talking.
- aydyn 2y ago
  They are different but two sides of the same coin > Healthy nutrition requires more than eating less. Except in specific cases, this is mostly not true. Food in the modern era is very nutrient dense. This is why vitamin pills are mostly a placebo; you're getting an overabundance of nutrients in your diet already. The first principal component of healthy nutrition is simply _eating less_. Eating less reduces your risk of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, injury when you are older, and on and on. Calories in calories out as they say.

jmyeet 2y ago

Take that to its logical conclusion: the key problems are car-dependence and, well, capitalism. We completeely design our cities around cars. Just the act of walking 30 minutes a day makes a huge difference. If you can get that just going about your day, then it's kind of built into your life, almost "free". But walking (like every other form of exercise) has to be an intentional activity in a car-centric city. Car-dependence didn't just happen. It was intentional and relates heavily to economic segregation. So what about capitalism? Well, leisure time, from the perpsective of capitalism, is lost revenue. Where once you needed 1 full time job, now you need 2 plus 3 "side gigs". Housing costs, student loans, education costs, your cars and student loan debt are all designed to keep you working, creating wealth for someone else.

Gigachad 2y ago
Moving inner city and getting rid of my car changed my life. I walk every day now, lost the excess weight and live a lower stress life. It’s hard to overstate how poisonous cars are to your physical and mental health.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  Cars are great for mental health. They let people access a lot more things in less time. And plenty of people drive cars who are in fine physical and mental health.
  - Gigachad 2y ago
    They don’t actually allow you to access more things in less time. They reshape cities to spread things further out so you spend the same time accessing the same things, but you get there by sitting in traffic rather than walking or riding a bike. When I used to live in the suburbs it would take me 15 minutes to drive to the supermarket. Now I can walk there in 5 minutes. Walking is faster and healthier than driving.
    - tsimionescu 2y ago

block_dagger 2y ago

I've found that training yourself to enjoy the feeling of hunger (intermittent fasting) is a boon to weight loss. Another tip: fully chew your food, and eat slowly. Don't try to satiate yourself at every meal. It takes a lot of effort at first, but it's very effective. You start to respect food (and your own body's processes) much more.

MrMcCall 2y ago
I like to say, "Make hunger your friend." That is the way to begin the process of getting a little hungry and then appreciating it as it grows. Taking that extra time then makes finally eating more enjoyable, in my experience. And your tip on fully chewing food is subtle but powerful. It's very much in the spirit of being more engaged in the moment, where gratitude settles us down and keeps our worries at bay, for at least some small moments.
- ehnto 2y ago
  Also helps stop you choking to death. A non-trivial issue, in the context of increasing isolation in modern society.
1209412comb 2y ago
You can just eat calorically less dense food a.k.a more veggie. Fasting is very hard, and also dangerous if you faint while driving.
- block_dagger 2y ago
  I've never fainted from caloric restriction. If you faint when you fast, get checked for an underlying health issue.
- f1shy 2y ago
  Fasting for less than 24hs should bot be a problem. If it is, there is something wrong that has to be checked.
- hilux 2y ago

elevaet 2y ago

> It doesn't matter how potent it is if nobody wants to take it. Nobody? I can't agree, lots of people want to, and do "take" exercise. Most of my friends are super active and they look good and feel good and are living really healthy lives. It's true that a lot of society is set up such that we can totally avoid exercising, but on the flip side we've probably never had more access to great ways to be fit that are tailored to personal interest, aptitudes, needs. Sadly I agree that most (north Americans at least) are extremely under-exercised, but it is a choice.

D13Fd 2y ago
It’s a “choice,” but the extremely strong default is a sedentary lifestyle. Many people have to actively fight that default to overcome it, day in and day out, and it’s hard.

asveikau 2y ago

> The problem with exercise is everything in modern life is set up to discourage it. That sounds like a problem with modern life rather than a problem with exercise.

zfnmxt 2y ago

Modern life enables the most effective exercise (really "training" is the correct word) in the history of humanity. There is no more potent stressor (in regards to the degree of adaptations that result---I guess getting shot in the face is a more potent stressor, but it's hard to recover from) than weightlifting. For example, you can radically change your physiology just doing a single (hard) set of 5 deadlifts a week. Spending just ~30 seconds a week under acute stress can take a human male who cannot lift 185 lbs to one who can lift 405 lbs in a number of months. It's radically, stupidly, unreasonably, and absurdly effective. We have the most understanding and most effective tools to take advantage of the adaptive mechanisms of our bodies than ever before. I think people think that "exercising" has to be this pervasive, incessant thing that invades every facit of life and requires constant discipline. Even the linked article hints at this---walk 45 minutes daily, stand all the time, etc. All that shit constitutes (for all but the most untrained) extremely small stressors that are rapidly adapted to (and hence no longer do anything but maintain your existing level of fitness) and that take a lot of time (and can be rather uncomfortable, like standing for hours). More is not better. If you disrupt homeostasis with one set of 5 deadlifts, you've disrupted homeostasis! The adaptation is in motion. It doesn't matter that it only took 30 seconds. And unlike standing or walking, it's easy to effectively increase the stress to reap more adaptations: add weight to the bar. (To be clear, I'm not discouraging walking/standing/Zumba/whatever---they're all better than doing nothing and they can complement weightlifting. I'm just pointing out that there are much more efficient ways to rapidly accrue useful stress (well, I'd argue the amount of useful stress you can accrue from walking or Zumba or whatever is limited because the activities themselves can't be effectively scaled to result in more stress) and if you were to choose only one, the choice should be weightlifting.) Deadlifts are life's panacea. You should be doing them.

econ 2y ago
Yeah, it's pretty wild. One can also do 10-20 seconds of cardio a few times per week and have real results.
sawmurai 2y ago
Agreed, it’s like doing static HTML instead of an SPA for a simple website. It’s not glamorous, it’s not exciting but it’s incredibly efficient. I have been lifting for 18 years now and it’s become like brushing my teeth: I just do it without thinking much about it. Just basic stuff - squats, bench, deadlift, few vanity additions. The older I get the more I see how much my peers physically suffer without it.

econ 2y ago

That's right, convenience is the enemy! We should start some kind of movement and convince others in the least productive way. I know, it sounds like a lot of work. There is one more funny twist to the picture you've painted. What little physical labor we have left is piled onto as few people as possible while others are dying in cubicles.

scelerat 2y ago

The hardest part about exercise is the mental aspect of pushing past the inertia of habit and comfort. As Dr Ashley says in the OP, if you can just walk 30-45 minutes five or six days a week, you're already doing your health a great service. The hard part isn't the walk itself, it's the motivation to start, and the discipline to make it part of a routine. Once you have ingrained exercise into your routine, it becomes easy. Not exercising feels uncomfortable; feeding your body with things which do not support your more healthful state will feel more innately uncomfortable. Once you establish a routine of exercise, you have the basis for a virtuous cycle.

tsimionescu 2y ago
> feeding your body with things which do not support your more healthful state will feel more innately uncomfortable. Getting used to exercise every day will in no way make you like McDonald's less.

tzs 2y ago

> The problem with exercise is everything in modern life is set up to discourage it Psychologically manipulative gamification can address that. Soon after I got an Apple Watch the reminders and rewards for the activity rings got me to make sure to close all three of them daily. That was 2063 days ago and I've not missed a day. Before I got the watch I rarely deliberately exercised. I would choose stairs over elevators, and for a while I would do a 10 to 15 leisurely bike ride a couple times a week (but that stopped about a year before I got the watch due to problems with my bike that weren't worth fixing), but other than that it was mostly sitting at my desk or on my couch for me. I'd get in about a mile of walking during normal daily activities and maybe 2500 steps. Those are both 2.5x to 3x as much after the watch. What's interesting is that there were no days during that 2063 (and counting) streak where I had to force myself to continue. I got sick occasionally with a cold or a flu (or something flu like--I never got sick enough with flu like symptoms to actually go get tested to see what it was), but never bad enough that I just wanted to stay in bed until it was over. In the several years before that I would maybe once a year get something that would leave me with no will or energy to get out of bed for a day or two. So something seems to have changed, and increased exercising seems like a decent candidate.

thefz 2y ago

America is not the world and plenty of cities are designed around people.

pjc50 2y ago

The article mentions the difference in health outcomes between bus drivers and bus conductors. An outcome that is effectively dictated by the employer. And of course, since then, one of those jobs has been eliminated: the one that required more exercise.

ratmeadow 2y ago

Yep, you hit the nail on the head. I think a similar train of thought with mental health. Every time there's a new study on how terrible chronic stress is, or how many years of life chronic loneliness loses you. Well how about - radical thought incoming - we stop constructing a society where we are increasingly exploited and isolated? "Oh but the free market" (or whatever other excuse) we bemoan. Crap, yeah, guess as long as someone makes a dollar, the wellbeing of millions doesn't matter...

Herring 2y ago
Well you saw how those millions recently voted in the US. I've largely stopped worrying about this. Slavery took hundreds of years to get phased out, and Europe took hundreds of years to mostly-stop going to war. I only have a couple decades to my life. I got a nice exercise bike, which I use for 30m most days. I got one for my parents too, but my mom refused to use it and promptly got a heart attack. Can't win them all. I do what I can, but I've stopped trying to lift mountains.
illiac786 2y ago
Toure really contributing to the problem here. Hearing people complaining about the state of the world is stressful for everyone and causes people to isolate even more. I recommend to be constructive and make actionable recommendations, and have a positive tone. I know it’s not easy in the current state of affairs though. “ stop constructing a society where ….” really doesn’t tell anyone what you think we should do. And I agree with you btw, I think the root cause is, we have anonymised too much, revenue is the only thing that matters, because before that, there were things like traditions, shame, ethic, etc. but they went all out the window when money making became possible anonymously via funds, VCs, etc. You can switch to child labor to save 0.1% margin because, guess what, no one is responsible anymore: the shareholders, these anonymous mass, want it.
- ratmeadow 2y ago
  What you say is true. Although I'm conflicted on whether a 100% positive approach is best. Thing is, we're currently doing a pretty shit job of building a good society, and it needs to change ASAP, for our benefit and the benefit of the planet. I'm partly of the mindset that people need a huge wakeup call. While we are humming and hahing and saying "no don't worry, it's not THAT bad", the world probably doesn't get any better. Bad actors prey on complacency. How long do we need to wait for cost of living to soar, inequality to increase, mental health to decline, etc until we take a hard stance and put a stop to it? You and I may be in the privileged position to take a nonradical stance and ultimately still live decent lives. Also, I think many people don't think we are headed in the wrong direction, or are generally uneducated about the topic. Blissful ignorance... during which they continue being good consumers to keep the hamster wheel spinning. We are sleepwalking into some sort of societal disaster. You're probably right that people need to be addressed with a positive tone. But it's hard.