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Obesity and Fitness Are Revolutionized By Reddit, Not Doctors

212 points by jc4p 14y ago

WalterSear 14y ago
As a developer I bristle at the idea that 'if it's not in the curriculum, what can you do?' The doctors are at fault here for not reaearching and advocating for the research needed.
- vacri 14y ago
  You don't seem to have any idea about how complex medicine is. You wouldn't say the same thing about a specialist in IT ("This DBA doesn't know enough Java!").
  - alex_c 14y ago
    For specialists, sure. But for a GP shouldn't it be essential to be knowledgeable and effective about basic fitness and nutrition? My (relatively uninformed) impression is that studies of fitness and nutrition are surprisingly unsophisticated relative to research for curing specific diseases. This is basically the debate of preventive care vs. palliative care (and, I guess, the argument that one allows for much higher profits than the other).
    - jacques_chester 14y ago
      It's not just profit. It's hard to get funding for research into training. Nobody wants to be the public research administrator who put $$$ down for research into the effects of hypertrophy. So the studies that do get done tend to be small. A lot of what is known about sports science relies on meta-studies, because so many training studies are of the form "we took 20 college-aged males and divided them into three groups ..."
    - vacri 14y ago
      Western medicine has historically never been focused on preventative medicine; their role has traditionally been to make you healthy, not keep you healthy. It's not the conspiracy some might suggest, it's just that historically you called a doctor when you were ill, not for lifestyle advice. When it comes to fitness, you still don't - unless you're talking to a sports doctor, you're not going to get a useful training programme tailored for your needs. Regarding GPs in particular - they aren't really about keeping you trim and terrific. They're about dealing with niggling issues while flagging serious ones for referral to specialists. They do know about basic fitness and diet, but they're not specialists in the area - see sports doctors and dieticians. Also consider that diet is a rapidly moving target at the moment - there's a lot of contradictory opinion and new info coming out all the time. It's not a GP's role to stay at the bleeding edge of medicine. That's what specialists do, and as the specialists settle on the right thing, it filters down to the non-specialists. You can of course find GPs who take special interests in certain areas, and may get lucky and find one that loves fitness and diet. Also, 'palliative' doesn't mean 'after injury', it means 'relieve symtoms without attempting a cure', and most doctors would rather cure a problem than use the patient as a cash cow (there's enough work out there, even before you get to the ethical issues). Perhaps a better pair of terms would be preventative/proactive vs reactive care.
      - alex_c 14y ago
        Great comment, and I agree with you on all counts. I believe western medicine should put more emphasis on preventive care and GPs, as most people's first and sometimes only point of contact for health-related matters, should be much more informed and proactive about their patients' fitness and nutrition. Regarding diet being a rapidly moving target, that is exactly my point. It seems to me, as an uninformed layman, incredible how much we've learned about diseases like cancer and yet how relatively little we seem to know about diet, fitness, and the behavioural research related to them. Not because these topics are in any way more simple than understanding a specific disease, but because they affect everybody.
caycep 14y ago
there are 2 different purposes here. the high saturated fat diets - yeah that will drop weight. No one really knows what the long term effect on cardivascular disease (i.e. damage to arteries) will be, since they haven't been practiced for the several decades it takes to find that out.
moistgorilla 14y ago
r/fitness is good for an average person but I would not say it's as good as you make it out to be. Other bodybuilding and fitness websites are much better. Also, most of the advice on r/fitness comes from /fit/.
- oacgnol 14y ago
  Sure, the depth of the content is not as good as other forums, but a peripheral point I think the article was trying to make was that the accessibility of such resources is what makes it so revolutionary. I'm an avid reader of r/fitness and one of the things that makes it so appealing it me is how much of the advice relates to me, an average guy who spends much of his time on the internet.
Professoroak 14y ago
I firmly believe that for most things, fitness and health included, the internet will always be lightyears ahead of what is published in peer-reviewed journals.　Now, new ideas get thrown on a blog for millions to (potentially) see, the ideas are read and analyzed by a portion of the general population, and then they're either rejected or expanded upon. It's the perfect meritocracy of ideas, and the slow peer review process can't keep up.
- jc4p 14y ago
  It just blows my mind that there are sections of the internet where smart people can analyze peer-reviewed articles the second they come out and shine a light on them. This is the kind of thing that happens in close-knit communities like /r/Fitness and SomethingAwful a lot.
- jmduke 14y ago
  > the internet will always be lightyears ahead of what is published in peer-reviewed journals The thing is, its not as if r/fitness or /fit/ invented the low-carb diet or the paleo diet. They just spread it to people who'd otherwise never engage in debate/discourse about nutrition (which is of course commendable.) > It's the perfect meritocracy of ideas, and the slow peer review process can't keep up. I think Reddit and blogs have seen enough false witch hunts and outright lies to know that the internet is very, very rarely a meritocracy. Peer-reviewed processes aren't meant to serve as a proxy for the general population, or to spur rapid progress; in fact, their goal is serve as objective judges of validity and accuracy. This is somewhat akin to when people complain about the difficulty in passing legislation in the U.S. Things like bicameral legislature and checks and balances were instituted specifically to slow down the passage of legislature and allow a more deliberate review process.
  - Nicole060 14y ago
    All the things you said are true but remember, not all doctors are up to date with research and even if you can find a lot of false information on the internet, you're more likely to also find the truth than you are with an outdated physician. The general practitioner that has followed me since I was born whenever I was ill or hurt is someone who has nearly stopped reading anything about medicine since he finished his study and got his job. On his own admission he doesn't even use computers much and doesn't read the research you can find on places like pubmed. He's nearing retirement and I'm going to change my physician (in France you have to declare one to prevent people from hopping to one place from the other whenever they're ill and "paranoid" and save costs to our health care) once I get done with the paperwork, since I am very lazy when it comes to anything that has to do with paperwork. Btw I know all this about him because he's rather talkative and love to waste time once he's done with the check up. One thing that enforced my laziness in looking for another one is the fact that it can be good to have a physician who knows all your health history from the start, even if he's somewhat incompetent. When you end up with that kind of "doctor" the internet doesn't look so bad.
orangethirty 14y ago
I've lost a ton of weight (no pun intended) by being an active member of r/loseit. Nothing else. That community helped me achieve my goals. It is just an amazing place.
- illuminate 14y ago
  "Nothing else." I find this doubtful.
  - orangethirty 14y ago
    What is it that you found doubtful? Or did you not understand the message behind the sentence? It meant that I did not use any gimmicks or pills or surgery. I relied (still do) on the community as a tool to achieve my fitness goals. Of course, I still run about 20 miles per week, and bicycle an equal amount. I control what I eat by counting calories and I also calculate how much to eat in order to keep a deficit of 3500 calories per month (one pound of fat per month basically).
    - illuminate 14y ago
      You made the statement as if to bolster the subreddit as "revolutionary". It's effective, but there's nothing medically or socially revolutionary about fitness support groups. You followed healthy patterns and share your successes with others.
      - orangethirty 14y ago
        You don't get it. :) Where reason is king all the flowers are black and white. Good luck.
david_shaw 14y ago
Disclaimer: this post is going to go into some of my personal experiences with weight loss, fitness, and reddit. In March 2012, not all that long ago, I was considered obese. Living a life primarily behind the computer screen while leading an engineering team at a rapidly growing startup (over 100% growth in the last year alone) left little time for me to consider my fitness. I'd eat trash -- burritos four or five times a week, pizza or fast food the rest. I never cooked, because I "didn't have time." I didn't work out for the same half-assed reason. I realized in early April that I weighed more than I ever had before, that I was not satisfied in my appearance, and that I was very likely introducing unwanted health issues. Like many other things in my life (coding, managing, infosec, etc.) I took the "dive deep" approach into health and fitness. I experimented with several diet and fitness plans, until finally finding one that seemed sustainable for me. I'm not trying to start a flame war about diets -- I've seen far too many of them in the last few months -- but a very low-carbohydrate, ketogenic diet (called "keto") works extremely well for me. I found a reddit community (surprise!) called /r/keto that shares recipes, support, and tips with each other. Especially in the beginning of my diet, it was an invaluable resource. I started my keto diet on April 18th, at about 255 lbs. Today I weigh 189. I'm still not where I want to be (yet), but I can personally attest to the extremely kind and supportive atmosphere that reddit provides when working towards a goal like this. We rejoice in each others' victories and help each other through the harder times. That said, there are downsides, too. I already mentioned the diet/exercise flame wars that go on -- for example, Low-Carb/High-Fat (LCHF) diets vs. High-Protein/Low Fat vs. Low-Fat Generalized, etc. I think that each of these diets can work (science supports that), but different people need to figure out what works for them. The problem with these subreddits -- /r/fitness included -- is that they develop a hive-mind towards their respective goal. /r/fitness almost makes a joke of it ("join a gym, quit facebook, get girls"), and "starting strength" is recommended all the time, in response to pretty much everything. Not that these are bad recommendations at all, just something that I see a lot. The communities are very welcoming, but when an individual strays from the hive mind, they can also be very discouraging. Hope this lends a little insight and personality to the article!
- neutronicus 14y ago
  I have a pet hypothesis that one of (for instance) Keto's main benefits is that it shakes up habitual eating patterns. Instead of trying to eat less of foods you're used to eating a lot of, you're forced to develop new habits around entirely new food. I've also gone from 250-ish down to 170-ish (although over the course of 2 years, not 4 months, lol), but I haven't really bought into any specific diet. I just don't eat out.
_delirium 14y ago
What's missing in this article is mention of actual scientific evidence. I can believe that traditional nutritional recommendations are on flimsy ground, but replacing them with new cargo-cult ideas isn't necessarily better. Do these newer recommendations have good science behind them? My lurker experiences in /r/fitness are quite mixed; they seem like nice people, but the specific diet plans are very heavy on anecdotal evidence, with people professing very high confidence in recommendations relative to how much evidence there is (if anything, it reminds me of alternative-medicine communities). They're also a bit too focused for my interests on bodybuilding/image/etc. rather than measurable health outcomes, e.g. reduction in heart-attack or diabetes risk rather than muscle definition.
- dicktalens 14y ago
  Far from alternative medicine. The beliefs touted by /r/fitness, such as intermittent fasting, increased protein consumption (many times more than the FDA recommendation), progressive load resistance training, and NOT focusing on cardio for weight loss are highly researched. The leaders of the /r/fitness community are incredibly well-versed in science and there are extremely intelligent debates that take place on /r/ fitness. The problem is that these concepts rarely make it to the mainstream on their own. There's lot of links to the research, but this wasn't the appropriate article to include them. :)
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- neutronicus 14y ago
  I'm actually thankful for the focus on near-term goals rather than living to 75 instead of 70.
  - _delirium 14y ago
    I don't mind that people are interested in bodybuilding/fitness, but if it's positioned as a replacement for traditional nutritional science, that's not the main goal of nutritional science. And personally it's not my interest: I don't really care about bodybuilding/fitness, but I do care about minimizing my risk of serious health problems. It's not clear to me that the two goals even result in the same recommendations; it's quite possible that there are diets that are good for short/medium-term muscle building which are not good for, say, long-term organ health. At least, I would want to see scientific evidence one way or another.
zone411 14y ago
I'm sorry but the content on Reddit is very shallow compared to popular fitness and nutrition forums that have been existing and going strong for many years. There is nothing in this poor article that shows Reddit to be superior in any way. It is very questionable that Reddit's weak voting system improves the quality in any way (and reputation and other voting systems are available on many forums anyway).
- kyro 14y ago
  The average person and the population in general doesn't need advice any deeper than the "shallow" content found on Reddit in order to live a healthy lifestyle, and because the information is often so easy to swallow, it makes new members feel infinitely more comfortable. Sally next door doesn't need to know about carb-loading and iso-whey protein shakes. Forums all about that stuff are incredibly intimidating and geared towards individuals who typically want to go above and beyond what is considered a normal healthy state. Reddit offers easily digestible information with support from a huge community. I'd argue that's all you really need to fight obesity.
- manaskarekar 14y ago
  It's not just the content alone that makes the difference. A few things: - It's the community that makes you feel like a part of something. Compared to popular fitness boards, you don't go to reddit only when you're in the 'trying to lose weight actively' mode. You just go to reddit and then these posts show up in your stream keeping you actively engaged. YMMV of course. - It serves as a gentle break-in to more detailed/technical information. Most of the advice there is usually watered down from some technical sources, which people/FAQs eventually link to in case someone needs more information. The third and perhaps the most important point would be, - people see 'regular joes' like you and me losing xxx pounds and know by their posting history that they're not a made up figment of the advertisers imagination. This works on two levels, not only does it give confidence to the average guy, it also ensures that he's not being fed some bullshit theory in lieu of money. The major fact that people get amazing results without throwing money at the techniques seems to lower the barrier to 'hmm maybe I should try this.' I'm a big time fan of keto and have had great results and I have but r/keto to thank for this.
rickdale 14y ago
This is the first time I have seen the reddit fitness stuff. I was big at the beginning of the year. Wasn't even thinking of a diet. Then I read a comment here on hn posted by Aramgutang, on the best books of 2011 thread, where they recommended reading the four hour body. The community behind the four hour body was a huge motivator for me to lose 40 lbs and really it does change the way you think about things. I think reddit offers a similar backing to your diet. You need support, sometimes it seems pointless, but when you are feeling good, you will never feel better. Everywhere you look is temptation to sabotage, a strong community behind you really helps. I always wanted to thank Aramgutang so thank you. PS Get a kettlebell.
- Aramgutang 14y ago
  You're very welcome. Inspiring someone to become more healthy is probably the most rewarding inspiration there is.
  - rickdale 14y ago
    Well, once again thank you. It's crazy how some tiny comment on the internet can really change some random persons life. When I started to read 4HB, I was like whoa, that comment on HN was/is my hirjaku moment. It was the door to the other side. So once again thank you so much. I looked up your email at one point to send a gratis note, but couldnt find anything. Glad you spotted out my comment. Not sure how you found it :)
kmfrk 14y ago
I think the main appeal of communities like this is that there is a central place to cheer on people who are trying to get into improving their health. You see something similar going on at Pinterest, which, for all its scientifically debunked advice, tries to encourage and inspire people to work out. It doesn't matter how good your workout and diet regimen looks on paper, if you have to multiply that result with an enthusiasm of zero.
- petercooper 14y ago
  I was thinking this. That is, even if a lot of the advice is bunk, as long as it's not harmful, anything that gets people actually thinking "Yeah, I can do this!" and giving it a go has to be valuable. For example, if my prime goal in life were to get as many people coding as possible, I'd rather have an eager but bad VBScript developer I could train up than someone who doesn't really care about programming either way. Ditto for fitness, perhaps.
  - kmfrk 14y ago
    Since fitness people usually start from a very, very bad level of exercise and dieting, you'd have to do some seriously stupid stuff for the net effect of your regimen not to be a big improvement regardless. Compared to programming or anything else, it's not that important to use the perfect way to improve most of the time. Especially when all the research happens at the cost of actually doing what you set out to. So what if you can't burn fat from targeted areas on your body, when your overall weight decreases and will eventually shed that tummy fat you've been bothered by. This is one of the reasons I like Hacker News as a community a lot. I think it sometimes makes starting a company sound way too easy (and buzzwordy), but there are a lot of people here who would never have started their companies, if they hadn't found a community here to cheer them on.
xiaoma 14y ago
From reading the article I get the impression that the author isn't that familiar with the scientific literature at all. The evidence he presents against the usefulness of cardio for weight loss compares a group of weightlifters against a group of runners who ran only 20km per week and they still lost marginally more weight than the weightlifters! Cardio really should be a minimum of an hour per day, at least 5 days a week if weight control is the goal. Health benefits accrue much sooner, though. Science certainly hasn't weighed in on favor of high protein diets or abandoning cardio unless you cherry pick specific smaller studies to get what you're looking for. On the other hand there are HUGE studies supporting cardio, both for weight loss and for health. I've written about this many times before on HN: According to the 32,000 person study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (1999), "fit persons with any combination of smoking, elevated blood pressure, or elevated cholesterol level had lower adjusted death rates than low-fit persons with none of these characteristics". The same study found that aerobic fitness had a far more important impact on longevity than obesity did. Fantastic Voyage, Kurzweil and Grossman, Chapter 22. Here's a report on a study that monitored over 100,000 people: Paul Williams, Ph.D., author of the study, found that men who ran two or more marathons per year were 41 percent less likely to suffer from high blood pressure, 32 percent less likely to have high cholesterol, and 87 percent less likely to be diabetic than non-marathoners. Those who ran only one marathon every two to five years also had significantly lower risk for these conditions than non-marathoners. The benefits of running marathons were largely independent of total number of miles run per year by participants, indicating that isolated distance running bouts in preparation for marathons may have been effective in decreasing risk of disease. Even runners who didn't run marathons - those who included longer runs as part of their usual exercise routines - were less likely to have high blood pressure, diabetes, or high cholesterol. http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/140104.php http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/140104.php Here's a different piece on how regular hour-long runs stimulate neurogenesis and memory improvements in middle aged humans: http://www.dana.org/news/brainwork/detail.aspx?id=7374 http://www.dana.org/news/brainwork/detail.aspx?id=7374 Distance running is one of the most beneficial things you can do for yourself. Racing marathons can be reasonably low-risk with sufficient training, but it's the training that gives benefits. In terms of life expectancy, endurance athletes such as marathoners and cross-country skiers live about 2 years longer than sprinters, 4 years longer than power lifters and 6 years longer than the general populace. (warning- small sample sized case study) http://www.mdconsult.com/das/citation/body/163630869-2/jorg=.. http://www.mdconsult.com/das/citation/body/163630869-2/jorg=.... Recommended food for thought for those convinced that low-carb is the optimal diet: Why is it that both Atkins and Taubes got so fat on very low carb diets while Japanese people traditionally ate (and many still do eat) rice at every single mean, lunch, breakfast and dinner? Maybe a bunch of high protein eating redditors don't have all the answers. http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2008/07/15/the-never-ending-diet-wars.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2008/07/15/the-never-e... http://www.paleopharm.com/what-if-gary-taubes-is-a-big-fat-liar/ http://www.paleopharm.com/what-if-gary-taubes-is-a-big-fat-l... http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/16/no-surprise-meat-is-bad-for-you/ http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/16/no-surprise-... My own personal experiences are largely irrelevant, but FWIW the leanest and fittest I ever was, I was getting nearly 80% of my calories from carbs. And the time in my life I gained the most, I was only getting closer to 20% of my calories from carbs. I can respect someone who encourages testing, a la Seth Roberts' "n=1 studies". I can't respect someone who puts up a few blog posts and claims to know more than the entire medical establishment. Americans are more into protein and more into weightlifting than any other nation I've ever seen. And while there are a number of muscled-bound guys strutting around, there are a whole lot more fat people buying into the same pop weight-loss ideologies.
vitno 14y ago
I don't go on reddit much anymore, but the /r/paleo community is almost directly responsible for my 75+ pound weight loss. They easily supplied the basic knowledge & a sense of community.
abalone 14y ago
Not surprising that this is an unscientific article. What evidence is presented that "ignoring the fitness advice of doctors" achieves "better results"? Anecdotal evidence, that's what. 1 dude. The author even cites a "completely unscientific, but accurate chart." That says it all.
- davidtanner 14y ago
  How strong have you ever known anyone to get by following the advice of doctors?
  - Xodarap 14y ago
    Given that every single Olympic athlete is advised by doctors I would say, "pretty damn strong".
dhughes 14y ago
Reddit's /r/fitness is like the 4chan of fitness I stopped reading it due to the bickering and posturing, I'd say a wee bit of roid-rage is leaking through.
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  This is a lazy, spiteful stereotype.
  - dhughes 14y ago
    No, it isn't. Read the posts for a while and you'll see a pattern of certain groups who have an absolute view of what they perceive is right and aren't shy to say it. Maybe the mods are better now but I gave up reading anything there after a few months. Another bad one is r/coffee lots of bickering there too, it must be the caffeine or lack of it.
    - jacques_chester 14y ago
      People with strongly-held opinions share those opinions with others? Shocking. I was referring to your "roid rage" slur, by the way.
      - dhughes 14y ago
        It's not a slur it's pretty obvious going by some comments in r/fitness, but like I said I gave up reading r/fitness.
- pessimizer 14y ago
  No, 4chan.org/fit/ is the 4chan of fitness.
peterwwillis 14y ago
Obesity and Fitness are not revolutionized by a forum full of people telling you what worked for them. The revolution comes when people find what works for themselves. So far, it's very far away. News flash: Most people don't go on Reddit. gasp Calm down. I'm sorry I frightened you. But it turns out you don't get a revolution by a small number of people who use a particular forum looking for fitness tips from their formely fat peers. In the future, you will be able to go online, fill out a questionnaire, and for a small monthly fee receive one of several pre-programmed diet and exercise programs, complete with local gyms that are part of the program and can help you perform your exercise requirements. A local food store will also be part of the program, with a special aisle of diet food for you to buy from. The solution comes from tailored, marketed, cult-of-the-self products that suck you in for long enough to make a dent. The problem I see with the fitness portion is creating a fitness product without real user engagement. You've seen it before plenty of times: CrossFit. P90X. Tae Bo. Yoga. The Brazilian Butt Lift. They can all pretty much work to get you in better shape, but there's nothing keeping a random person engaged in it enough to continue for long. For someone starting out for the first time, they have to have an enormous amount of motivation to continue once they see how difficult it will be to begin. To my mind, the easiest way to get people stuck on fitness is to Facebook it. Make it addictive and interesting, and make them obsessed with how they are doing. Give them micro stats. Gimmicks and social fluff to turn it into a game. Anything to keep them hooked, to the point where the exercise is just a small component to them. The diet becomes the same, giving lots of interesting variables and an infinite number of simple user-friendly options to continue getting healthy while being obsessed with a new toy. If it's done right, they'll have gone weeks with the program, eating right, and working hard, and suddenly find they've made some noticeable gains. The rest takes care of itself. The revolution comes when people don't really notice that they're being healthy.
- nazgulnarsil 14y ago
  It's called fitocracy. :)
- BrandonM 14y ago
  This sounds like a pretty good approach. Why must it be "in the future"? Why don't you work on it yourself? This is Hacker News, after all.
beloch 14y ago
The key obstacle to weight loss is the same as any form of self-improvement: Motivation. Most people know what they need to do in order to lose weight. They just don't do it because its hard to motivate ourselves to do things we're not used to doing. i.e. It's hard to defy our habits. Healthy people don't defy their habits any more than unhealthy people do. They just have healthy habits. So when you're trying to become healthy the goal should not be to "lose 5 pounds this week", but to form healthy habits and break unhealthy ones. This kind of thinking is crucial. You might have enough willpower to defy your habits long enough to achieve your weight-loss goal, but only forming healthy habits will keep the weight from coming right back. This is possibly why doctors aren't terribly useful. They can tell us when we need to lose weight and perhaps even give us a general idea of what we need to do, but they really aren't trained to focus on habits and motivation. Even if they were, everyone responds differently to ideas and we each need to sift through a lot of possible ideas to find ways of changing our habits that are actually compatible with how we live and think. It's a matter of brute-force. A doctor has maybe 10 minutes to set you on the right path, but you can spend hours upon hours reading reddit looking for things that will work for you. One point in the linked article that I absolutely disagree with is that cardio is unimportant. To be fair, he only really said it's unimportant for weight-loss. If all you want is to look pretty then perhaps it's not crucial, but it absolutely is important for being healthy. Above I said that forming healthy habits is a way to side-step the need to constantly motivate ourselves, but the truth is that it also takes effort to change our habits! Having the strongest possible motivation helps, and I've found that being healthy so I can do things like play sports and hike is a better motivator than simply looking good.
- HelloMcFly 14y ago
  > Motivation. Most people know what they need to do in order to lose weight. Maybe. But I think the issue is some people, based on bad advice, focus their motivation on eating right and exercise. Many times that split focus leads people to over-emphasize the exercise part, and that often comes at the expense of the food part. They'll probably see some progress on their goals, but they may be slow and not nearly as rewarding as they expected. That can be a huge de-motivator. Also, as you said, the article didn't say cardio wasn't important, just that it's not necessary (or the best strategy) for weight loss. If you're going to point someone towards a healthy diet or a jogging regimen, the healthy diet is often the way to go.
EternalFury 14y ago
People always end up believing what they want to believe, even if it's illogical or totally insane. But, no one has ever put on weight on a calorie deficit. NEVER. This being said, you can get overweight or even obese if you eat too much, be it green beans or lard. Similarly, you can lose weight eating "bad" foods, if you maintain a calorie deficit. Obviously, for long term results, it's best to eat good food, exercise regularly and do both with moderation. That is it. This is all there is to know on that topic. PS: Anyone above 500 pounds can lose 100 pounds fairly quickly. Using such an achievement to prove that this or that miracle diet is best...is disingenuous.
- Jimmie 14y ago
  >But, no one has ever put on weight on a calorie deficit. NEVER. I want to be a pedant and correct that to "body fat" instead of "weight". A change in diet can stress the body into retaining extra water weight, causing a temporary increase in weight.
  - EternalFury 14y ago
    There are definitely temporary adaptations and self-preserving mechanisms that slow down the process, but the laws of thermodynamics still hold. Also, the calorie deficit does not even need to be large. 100-200 calories a day will already make a bit change in the long run. Part of the problem is that people want results fast. Again, faster than even the laws of thermodynamics would permit.
- glenra 14y ago
  > But, no one has ever put on weight on a calorie deficit. NEVER. The vast majority of people who lose a substantial amount of weight through calorie restriction gain it all back and then some within a few years. Though they do lose in the short run (say, 6 months), they're worse off three years later than if they had never dieted at all. This simple fact - that dieting doesn't work in the long run - suggests that telling people to lose weight simply by dieting is BAD ADVICE. Given that doctors are giving people bad advice, there's still plenty of room for people to try to come up with BETTER advice.
creamyhorror 14y ago
What's very inspiring are the body transformations posted by members of forums. Just check out the ridiculous before-and-after shots on the following thread from the SomethingAwful Forums' fitness subforum: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3334499 http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=333... Threads like these are what inspire people to radically change their lifestyle, start lifting weights, and stay motivated. They go on to keep fitness logs to keep themselves publicly accountable, and also join Fitocracy and weight/diet-tracker sites. There're also a lot of helpful resource threads on such forums, informing newbies on diet, exercises, supplements, etc. On the scientific side of things, I've spent the last few weeks reading a range of PubMed(Central) articles and various blogs and forums on fitness and diet. There are many schools of thought, but many are mostly supported by anecdotal evidence and not studies. What I've found most helpful are scientific studies/articles, e.g. - Evidence-based resistance training recommendations http://baye.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/ebrtr-Fisher1.pdf http://baye.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/ebrtr-Fisher1.pdf - ISSN recommendations for supplementation http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2853497/?tool=pubmed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2853497/?tool=pu... - Protein per day for muscle-building: 1.6 g/kg of bodyweight (not the 1+g/lb that many sites tout) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2129150/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2129150/ - Reduce saturated fat intake and replace with polyunsaturated fats, not carbs or monounsaturated fats http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19211817 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19211817 Scientific bloggers are also good to read, if they assess studies critically - people like Bill Shrapnel, DH Kiefer, Bryan Chung, Stephan Guyenet, Alan Aragon. Check their blogs out if you aren't already following them. My current understanding of various controversial topics, based (mostly) on studies: Calories in, calories out - absolute calories matters, but is mediated by the effect of composition of diet. Consuming more protein tends to result in an increased lean-mass-to-fat ratio (whether due to satiety, hormonal effects, or a combination of the two). Carbs/sugars/starches - high glycaemic-index carbs are riskier than saturated fats for heart disease. They are also associated with weight gain. The endless intake of rice in Asian countries (like mine) makes many of us fat and at risk of heart disease. Dietary cholesterol - probably not as bad as previously assumed, but having >6 eggs a week actually increases your risk of heart disease/events. Intermittent fasting - I haven't seen the scientific evidence for this, though a friend assures me it's out there. All I see is Berkhan's leangains.com and I'm not sure I'm convinced. I searched PubMed for a bit but didn't come across anything. Diet vs exercise for weight loss - diet is the key to weight loss. Neither cardio (whether HIIT or low-intensity) nor resistance training alone is particularly effective at causing weight loss (claims of raised metabolism notwithstanding); you need a calorie deficit as well. Training to muscular failure - training to failure actually provides more efficient strength gains. Genetics and muscle - genes play a major, possibly the largest, role in determining how much muscle mass individuals can gain and how easily they do it. "...it appears that those who are naturally lean and muscular to start with, can gain strength and size to a much greater degree than naturally ‘skinny’ individuals." i.e. ectomorphs won't be exploding with muscle in short order, despite their best efforts.
mmaunder 14y ago
"When it comes to weight loss, creating a caloric deficit is the most important thing that matters; eating less, not moving more, is the most realistic way to do so." What? Please read Gary Taubes "Good Calories, Bad Calories" or "Why we get fat". He is one of the leading thinkers in nutrition and is worshipped by other gurus like Tim Noakes (who wrote the runners bible Lore of Running). Taubes spends the first third of "Why we get fat" rebuking this "first law of thermodynamics" approach to dieting. I'd also argue that nutrition today is evolving from an anecdotal approach to what works e.g. Dr Atkins discovering that if he eats meat-only he gets thin, to a science based approach where we are beginning to understand the profound effect insulin has on fat storage and why dietary fat does not make you fat. Reddit is a great resource for new data, but not a source. It does however have some amazing pointers. Another case in point is the cult of Mark Rippetoe fans on Reddit and the AMA that Rip did on Reddit a while ago which was awesome. [Rippetoe is pretty much God in strength training circles and his book "Starting Strength" is the strength training bible.]
- tomjen3 14y ago
  I have read Christians "refuting" evolution too. I give a guy who doesn't thermodynamics (one does not refute that in a popsci book) the same credit. If he had really discovered something important, he would not be worshipped. He would present evidence to other researchers, who would confirm his experiments, etc.
  - ehsanu1 14y ago
    The first law of thermodynamics only applies to a closed system. The body is not a closed system, and thus conservation of energy does not apply. There is both input and output of energy/mass, and some efficiency of conversion of food/oxygen to useful energy/body mass, as opposed to sweat, urine, stool, hair loss, exfoliation of skin, etc. It was probably that kind of refutal: the first law of thermodynamics is just fine, for a closed system.
  - glenra 14y ago
    Taubes has been presenting evidence to other researchers. But the medical establishment takes a loooooong time to change its collective mind on stuff like this. Here's a relevant video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4362041487661765149 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4362041487661765149 In that video, I think Taubes actually refutes the "law of thermodynamics" approach to losing weight in a single picture, with an existence proof. There exist people who are emaciated in half their body (say, the top half) and obese in the other half (say, the bottom). According to the "law of thermodynamics" approach, such a person should simultaneously "eat less, move more" (to cure their bottom half) and "eat more, move less" (to cure their top). This is clearly impossible advice to follow. These people need some other form of advice. Once we figure out what that advice should be, it's probably going to be of benefit to people who are fat or emaciated over their entire body rather than a selected part. As for your analogy: I'm an atheist, but if any Christian that others saw as "refuting" evolution had as much social proof as Taubes - had huge communities of my peers recommending his work - I'd kind of be inclined to check it out and see what he had to say.
Tichy 14y ago
"Reddit’s voting system provides a reliably transparent soundboard for fitness knowledge." Any studies showing that? I find such online discussions interesting, and certainly sometimes they might reveal better information than just going to your doctors office. But these are just people hanging out online - just because they vote something up doesn't mean it is proven, it just means they like to believe it. In fact, for any theory you can probably find an online community that believes in it and votes up things supporting that belief. The latest studies I read about seem to indicate that low carb and so on are irrelevant, calorie reduction is all that counts. But if you want to believe in low carb, you can probably find lots of anecdotes proving its effectiveness. Possibly because the low carbers accidentally also reduced calorie intake. (Although my own criticism of those studies is that it remains unclear how differing diets allow you to keep calories low. One snickers bar might have enough calories for a day, but it would be difficult to just eat one snickers bar every day, contrary to eat lots of whole grains).
- sixbrx 14y ago
  > because the low carbers accidentally also reduced calorie intake Accidentally is a loaded word there, because if low carb diets tend to make people eat less, then that is an enormous, critical advantage over competing diets.
  - Tichy 14y ago
    Totally agree - as I said, it would be difficult to sustain a low calories diet on chocolate, simply because of the craving it induces.
m0nty 14y ago
Ooooh! Delayed interstitial. Out of there.
zerostar07 14y ago
... and as of now, also by hacker news.
Xodarap 14y ago
It's remarkable to me that hackers are against every form of alternative medicine, except regarding nutrition. If I told you that the American Cancer Society said wearing pendants to protect from electromagnetic radiation was hokum, it would be case closed. But when the ADA says [low carb diets are nonsense](http://www.eatright.org/Public/content.aspx?id=10645#.UCemyUgyC9U http://www.eatright.org/Public/content.aspx?id=10645#.UCemyU...) it's contentious. I wonder why?
- glenra 14y ago
  Hackers are in favor of following methods that are testable and that work. When it comes to fighting obesity, the medical establishment is obviously clueless - they don't have any advice to give that has a track record of long-term success. It's not clear why their advice doesn't work, but it's clear that it doesn't. Which leaves room for alternative theories that at least might work. I also think you're overestimating how much hackers approve of mainstream medicine generally. There is quite a lot of bad science in the medical field generally. If we were legally allowed to build our own medical devices and mix our own drugs and practice medicine ourselves, I suspect a lot of us would be inclined to do that. The government hasn't yet made it illegal to give advice on diet and nutrition, so you see more people giving advice on diet and nutrition than you see people giving advice on, say, dealing with cancer.
  - kanzure 14y ago
    > There is quite a lot of bad science in the medical field generally. If we were legally allowed to build our own medical devices and mix our own drugs and practice medicine ourselves, I suspect a lot of us would be inclined to do that. Well, and if you're not allowed to, some people just do it anyway. http://groups.google.com/group/diybio http://groups.google.com/group/diybio http://diyhpl.us/wiki/diybio/faq http://diyhpl.us/wiki/diybio/faq
snarfy 14y ago
> Here’s a discouraging fact: A 220 lb. man walking up 27 flights of stairs burns the caloric equivalent of half an Oreo I always hate these statements because they are misleading. It is true the amount of energy required to lift 220 lbs 27 flights of stairs is about half an Oreo, but you burn a lot more than that. To put things in perspective, you burn 35 calories smoking a cigarette.
will_work4tears 14y ago
I love reading fitness and health debates. I think this is still an area that is very much still an unknown. There are studies this way and that way, diets range from no meat to mostly meat, and exercise itself is debated, be it which is best or what have you. I don't personally know, and IMO the question is too complex. I don't believe there is a single, unified solution. I personally do High intensity stuff, sprinting and weightlifting, and while I'm fat, it isn't because of my diet. I drink, a lot. And love it. I'm not quite an alcoholic, at least in most people's eyes (Europe for example), but it has some negative effects. It also probably keeps me from ever hitting the 2x BW bench, 2.5 BW squat and 3x BW Deadlift, but what the hell. I try to have a balanced, fun life. I'm healthy, even if I'm at ~20% Body Fat. I truly believe in the Calories in Calories out method, from a physical or mathematical perspective but get that psychology and other factors make this more than a simple "law of thermodynamics" issue. Yes, the law still stands, but if there is no human motivation to a diet/lifestyle change, then it isn't going to work. We need a lifestyle change that works, and I don't think there is a single, master lifestyle that will work for everybody. I for one, have no interest in endurance running. It works when you do have an interest, a passion, or the motivation to make it work, but so does keto - another thing I'm not a huge fan of. I eat plenty of protein, don't get me wrong (~150 g/day) but I don't think "high" protein diets work for everybody (though I do feel everybody should eat 150-160g a day, just a IMO thing). Anyway, on topic, I don't like Reddit's /r/fitnees or even the spawns of it (/r/fitnesscirclejerk etc), as they tend to be filled with acerbic know it alls that are very insulting and not very much fun to interact with.
b3b0p 14y ago
After reading almost every single comment in this story, I have come to 1 conclusion: Geeks on Hacker News should not be giving out diet, nutrition, and fitness advice. (No one should be taking the advice anyway.) Diet, exercise, and nutrition stories on Hacker News always seem to be messy. They do end up being entertaining seeing all the back and forth controversy though some times.

212 points by jc4p 14y ago

As a developer I bristle at the idea that 'if it's not in the curriculum, what can you do?' The doctors are at fault here for not reaearching and advocating for the research needed.

vacri 14y ago
You don't seem to have any idea about how complex medicine is. You wouldn't say the same thing about a specialist in IT ("This DBA doesn't know enough Java!").
- alex_c 14y ago
  For specialists, sure. But for a GP shouldn't it be essential to be knowledgeable and effective about basic fitness and nutrition? My (relatively uninformed) impression is that studies of fitness and nutrition are surprisingly unsophisticated relative to research for curing specific diseases. This is basically the debate of preventive care vs. palliative care (and, I guess, the argument that one allows for much higher profits than the other).
  - jacques_chester 14y ago
    It's not just profit. It's hard to get funding for research into training. Nobody wants to be the public research administrator who put $$$ down for research into the effects of hypertrophy. So the studies that do get done tend to be small. A lot of what is known about sports science relies on meta-studies, because so many training studies are of the form "we took 20 college-aged males and divided them into three groups ..."
  - vacri 14y ago
    Western medicine has historically never been focused on preventative medicine; their role has traditionally been to make you healthy, not keep you healthy. It's not the conspiracy some might suggest, it's just that historically you called a doctor when you were ill, not for lifestyle advice. When it comes to fitness, you still don't - unless you're talking to a sports doctor, you're not going to get a useful training programme tailored for your needs. Regarding GPs in particular - they aren't really about keeping you trim and terrific. They're about dealing with niggling issues while flagging serious ones for referral to specialists. They do know about basic fitness and diet, but they're not specialists in the area - see sports doctors and dieticians. Also consider that diet is a rapidly moving target at the moment - there's a lot of contradictory opinion and new info coming out all the time. It's not a GP's role to stay at the bleeding edge of medicine. That's what specialists do, and as the specialists settle on the right thing, it filters down to the non-specialists. You can of course find GPs who take special interests in certain areas, and may get lucky and find one that loves fitness and diet. Also, 'palliative' doesn't mean 'after injury', it means 'relieve symtoms without attempting a cure', and most doctors would rather cure a problem than use the patient as a cash cow (there's enough work out there, even before you get to the ethical issues). Perhaps a better pair of terms would be preventative/proactive vs reactive care.
    - alex_c 14y ago
      Great comment, and I agree with you on all counts. I believe western medicine should put more emphasis on preventive care and GPs, as most people's first and sometimes only point of contact for health-related matters, should be much more informed and proactive about their patients' fitness and nutrition. Regarding diet being a rapidly moving target, that is exactly my point. It seems to me, as an uninformed layman, incredible how much we've learned about diseases like cancer and yet how relatively little we seem to know about diet, fitness, and the behavioural research related to them. Not because these topics are in any way more simple than understanding a specific disease, but because they affect everybody.

caycep 14y ago

there are 2 different purposes here. the high saturated fat diets - yeah that will drop weight. No one really knows what the long term effect on cardivascular disease (i.e. damage to arteries) will be, since they haven't been practiced for the several decades it takes to find that out.

moistgorilla 14y ago

r/fitness is good for an average person but I would not say it's as good as you make it out to be. Other bodybuilding and fitness websites are much better. Also, most of the advice on r/fitness comes from /fit/.

oacgnol 14y ago
Sure, the depth of the content is not as good as other forums, but a peripheral point I think the article was trying to make was that the accessibility of such resources is what makes it so revolutionary. I'm an avid reader of r/fitness and one of the things that makes it so appealing it me is how much of the advice relates to me, an average guy who spends much of his time on the internet.

Professoroak 14y ago

I firmly believe that for most things, fitness and health included, the internet will always be lightyears ahead of what is published in peer-reviewed journals.　Now, new ideas get thrown on a blog for millions to (potentially) see, the ideas are read and analyzed by a portion of the general population, and then they're either rejected or expanded upon. It's the perfect meritocracy of ideas, and the slow peer review process can't keep up.

jc4p 14y ago
It just blows my mind that there are sections of the internet where smart people can analyze peer-reviewed articles the second they come out and shine a light on them. This is the kind of thing that happens in close-knit communities like /r/Fitness and SomethingAwful a lot.
jmduke 14y ago
> the internet will always be lightyears ahead of what is published in peer-reviewed journals The thing is, its not as if r/fitness or /fit/ invented the low-carb diet or the paleo diet. They just spread it to people who'd otherwise never engage in debate/discourse about nutrition (which is of course commendable.) > It's the perfect meritocracy of ideas, and the slow peer review process can't keep up. I think Reddit and blogs have seen enough false witch hunts and outright lies to know that the internet is very, very rarely a meritocracy. Peer-reviewed processes aren't meant to serve as a proxy for the general population, or to spur rapid progress; in fact, their goal is serve as objective judges of validity and accuracy. This is somewhat akin to when people complain about the difficulty in passing legislation in the U.S. Things like bicameral legislature and checks and balances were instituted specifically to slow down the passage of legislature and allow a more deliberate review process.
- Nicole060 14y ago
  All the things you said are true but remember, not all doctors are up to date with research and even if you can find a lot of false information on the internet, you're more likely to also find the truth than you are with an outdated physician. The general practitioner that has followed me since I was born whenever I was ill or hurt is someone who has nearly stopped reading anything about medicine since he finished his study and got his job. On his own admission he doesn't even use computers much and doesn't read the research you can find on places like pubmed. He's nearing retirement and I'm going to change my physician (in France you have to declare one to prevent people from hopping to one place from the other whenever they're ill and "paranoid" and save costs to our health care) once I get done with the paperwork, since I am very lazy when it comes to anything that has to do with paperwork. Btw I know all this about him because he's rather talkative and love to waste time once he's done with the check up. One thing that enforced my laziness in looking for another one is the fact that it can be good to have a physician who knows all your health history from the start, even if he's somewhat incompetent. When you end up with that kind of "doctor" the internet doesn't look so bad.

orangethirty 14y ago

I've lost a ton of weight (no pun intended) by being an active member of r/loseit. Nothing else. That community helped me achieve my goals. It is just an amazing place.

illuminate 14y ago
"Nothing else." I find this doubtful.
- orangethirty 14y ago
  What is it that you found doubtful? Or did you not understand the message behind the sentence? It meant that I did not use any gimmicks or pills or surgery. I relied (still do) on the community as a tool to achieve my fitness goals. Of course, I still run about 20 miles per week, and bicycle an equal amount. I control what I eat by counting calories and I also calculate how much to eat in order to keep a deficit of 3500 calories per month (one pound of fat per month basically).
  - illuminate 14y ago
    You made the statement as if to bolster the subreddit as "revolutionary". It's effective, but there's nothing medically or socially revolutionary about fitness support groups. You followed healthy patterns and share your successes with others.
    - orangethirty 14y ago
      You don't get it. :) Where reason is king all the flowers are black and white. Good luck.

david_shaw 14y ago

Disclaimer: this post is going to go into some of my personal experiences with weight loss, fitness, and reddit. In March 2012, not all that long ago, I was considered obese. Living a life primarily behind the computer screen while leading an engineering team at a rapidly growing startup (over 100% growth in the last year alone) left little time for me to consider my fitness. I'd eat trash -- burritos four or five times a week, pizza or fast food the rest. I never cooked, because I "didn't have time." I didn't work out for the same half-assed reason. I realized in early April that I weighed more than I ever had before, that I was not satisfied in my appearance, and that I was very likely introducing unwanted health issues. Like many other things in my life (coding, managing, infosec, etc.) I took the "dive deep" approach into health and fitness. I experimented with several diet and fitness plans, until finally finding one that seemed sustainable for me. I'm not trying to start a flame war about diets -- I've seen far too many of them in the last few months -- but a very low-carbohydrate, ketogenic diet (called "keto") works extremely well for me. I found a reddit community (surprise!) called /r/keto that shares recipes, support, and tips with each other. Especially in the beginning of my diet, it was an invaluable resource. I started my keto diet on April 18th, at about 255 lbs. Today I weigh 189. I'm still not where I want to be (yet), but I can personally attest to the extremely kind and supportive atmosphere that reddit provides when working towards a goal like this. We rejoice in each others' victories and help each other through the harder times. That said, there are downsides, too. I already mentioned the diet/exercise flame wars that go on -- for example, Low-Carb/High-Fat (LCHF) diets vs. High-Protein/Low Fat vs. Low-Fat Generalized, etc. I think that each of these diets can work (science supports that), but different people need to figure out what works for them. The problem with these subreddits -- /r/fitness included -- is that they develop a hive-mind towards their respective goal. /r/fitness almost makes a joke of it ("join a gym, quit facebook, get girls"), and "starting strength" is recommended all the time, in response to pretty much everything. Not that these are bad recommendations at all, just something that I see a lot. The communities are very welcoming, but when an individual strays from the hive mind, they can also be very discouraging. Hope this lends a little insight and personality to the article!

neutronicus 14y ago
I have a pet hypothesis that one of (for instance) Keto's main benefits is that it shakes up habitual eating patterns. Instead of trying to eat less of foods you're used to eating a lot of, you're forced to develop new habits around entirely new food. I've also gone from 250-ish down to 170-ish (although over the course of 2 years, not 4 months, lol), but I haven't really bought into any specific diet. I just don't eat out.

_delirium 14y ago

What's missing in this article is mention of actual scientific evidence. I can believe that traditional nutritional recommendations are on flimsy ground, but replacing them with new cargo-cult ideas isn't necessarily better. Do these newer recommendations have good science behind them? My lurker experiences in /r/fitness are quite mixed; they seem like nice people, but the specific diet plans are very heavy on anecdotal evidence, with people professing very high confidence in recommendations relative to how much evidence there is (if anything, it reminds me of alternative-medicine communities). They're also a bit too focused for my interests on bodybuilding/image/etc. rather than measurable health outcomes, e.g. reduction in heart-attack or diabetes risk rather than muscle definition.

dicktalens 14y ago
Far from alternative medicine. The beliefs touted by /r/fitness, such as intermittent fasting, increased protein consumption (many times more than the FDA recommendation), progressive load resistance training, and NOT focusing on cardio for weight loss are highly researched. The leaders of the /r/fitness community are incredibly well-versed in science and there are extremely intelligent debates that take place on /r/ fitness. The problem is that these concepts rarely make it to the mainstream on their own. There's lot of links to the research, but this wasn't the appropriate article to include them. :)
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
neutronicus 14y ago
I'm actually thankful for the focus on near-term goals rather than living to 75 instead of 70.
- _delirium 14y ago
  I don't mind that people are interested in bodybuilding/fitness, but if it's positioned as a replacement for traditional nutritional science, that's not the main goal of nutritional science. And personally it's not my interest: I don't really care about bodybuilding/fitness, but I do care about minimizing my risk of serious health problems. It's not clear to me that the two goals even result in the same recommendations; it's quite possible that there are diets that are good for short/medium-term muscle building which are not good for, say, long-term organ health. At least, I would want to see scientific evidence one way or another.

zone411 14y ago

I'm sorry but the content on Reddit is very shallow compared to popular fitness and nutrition forums that have been existing and going strong for many years. There is nothing in this poor article that shows Reddit to be superior in any way. It is very questionable that Reddit's weak voting system improves the quality in any way (and reputation and other voting systems are available on many forums anyway).

kyro 14y ago
The average person and the population in general doesn't need advice any deeper than the "shallow" content found on Reddit in order to live a healthy lifestyle, and because the information is often so easy to swallow, it makes new members feel infinitely more comfortable. Sally next door doesn't need to know about carb-loading and iso-whey protein shakes. Forums all about that stuff are incredibly intimidating and geared towards individuals who typically want to go above and beyond what is considered a normal healthy state. Reddit offers easily digestible information with support from a huge community. I'd argue that's all you really need to fight obesity.
manaskarekar 14y ago
It's not just the content alone that makes the difference. A few things: - It's the community that makes you feel like a part of something. Compared to popular fitness boards, you don't go to reddit only when you're in the 'trying to lose weight actively' mode. You just go to reddit and then these posts show up in your stream keeping you actively engaged. YMMV of course. - It serves as a gentle break-in to more detailed/technical information. Most of the advice there is usually watered down from some technical sources, which people/FAQs eventually link to in case someone needs more information. The third and perhaps the most important point would be, - people see 'regular joes' like you and me losing xxx pounds and know by their posting history that they're not a made up figment of the advertisers imagination. This works on two levels, not only does it give confidence to the average guy, it also ensures that he's not being fed some bullshit theory in lieu of money. The major fact that people get amazing results without throwing money at the techniques seems to lower the barrier to 'hmm maybe I should try this.' I'm a big time fan of keto and have had great results and I have but r/keto to thank for this.

rickdale 14y ago

This is the first time I have seen the reddit fitness stuff. I was big at the beginning of the year. Wasn't even thinking of a diet. Then I read a comment here on hn posted by Aramgutang, on the best books of 2011 thread, where they recommended reading the four hour body. The community behind the four hour body was a huge motivator for me to lose 40 lbs and really it does change the way you think about things. I think reddit offers a similar backing to your diet. You need support, sometimes it seems pointless, but when you are feeling good, you will never feel better. Everywhere you look is temptation to sabotage, a strong community behind you really helps. I always wanted to thank Aramgutang so thank you. PS Get a kettlebell.

Aramgutang 14y ago
You're very welcome. Inspiring someone to become more healthy is probably the most rewarding inspiration there is.
- rickdale 14y ago
  Well, once again thank you. It's crazy how some tiny comment on the internet can really change some random persons life. When I started to read 4HB, I was like whoa, that comment on HN was/is my hirjaku moment. It was the door to the other side. So once again thank you so much. I looked up your email at one point to send a gratis note, but couldnt find anything. Glad you spotted out my comment. Not sure how you found it :)

kmfrk 14y ago

I think the main appeal of communities like this is that there is a central place to cheer on people who are trying to get into improving their health. You see something similar going on at Pinterest, which, for all its scientifically debunked advice, tries to encourage and inspire people to work out. It doesn't matter how good your workout and diet regimen looks on paper, if you have to multiply that result with an enthusiasm of zero.

petercooper 14y ago
I was thinking this. That is, even if a lot of the advice is bunk, as long as it's not harmful, anything that gets people actually thinking "Yeah, I can do this!" and giving it a go has to be valuable. For example, if my prime goal in life were to get as many people coding as possible, I'd rather have an eager but bad VBScript developer I could train up than someone who doesn't really care about programming either way. Ditto for fitness, perhaps.
- kmfrk 14y ago
  Since fitness people usually start from a very, very bad level of exercise and dieting, you'd have to do some seriously stupid stuff for the net effect of your regimen not to be a big improvement regardless. Compared to programming or anything else, it's not that important to use the perfect way to improve most of the time. Especially when all the research happens at the cost of actually doing what you set out to. So what if you can't burn fat from targeted areas on your body, when your overall weight decreases and will eventually shed that tummy fat you've been bothered by. This is one of the reasons I like Hacker News as a community a lot. I think it sometimes makes starting a company sound way too easy (and buzzwordy), but there are a lot of people here who would never have started their companies, if they hadn't found a community here to cheer them on.

xiaoma 14y ago

From reading the article I get the impression that the author isn't that familiar with the scientific literature at all. The evidence he presents against the usefulness of cardio for weight loss compares a group of weightlifters against a group of runners who ran only 20km per week and they still lost marginally more weight than the weightlifters! Cardio really should be a minimum of an hour per day, at least 5 days a week if weight control is the goal. Health benefits accrue much sooner, though. Science certainly hasn't weighed in on favor of high protein diets or abandoning cardio unless you cherry pick specific smaller studies to get what you're looking for. On the other hand there are HUGE studies supporting cardio, both for weight loss and for health. I've written about this many times before on HN: According to the 32,000 person study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (1999), "fit persons with any combination of smoking, elevated blood pressure, or elevated cholesterol level had lower adjusted death rates than low-fit persons with none of these characteristics". The same study found that aerobic fitness had a far more important impact on longevity than obesity did. Fantastic Voyage, Kurzweil and Grossman, Chapter 22. Here's a report on a study that monitored over 100,000 people: Paul Williams, Ph.D., author of the study, found that men who ran two or more marathons per year were 41 percent less likely to suffer from high blood pressure, 32 percent less likely to have high cholesterol, and 87 percent less likely to be diabetic than non-marathoners. Those who ran only one marathon every two to five years also had significantly lower risk for these conditions than non-marathoners. The benefits of running marathons were largely independent of total number of miles run per year by participants, indicating that isolated distance running bouts in preparation for marathons may have been effective in decreasing risk of disease. Even runners who didn't run marathons - those who included longer runs as part of their usual exercise routines - were less likely to have high blood pressure, diabetes, or high cholesterol. http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/140104.php http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/140104.php Here's a different piece on how regular hour-long runs stimulate neurogenesis and memory improvements in middle aged humans: http://www.dana.org/news/brainwork/detail.aspx?id=7374 http://www.dana.org/news/brainwork/detail.aspx?id=7374 Distance running is one of the most beneficial things you can do for yourself. Racing marathons can be reasonably low-risk with sufficient training, but it's the training that gives benefits. In terms of life expectancy, endurance athletes such as marathoners and cross-country skiers live about 2 years longer than sprinters, 4 years longer than power lifters and 6 years longer than the general populace. (warning- small sample sized case study) http://www.mdconsult.com/das/citation/body/163630869-2/jorg=.. http://www.mdconsult.com/das/citation/body/163630869-2/jorg=.... Recommended food for thought for those convinced that low-carb is the optimal diet: Why is it that both Atkins and Taubes got so fat on very low carb diets while Japanese people traditionally ate (and many still do eat) rice at every single mean, lunch, breakfast and dinner? Maybe a bunch of high protein eating redditors don't have all the answers. http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2008/07/15/the-never-ending-diet-wars.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2008/07/15/the-never-e... http://www.paleopharm.com/what-if-gary-taubes-is-a-big-fat-liar/ http://www.paleopharm.com/what-if-gary-taubes-is-a-big-fat-l... http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/16/no-surprise-meat-is-bad-for-you/ http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/16/no-surprise-... My own personal experiences are largely irrelevant, but FWIW the leanest and fittest I ever was, I was getting nearly 80% of my calories from carbs. And the time in my life I gained the most, I was only getting closer to 20% of my calories from carbs. I can respect someone who encourages testing, a la Seth Roberts' "n=1 studies". I can't respect someone who puts up a few blog posts and claims to know more than the entire medical establishment. Americans are more into protein and more into weightlifting than any other nation I've ever seen. And while there are a number of muscled-bound guys strutting around, there are a whole lot more fat people buying into the same pop weight-loss ideologies.

vitno 14y ago

I don't go on reddit much anymore, but the /r/paleo community is almost directly responsible for my 75+ pound weight loss. They easily supplied the basic knowledge & a sense of community.

abalone 14y ago

Not surprising that this is an unscientific article. What evidence is presented that "ignoring the fitness advice of doctors" achieves "better results"? Anecdotal evidence, that's what. 1 dude. The author even cites a "completely unscientific, but accurate chart." That says it all.

davidtanner 14y ago
How strong have you ever known anyone to get by following the advice of doctors?
- Xodarap 14y ago
  Given that every single Olympic athlete is advised by doctors I would say, "pretty damn strong".

dhughes 14y ago

Reddit's /r/fitness is like the 4chan of fitness I stopped reading it due to the bickering and posturing, I'd say a wee bit of roid-rage is leaking through.

jacques_chester 14y ago
This is a lazy, spiteful stereotype.
- dhughes 14y ago
  No, it isn't. Read the posts for a while and you'll see a pattern of certain groups who have an absolute view of what they perceive is right and aren't shy to say it. Maybe the mods are better now but I gave up reading anything there after a few months. Another bad one is r/coffee lots of bickering there too, it must be the caffeine or lack of it.
  - jacques_chester 14y ago
    People with strongly-held opinions share those opinions with others? Shocking. I was referring to your "roid rage" slur, by the way.
    - dhughes 14y ago
      It's not a slur it's pretty obvious going by some comments in r/fitness, but like I said I gave up reading r/fitness.
pessimizer 14y ago
No, 4chan.org/fit/ is the 4chan of fitness.

peterwwillis 14y ago

Obesity and Fitness are not revolutionized by a forum full of people telling you what worked for them. The revolution comes when people find what works for themselves. So far, it's very far away. News flash: Most people don't go on Reddit. gasp Calm down. I'm sorry I frightened you. But it turns out you don't get a revolution by a small number of people who use a particular forum looking for fitness tips from their formely fat peers. In the future, you will be able to go online, fill out a questionnaire, and for a small monthly fee receive one of several pre-programmed diet and exercise programs, complete with local gyms that are part of the program and can help you perform your exercise requirements. A local food store will also be part of the program, with a special aisle of diet food for you to buy from. The solution comes from tailored, marketed, cult-of-the-self products that suck you in for long enough to make a dent. The problem I see with the fitness portion is creating a fitness product without real user engagement. You've seen it before plenty of times: CrossFit. P90X. Tae Bo. Yoga. The Brazilian Butt Lift. They can all pretty much work to get you in better shape, but there's nothing keeping a random person engaged in it enough to continue for long. For someone starting out for the first time, they have to have an enormous amount of motivation to continue once they see how difficult it will be to begin. To my mind, the easiest way to get people stuck on fitness is to Facebook it. Make it addictive and interesting, and make them obsessed with how they are doing. Give them micro stats. Gimmicks and social fluff to turn it into a game. Anything to keep them hooked, to the point where the exercise is just a small component to them. The diet becomes the same, giving lots of interesting variables and an infinite number of simple user-friendly options to continue getting healthy while being obsessed with a new toy. If it's done right, they'll have gone weeks with the program, eating right, and working hard, and suddenly find they've made some noticeable gains. The rest takes care of itself. The revolution comes when people don't really notice that they're being healthy.

nazgulnarsil 14y ago
It's called fitocracy. :)
BrandonM 14y ago
This sounds like a pretty good approach. Why must it be "in the future"? Why don't you work on it yourself? This is Hacker News, after all.

beloch 14y ago

The key obstacle to weight loss is the same as any form of self-improvement: Motivation. Most people know what they need to do in order to lose weight. They just don't do it because its hard to motivate ourselves to do things we're not used to doing. i.e. It's hard to defy our habits. Healthy people don't defy their habits any more than unhealthy people do. They just have healthy habits. So when you're trying to become healthy the goal should not be to "lose 5 pounds this week", but to form healthy habits and break unhealthy ones. This kind of thinking is crucial. You might have enough willpower to defy your habits long enough to achieve your weight-loss goal, but only forming healthy habits will keep the weight from coming right back. This is possibly why doctors aren't terribly useful. They can tell us when we need to lose weight and perhaps even give us a general idea of what we need to do, but they really aren't trained to focus on habits and motivation. Even if they were, everyone responds differently to ideas and we each need to sift through a lot of possible ideas to find ways of changing our habits that are actually compatible with how we live and think. It's a matter of brute-force. A doctor has maybe 10 minutes to set you on the right path, but you can spend hours upon hours reading reddit looking for things that will work for you. One point in the linked article that I absolutely disagree with is that cardio is unimportant. To be fair, he only really said it's unimportant for weight-loss. If all you want is to look pretty then perhaps it's not crucial, but it absolutely is important for being healthy. Above I said that forming healthy habits is a way to side-step the need to constantly motivate ourselves, but the truth is that it also takes effort to change our habits! Having the strongest possible motivation helps, and I've found that being healthy so I can do things like play sports and hike is a better motivator than simply looking good.

HelloMcFly 14y ago
> Motivation. Most people know what they need to do in order to lose weight. Maybe. But I think the issue is some people, based on bad advice, focus their motivation on eating right and exercise. Many times that split focus leads people to over-emphasize the exercise part, and that often comes at the expense of the food part. They'll probably see some progress on their goals, but they may be slow and not nearly as rewarding as they expected. That can be a huge de-motivator. Also, as you said, the article didn't say cardio wasn't important, just that it's not necessary (or the best strategy) for weight loss. If you're going to point someone towards a healthy diet or a jogging regimen, the healthy diet is often the way to go.

EternalFury 14y ago

People always end up believing what they want to believe, even if it's illogical or totally insane. But, no one has ever put on weight on a calorie deficit. NEVER. This being said, you can get overweight or even obese if you eat too much, be it green beans or lard. Similarly, you can lose weight eating "bad" foods, if you maintain a calorie deficit. Obviously, for long term results, it's best to eat good food, exercise regularly and do both with moderation. That is it. This is all there is to know on that topic. PS: Anyone above 500 pounds can lose 100 pounds fairly quickly. Using such an achievement to prove that this or that miracle diet is best...is disingenuous.

Jimmie 14y ago
>But, no one has ever put on weight on a calorie deficit. NEVER. I want to be a pedant and correct that to "body fat" instead of "weight". A change in diet can stress the body into retaining extra water weight, causing a temporary increase in weight.
- EternalFury 14y ago
  There are definitely temporary adaptations and self-preserving mechanisms that slow down the process, but the laws of thermodynamics still hold. Also, the calorie deficit does not even need to be large. 100-200 calories a day will already make a bit change in the long run. Part of the problem is that people want results fast. Again, faster than even the laws of thermodynamics would permit.
glenra 14y ago
> But, no one has ever put on weight on a calorie deficit. NEVER. The vast majority of people who lose a substantial amount of weight through calorie restriction gain it all back and then some within a few years. Though they do lose in the short run (say, 6 months), they're worse off three years later than if they had never dieted at all. This simple fact - that dieting doesn't work in the long run - suggests that telling people to lose weight simply by dieting is BAD ADVICE. Given that doctors are giving people bad advice, there's still plenty of room for people to try to come up with BETTER advice.

creamyhorror 14y ago

What's very inspiring are the body transformations posted by members of forums. Just check out the ridiculous before-and-after shots on the following thread from the SomethingAwful Forums' fitness subforum: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3334499 http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=333... Threads like these are what inspire people to radically change their lifestyle, start lifting weights, and stay motivated. They go on to keep fitness logs to keep themselves publicly accountable, and also join Fitocracy and weight/diet-tracker sites. There're also a lot of helpful resource threads on such forums, informing newbies on diet, exercises, supplements, etc. On the scientific side of things, I've spent the last few weeks reading a range of PubMed(Central) articles and various blogs and forums on fitness and diet. There are many schools of thought, but many are mostly supported by anecdotal evidence and not studies. What I've found most helpful are scientific studies/articles, e.g. - Evidence-based resistance training recommendations http://baye.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/ebrtr-Fisher1.pdf http://baye.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/ebrtr-Fisher1.pdf - ISSN recommendations for supplementation http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2853497/?tool=pubmed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2853497/?tool=pu... - Protein per day for muscle-building: 1.6 g/kg of bodyweight (not the 1+g/lb that many sites tout) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2129150/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2129150/ - Reduce saturated fat intake and replace with polyunsaturated fats, not carbs or monounsaturated fats http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19211817 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19211817 Scientific bloggers are also good to read, if they assess studies critically - people like Bill Shrapnel, DH Kiefer, Bryan Chung, Stephan Guyenet, Alan Aragon. Check their blogs out if you aren't already following them. My current understanding of various controversial topics, based (mostly) on studies: Calories in, calories out - absolute calories matters, but is mediated by the effect of composition of diet. Consuming more protein tends to result in an increased lean-mass-to-fat ratio (whether due to satiety, hormonal effects, or a combination of the two). Carbs/sugars/starches - high glycaemic-index carbs are riskier than saturated fats for heart disease. They are also associated with weight gain. The endless intake of rice in Asian countries (like mine) makes many of us fat and at risk of heart disease. Dietary cholesterol - probably not as bad as previously assumed, but having >6 eggs a week actually increases your risk of heart disease/events. Intermittent fasting - I haven't seen the scientific evidence for this, though a friend assures me it's out there. All I see is Berkhan's leangains.com and I'm not sure I'm convinced. I searched PubMed for a bit but didn't come across anything. Diet vs exercise for weight loss - diet is the key to weight loss. Neither cardio (whether HIIT or low-intensity) nor resistance training alone is particularly effective at causing weight loss (claims of raised metabolism notwithstanding); you need a calorie deficit as well. Training to muscular failure - training to failure actually provides more efficient strength gains. Genetics and muscle - genes play a major, possibly the largest, role in determining how much muscle mass individuals can gain and how easily they do it. "...it appears that those who are naturally lean and muscular to start with, can gain strength and size to a much greater degree than naturally ‘skinny’ individuals." i.e. ectomorphs won't be exploding with muscle in short order, despite their best efforts.

mmaunder 14y ago

"When it comes to weight loss, creating a caloric deficit is the most important thing that matters; eating less, not moving more, is the most realistic way to do so." What? Please read Gary Taubes "Good Calories, Bad Calories" or "Why we get fat". He is one of the leading thinkers in nutrition and is worshipped by other gurus like Tim Noakes (who wrote the runners bible Lore of Running). Taubes spends the first third of "Why we get fat" rebuking this "first law of thermodynamics" approach to dieting. I'd also argue that nutrition today is evolving from an anecdotal approach to what works e.g. Dr Atkins discovering that if he eats meat-only he gets thin, to a science based approach where we are beginning to understand the profound effect insulin has on fat storage and why dietary fat does not make you fat. Reddit is a great resource for new data, but not a source. It does however have some amazing pointers. Another case in point is the cult of Mark Rippetoe fans on Reddit and the AMA that Rip did on Reddit a while ago which was awesome. [Rippetoe is pretty much God in strength training circles and his book "Starting Strength" is the strength training bible.]

tomjen3 14y ago
I have read Christians "refuting" evolution too. I give a guy who doesn't thermodynamics (one does not refute that in a popsci book) the same credit. If he had really discovered something important, he would not be worshipped. He would present evidence to other researchers, who would confirm his experiments, etc.
- ehsanu1 14y ago
  The first law of thermodynamics only applies to a closed system. The body is not a closed system, and thus conservation of energy does not apply. There is both input and output of energy/mass, and some efficiency of conversion of food/oxygen to useful energy/body mass, as opposed to sweat, urine, stool, hair loss, exfoliation of skin, etc. It was probably that kind of refutal: the first law of thermodynamics is just fine, for a closed system.
- glenra 14y ago
  Taubes has been presenting evidence to other researchers. But the medical establishment takes a loooooong time to change its collective mind on stuff like this. Here's a relevant video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4362041487661765149 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4362041487661765149 In that video, I think Taubes actually refutes the "law of thermodynamics" approach to losing weight in a single picture, with an existence proof. There exist people who are emaciated in half their body (say, the top half) and obese in the other half (say, the bottom). According to the "law of thermodynamics" approach, such a person should simultaneously "eat less, move more" (to cure their bottom half) and "eat more, move less" (to cure their top). This is clearly impossible advice to follow. These people need some other form of advice. Once we figure out what that advice should be, it's probably going to be of benefit to people who are fat or emaciated over their entire body rather than a selected part. As for your analogy: I'm an atheist, but if any Christian that others saw as "refuting" evolution had as much social proof as Taubes - had huge communities of my peers recommending his work - I'd kind of be inclined to check it out and see what he had to say.

Tichy 14y ago

"Reddit’s voting system provides a reliably transparent soundboard for fitness knowledge." Any studies showing that? I find such online discussions interesting, and certainly sometimes they might reveal better information than just going to your doctors office. But these are just people hanging out online - just because they vote something up doesn't mean it is proven, it just means they like to believe it. In fact, for any theory you can probably find an online community that believes in it and votes up things supporting that belief. The latest studies I read about seem to indicate that low carb and so on are irrelevant, calorie reduction is all that counts. But if you want to believe in low carb, you can probably find lots of anecdotes proving its effectiveness. Possibly because the low carbers accidentally also reduced calorie intake. (Although my own criticism of those studies is that it remains unclear how differing diets allow you to keep calories low. One snickers bar might have enough calories for a day, but it would be difficult to just eat one snickers bar every day, contrary to eat lots of whole grains).

sixbrx 14y ago
> because the low carbers accidentally also reduced calorie intake Accidentally is a loaded word there, because if low carb diets tend to make people eat less, then that is an enormous, critical advantage over competing diets.
- Tichy 14y ago
  Totally agree - as I said, it would be difficult to sustain a low calories diet on chocolate, simply because of the craving it induces.

m0nty 14y ago

Ooooh! Delayed interstitial. Out of there.

zerostar07 14y ago

... and as of now, also by hacker news.

Xodarap 14y ago

It's remarkable to me that hackers are against every form of alternative medicine, except regarding nutrition. If I told you that the American Cancer Society said wearing pendants to protect from electromagnetic radiation was hokum, it would be case closed. But when the ADA says [low carb diets are nonsense](http://www.eatright.org/Public/content.aspx?id=10645#.UCemyUgyC9U http://www.eatright.org/Public/content.aspx?id=10645#.UCemyU...) it's contentious. I wonder why?

glenra 14y ago
Hackers are in favor of following methods that are testable and that work. When it comes to fighting obesity, the medical establishment is obviously clueless - they don't have any advice to give that has a track record of long-term success. It's not clear why their advice doesn't work, but it's clear that it doesn't. Which leaves room for alternative theories that at least might work. I also think you're overestimating how much hackers approve of mainstream medicine generally. There is quite a lot of bad science in the medical field generally. If we were legally allowed to build our own medical devices and mix our own drugs and practice medicine ourselves, I suspect a lot of us would be inclined to do that. The government hasn't yet made it illegal to give advice on diet and nutrition, so you see more people giving advice on diet and nutrition than you see people giving advice on, say, dealing with cancer.
- kanzure 14y ago
  > There is quite a lot of bad science in the medical field generally. If we were legally allowed to build our own medical devices and mix our own drugs and practice medicine ourselves, I suspect a lot of us would be inclined to do that. Well, and if you're not allowed to, some people just do it anyway. http://groups.google.com/group/diybio http://groups.google.com/group/diybio http://diyhpl.us/wiki/diybio/faq http://diyhpl.us/wiki/diybio/faq

snarfy 14y ago

> Here’s a discouraging fact: A 220 lb. man walking up 27 flights of stairs burns the caloric equivalent of half an Oreo I always hate these statements because they are misleading. It is true the amount of energy required to lift 220 lbs 27 flights of stairs is about half an Oreo, but you burn a lot more than that. To put things in perspective, you burn 35 calories smoking a cigarette.

will_work4tears 14y ago

I love reading fitness and health debates. I think this is still an area that is very much still an unknown. There are studies this way and that way, diets range from no meat to mostly meat, and exercise itself is debated, be it which is best or what have you. I don't personally know, and IMO the question is too complex. I don't believe there is a single, unified solution. I personally do High intensity stuff, sprinting and weightlifting, and while I'm fat, it isn't because of my diet. I drink, a lot. And love it. I'm not quite an alcoholic, at least in most people's eyes (Europe for example), but it has some negative effects. It also probably keeps me from ever hitting the 2x BW bench, 2.5 BW squat and 3x BW Deadlift, but what the hell. I try to have a balanced, fun life. I'm healthy, even if I'm at ~20% Body Fat. I truly believe in the Calories in Calories out method, from a physical or mathematical perspective but get that psychology and other factors make this more than a simple "law of thermodynamics" issue. Yes, the law still stands, but if there is no human motivation to a diet/lifestyle change, then it isn't going to work. We need a lifestyle change that works, and I don't think there is a single, master lifestyle that will work for everybody. I for one, have no interest in endurance running. It works when you do have an interest, a passion, or the motivation to make it work, but so does keto - another thing I'm not a huge fan of. I eat plenty of protein, don't get me wrong (~150 g/day) but I don't think "high" protein diets work for everybody (though I do feel everybody should eat 150-160g a day, just a IMO thing). Anyway, on topic, I don't like Reddit's /r/fitnees or even the spawns of it (/r/fitnesscirclejerk etc), as they tend to be filled with acerbic know it alls that are very insulting and not very much fun to interact with.

b3b0p 14y ago

After reading almost every single comment in this story, I have come to 1 conclusion: Geeks on Hacker News should not be giving out diet, nutrition, and fitness advice. (No one should be taking the advice anyway.) Diet, exercise, and nutrition stories on Hacker News always seem to be messy. They do end up being entertaining seeing all the back and forth controversy though some times.