Yeah, that kind of advice is not going to fill any procedural knowledge gaps, sorry.
Previously I’ve tried “exercise” with fitness machines, aerobic and resistance both, an hour apiece on both, and it doesn’t seem to do anything at all. I currently walk a couple of hours every other day. I have no idea whether this does anything (besides exhausting me so much I don’t get any work done for the rest of the day, of course). I once read that 40% of the population is “immune to exercise” and I suspect I’m one of the 0.40.
If I have enough money at some point I’ll try hiring a fitness trainer, and then getting a larger apartment with an extra bedroom for exercise equipment (and maybe get Lasik so I don’t have to wear glasses and use a TV and Dance Dance Revolution) but such expenses are beyond the reach of my current financial balance.
EDIT: Wow, lots of advice here from metabolically privileged folks who don’t comprehend the nothing fucking works phenomenon that obtains if you’re not metabolically privileged.
I once read that 40% of the population is “immune to exercise” and I suspect I’m one of the 0.40.
I’ve been a competitive distance runner for a decade. In that time I’ve watched maybe 100 people join track or cross country teams, and every one who stays on the team more than a month has shown clear improvement, at least at first.
I’ve also known many recreational runners, and there’s a big difference between a median runner on a cross country team and a median recreational runner of the same age and gender. In fact, of the fifty or so recreational runners I’ve talked to in some depth, and thousands I’ve seen at races, I have never met someone who trained themselves independently from the beginning and could beat me at 1500 meters. Meanwhile, I’ve known scores of people who could beat me at that distance, but they all ran on teams or had run on teams in the past.
In my experience, the slowest guys who joined the team and practiced every day would run a mile in about 5:30 after a year, with a median around 5:00, and 4:40 if they kept at it for a few years. For women it was about 7:00 at slowest, median 6:00 and around 5:30 for women who trained for some time. (Talented men and women run much faster; the times I cited are typical for moderately-athletic people. I ran 4:21 and never won anything big.)
Meanwhile, recreational runners I know tell me their bests are about 6:30 median for men and 8:00 for women. I haven’t collected solid data, but the divide is so sharp I’m convinced by personal experience that being on a track or cross country team makes you much faster. This in turn implies that everyone, or almost everyone, is trainable for distance running.
My experience applies mostly to men and women age 15 − 25, so I’m not sure if the same holds for older people. There is also the possibility that only fast people, or only trainable people, would stick around on the teams, but the teams I’ve been on made no cuts and were never top contenders, so the pressure was low. We sometimes had people come in forty pounds overweight and not able to run a mile, and still stick around for the entire season of training. They all improved to the point where they could run nonstop for an hour and run pretty fast for five minutes straight.
The practical advice is that hiring an athletic trainer or joining a team may lead to a significant improvement if you’re having trouble doing it on your own. This specifically applies to running. I don’t know about lifting weights, exercise machines, yoga, walking, etc.
In that time I’ve watched maybe 100 people join track or cross country teams, and every one who stays on the team more than a month has shown clear improvement, at least at first.
Are you suggesting that people join track teams because they have the capacity to improve at running? Maybe a third of those people had no prior experience with running and could not have known whether they would improve.
Or are you suggesting that people who don’t improve quit in less than a month? I can’t really answer that, except that it seems unlikely that all the people with no inborn ability to improve are also the people who will give up on something in less than a month.
The way it works in normal people seems to be that exercising regularly feels really awful at first, but after the first few times it doesn’t feel that bad (indeed, it starts releasing endorphins) and the person starts getting in shape.
Let’s imagine that it works like that for one segment of the population, but for another segment it never stops feeling awful and doesn’t have the same fitness effects. You’d see the exact same effect you note.
Obviously, what you say is evidence that regular running can make anyone more fit as long as they persist– but it’s not necessarily strong evidence.
Let’s imagine that it works like that for one segment of the population, but for another segment it never stops feeling awful and doesn’t have the same fitness effects.
I’m in a segment where it does have fitness effects, but never stops feeling awful. I was in the Army, and it was possible for me to meet the physical fitness standards, but even exercising strenuously every day during eight weeks of Basic Training never produced the exercise high that people speak of.
Are you sure you considered the selection effect (those likely to join a team have what unusual properties?) as well as further selection after joining from dropouts?
However, I can’t argue against your 6:30 recreational median. I trained for a half marathon for a few months and indeed got stuck at around a 6:10 mile (at 185lb).
No, I’m not sure how strong the selection effects are. In fact it’s seems certain that some selection effects exist, and I don’t know how to estimate them. But the signal is so strong that I didn’t think selection effects could explain all of it. It might be an interesting question to investigate. Presumably there are studies done on making out-of-shape people exercise. Military recruiting and training could also provide a lot of data.
I have less experience, but this matches what I saw and experienced in cross country exactly.
My starting point: couldn’t run a quarter mile. After a few years: 6:30 mile, didn’t have much trouble with a 12 mile run.
I basically would be extremely surprised if a serious exercise program didn’t improve performance. The only caveat is if we’re talking about someone who can’t run, due to bad knees or something. I’ve known people like that and I don’t know how to get around it safely.
I once read that 40% of the population is “immune to exercise”
If you mean, 40% of people don’t lose weight by exercising, that’s probably correct. The OP said “basic level of fitness”, though, which does not necessarily mean weight loss.
I currently walk a couple of hours every other day. I have no idea whether this does anything (besides exhausting me so much I don’t get any work done for the rest of the day, of course).
There is a fair amount of study (for citations see “Body By Science”) that longer exercise does not result in greater health gains, and that it is rather the intensity of exercise that makes the difference.
In my own personal experience, long walks are pleasant, but I felt a greater increase in energy levels from using one of Sears’s 10-minute PACE workouts (1 minute walking, 1 minute all-out running, repeat 5 times, then cool down). A few days of this and my general energy levels throughout the day went up. (I would guess the OP’s suggestion of hill sprints is based on the same principle of alternating high intensity and low intensity activity for a short period.)
There are quite a few ways in which conventional or popular wisdom about exercise is wrong; the idea that more exercise is better is one of them. (The idea that exercise will help or cause you to lose weight is another.)
This is confusing. It seems like somehting a good rationalist should not have any problem with. And you’re supposedly the greatest rationalist around. Are you sure you’ve actually applied your rationality skills and done stuff like sat down for 5 minutes (each) and thought about questions like “What exactly am I trying to accomplish with exercise, and is there any other way to accomplish it”, “How can I find out what kinds of exercise will give results” , “can I replicate what a fitness trainer does myself, find the information online, or find someone willing to act as one for free?”, etc.
There are probably a decent number of people with medical knowledge here, who knows these things. Heck, if a few things (like living on the wrong continent) were different I could’ve just given you my athlete sisters number.
Edit: Also, why is everyone talking about expensive equipment? I’m pretty sure you only need equipment for advanced training if you want to compete or because it’s easier/more comfortable, general fitness and health I can see no reason to do anything other than running and stretching and push-ups and such. I’m also pretty sure you can use normal stuff lieing around even for the things you need props for. I’m no expert thou.
… goodness I can’t believe I just typed this. -_- Feels like heresy telling Eliezer what to do, especially in an area I consider myself to know nothing about. I’m fully prepared for this to be down-voted to oblivion.
I had the same confusion, and interpreted it as: he’s just exceptionally un-athletic by nature—that there’s no rationality failure. Perhaps he has a little less willingness to overcome all obstacles than I’d expect, but then again, living slightly longer (debatable) or looking trim aren’t as important a prize as saving the world.
Yea, that’s one possibility, but my prior for it is pretty low. There does seem to be some evidence in that direction, but my meta uncertainty is to great to really say in which direction I’m leaning.
I am hoping it was advice specifically given for wait loss, emphasising that just adding light exercise will not see large results in many cases. As an independent observation it would be terrible.
Yes, but that shows that Eliezer probably misremembered what the 40% referred to. In that study, “40%” refers not to how many didn’t benefit, but rather to the maximal benefit on a particular measure of fitness received by any of the participants:
For example, the team found that training improved maximum oxygen consumption, a measure of a person’s ability to perform work, by 17% on average. But the most trainable volunteers gained over 40%, and the least trainable showed no improvement at all. Similar patterns were seen with cardiac output, blood pressure, heart rate and other markers of fitness.
Alternately, he might’ve been rounding the subsequent statistic:
Bouchard reported that the impact of training on insulin sensitivity – a marker of risk for diabetes and heart disease – also varied. It improved in 58% of the volunteers following exercise, but in 42% it showed no improvement or, in a few cases, may have got worse.
So, how many is many? What fraction of the subjects were resistant on the various metrics? Unfortunately, the NS article doesn’t give exactly what we want to know, so we need to find the original scientific papers to figure it out ourselves, but the NS article doesn’t give citations either, forcing us to fact-check it the hard way (a long time in Google Scholar punching in names and keywords).
Tracking down sources for this article is quite difficult. Bouchard quickly pulls up a bunch of papers all revolving around similar data from what is called the HERITAGE Family Study, which has apparently been running since 1995 (the abstract to “The HERITAGE family study: Aims, design, and measurement protocol”, 1995, describes it as in-progress) and there are a lot of papers on various minutia of it. So we need to search with ‘HERITAGE’.
VO2_max: “The average increase reached 384 mL O 2 with an SD of 202 mL O 2”; citing:
BOUCHARD , C., P. A N , T. RICE , et al. Familial aggregation of VO2max response to exercise training: results from the HERITAGE Family Study. J. Appl. Physiol. 87:1003–1008, 1999.
heart-rate during exercise, “heart rate during submaximal exercise at 50 W” ; “A mean decrease of 11 beats·min −1 was observed
among the 727 subjects with complete data. However, the
SD reached 10 beats.”
original to this review, it seems
blood lipids, HDL-C: “They found that when the distribution of the
percent changes in HDL-C was broken down into quartiles,
the first quartile actually experienced a decrease in HDL-C of
9.3%, whereas the fourth quartile registered a mean increase of
18%.” Cited to:
LEON , A. S., T. RICE , S. MANDEL , et al. Blood lipid response to 20 weeks of supervised exercise in a large biracial population: the HERITAGE Family Study. Metabolism 49:513–520, 2000.
blood pressure, “systolic blood pressure during
exercise in relative steady state at 50 W”; “Among these subjects, the mean decrease in SBP during cycling at 50 W was 8.2 mm Hg (SD
11.8)”
original to this review
So that covers 4 of the markers mentioned in the NS link. In those 4 cases, going by the graphs (the data is highly non-normal so you can’t just estimate from the mean/SD), I’d guesstimate that 5-20% of each show <=0 benefit from the 20-weeks of endurance exercise.
(The papers don’t seem to include any correlation matrixes, but this is definitely a problem which calls out for dimensionality reduction: presumably resistance on all 4 measurements correlates and you could extract a ‘exercise resistance factor’ which would be more informative than looking at things piecemeal. Since correlations between the 4 measurements are not given, it’s possible that they are independent and so only ~0.2^4 or <1% of the subjects were exercise-resistant on all 4 measures, but that would surprise me: it would be strange if one’s insulin improved but not VO2_max or cholesterol. I don’t have any guesses on how large this ‘exercise-resistant factor’ might be, though.)
Not all of these are as important as one another and weight does not seem to be included judging by Bouchard’s silence on individual differences w/r/t that. He does cite some interesting studies on resistance of body weight to change like two twin studies.
So going by the HERITAGE data described in that NS link, exercise resistance is a thing in maybe a fifth of the population but mostly on invisible things. 40%, however, is too high, since only 1 of the 5 measured things seemed to go that high, and the specific fractions were not mentioned, so most likely Eliezer was misremembering the other two stats as the more important stat.
I recall originally reading something about a measure of exercise-linked gene expression and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t that New Scientist article, but regardless, it’s plausible that some mismemory occurred and this more detailed search screens off my memory either way. 20% of the population being immune to exercise seems to match real-world experience a bit better than 40% so far as my own eye can see—I eyeball-feel more like a 20% minority than a 40% minority, if that makes sense. I have revised my beliefs to match your statements. Thank you for tracking that down!
I recall originally reading something about a measure of exercise-linked gene expression and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t that New Scientist article
That’s certainly possible. Bouchard and others, after observing that some subjects were exercise-resistant and finding that like everything else it’s heritable, have moved onto gene expression and GWAS hits. Any of those papers could’ve generated some journalism covering the earlier HERITAGE results as background.
20% of the population being immune to exercise seems to match real-world experience a bit better than 40% so far as my own eye can see
Another study suggests it’s more like 7%. Probably hard to get a real estimate: how do you do the aggregation across multiple measured traits? If someone appears to be exercise resistant on visceral fat, but not blood glucose levels, do you count them as a case of exercise resistance? On top of the usual sampling error.
Do you have an opinion concerning whether this is better characterized as “non-response to the benefits of exercise due to pathology” vs. “immunity to the harmful effects of a sedentary lifestyle”?
Basically, is being a non-responder good or bad? Eyeballing that graph it does look like untrained non-responders might be a bit fitter than responders—but of course the first thing we should assume is ceiling effect.
(And of course there’s many 3rd options—orchid/dandelion trade offs and such)
I don’t have a specific link on hand, but I remember the term being “metabolic set point”. The idea is that some low level feedback loop in the old brain sets your weight, and it can easily compensate for exercise. Along with that theory goes the idea that only dietary changes may be effective.
I once read that 40% of the population is “immune to exercise” and I suspect I’m one of the 0.40.
.4 of the population unlikely to have evolved? I can’t take this too seriously I suppose.
Did you try working on strength first? A lot of cardio is claimed to not be very helpful.
Also, consider a coach or a fellow rationalist with some domain knowledge to work with, it’s pretty important to optimize this area (esp. if it puts you out of commission for the rest of the day).
One hack that helped me work throughout the annoyance is reading kindle on a stationary bike. Lost 20 with that trick.
At this point, my Expectancy for positive results from single changes like “just use a trainer at the gym” has hit essentially zero—I’ve tried all sorts of stuff, nothing ever fucking works—so I’m not willing to spend the incremental money. If I have a lot of money to spend, I’ll try throwing a higher level of money at all aspects of the problem—get a trainer on weights, try the latest fad of “short interval bursts” for aerobic exercise, get LASIK and a big TV and a separate room of the apartment to make exercising less unpleasant (no, dears, I don’t get any endorphins whatsoever), buy a wide variety of grass-fed organic meats and take one last shot at the paleo diet again, and… actually I think that’s most of what I’d do. That way I’d be able to scrape up enough hope to make it worth a shot. Trying one item from that list doesn’t seem worth the bother.
I did try Shangri-La again when Seth Roberts contacted me personally and asked me to take another shot. It was just wearing tight, uncomfortable noseplugs while eating all my food and clearing out time at night to make sure I took oil 1 hour away from eating any other food or brushing my teeth, a trivial inconvenience when I’d walk over broken glass to lose weight. I lost 20 pounds and then despite trying out around 10 different things Seth Roberts said to do, my weight slowly started creeping up again, and when after a while I gave up and stopped taking the oil to see what would happen, there was no change in the behavior of my weight—the same slow creep. It’s clear that Shangri-La worked initially but then, contrary to all theory, it just mysteriously stopped working. So far I’ve gained 10 of those 20 pounds back, in accordance with the one truly reliable law of dietary science: 95% of the people who manage to lose weight put it back on shortly thereafter. BTW, exercise didn’t lead me to lose any weight whatsoever, even when combined with an attempt at the paleo diet (albeit not one that spent lots of money, or involved a personal trainer).
So far as I can tell, all the advice here is from metabolically privileged folks who don’t know they’re metabolically privileged and don’t comprehend the nothing fucking works phenomenon that obtains if you’re not metabolically privileged.
If you want to give advice, that’s fine. Don’t tell me how well it’s going to work or how easy it’s going to be; that just tells me you’re clueless.
I replied to your other comment without being sure whether the “nothing works” part was about weight loss or the ability to gain strength and conditioning from exercise.
I have a hard time not following the herd mentality and trying to measure my success with exercise by my size and shape. I can and generally do use another measure of success for exercise than what I weigh. You can measure increased strength either by seeing how much weight you can lift or how many push-ups or pull-ups you can do, or you can measure your increased cardiovascular fitness with your standing pulse rate, or how long you can walk or run without becoming exhausted. (I’m shooting for 45 push-ups in a row by age 45.)
Then it doesn’t actually matter whether you’re metabolically privileged. Or privileged with relation to losing weight anyway, some people would say your metabolism—and mine!--make total sense in a starvation environment. The problem getting the endorphins to let down is a big disadvantage, but you may be able to figure out a duration and intensity of exercise that will release endorphins. (And that would be a good goal to replace weight loss, too.)
I think the main thing is to stop walking over broken glass to get thinner. Where’s the utility in that? Exercise is still going to benefit you, even if you stay at your current weight and grumpy every minute of your walk.
If I were in your situation, I would start to take a technical interest in the biomechanics of fat deposition in male bodies, differential retention of water in body tissues, the genetics of metabolism, the adipocyte cell cycle in visceral fat—as much causal and molecular detail as I could bring myself to assimilate. Just for a few hours, I would proceed as if I was going to tackle the problem by understanding what’s happening from the molecular level up, genuinely identifying exactly where a change needs to occur, and fashioning an appropriate intervention.
The logic of this approach is that we are now in a time when such overkill analysis of all biological processes has become possible, and that you personally are smart and informed enough to be able to perform that analysis, “in principle”. “In principle” means that if you devoted the next several years of your life to nothing but the intensive study of those topics, you would almost assuredly make useful progress. In reality you have other priorities which guarantee that you won’t turn yourself into a research biologist. But just for a while proceed as if you were going to tackle this problem with the thoroughness and dedication you might reserve for problems in FAI theory, and knowing that it might have to be you personally who solves it (on the level of theory, not just the level of practice). You will undoubtedly learn relevant things if you do this, and if you manage to make a persistent hobby of it, your ability to tap into existing research literature and existing networks of expertise will eventually be transformed in an incredibly empowering way.
Also, you live in California. You could try to tap into the diy-bio scene, 23AndMe-style personal genomics, and the whole emerging bio-culture. Again, I’m not suggesting that you become in your own person an adipose-tissue hacker, but proceeding for a while as if you were going to do that will open doors and reveal perspectives that should actually be useful later on.
I have heard pretty good evidence that some people have a very hard time losing weight. I’ve also seen physiological reasons for why that might be.
I have never heard of “resistance to exercise” in the sense that you could exercise and never get stronger or fitter. I just don’t see how that would work, physiologically. Honestly—is this a documented phenomenon?
So far as I can tell, all the advice here is from metabolically privileged folks who don’t know they’re metabolically privileged and don’t comprehend the nothing fucking works phenomenon that obtains if you’re not metabolically privileged.
This is more of an anecdote than advice, but my wife has had some similar issues, i.e. being able to lose weight on occasion in some fashion, but then becoming immune to it and having it creep back on. Recently, she got some software that makes dietary recommendations based on genotype information—a combination of blood type, body proportions, PROP tasting ability, tooth shapes, etc. etc. (It took an hour or two to take all the measurements, tests, and observations required.)
The theory behind the software is that humans are evolved to thrive on different sorts of foods; even if you are going to eat “paleo”, your ancestral geography will make a difference as to which specific fruits, nuts, roots, eggs, and meats you’re going to thrive on. So, the software uses a bunch of known physical genetic markers (like torso length to leg length ratio, index/ring finger ratio, etc.) to identify a dietary genotype grouping.
From these measurements, the software spat out a list of foods to eat, avoid, or eat more of to lose weight… and many of the things to eat to lose weight were pretty obscure, while many of the things to avoid were things she ate a lot of. After cutting out all the things to avoid, her weight has started drifting down instead of up.
It’s still early days yet, in that one would expect this effect per Roberts’ hypothesis. However, one of the interesting things is that the foods the diet recommended just happened to also match things she’d been eating on previous diets when she lost weight… and many of the “avoid” items were things she’d been eating a lot of when struggling to stop gaining.
That is, if you looked at it in terms of “doing the X diet”, “doing the Y diet”, and so on, her results would appear more mixed than if you looked at the detail of, “doing the X diet eating food A” versus “doing the X diet eating food B.” For example, “doing Atkins eating beef and horseradish”, vs. “doing Atkins eating lots of whey protein bars and chicken.” The overall effectiveness of “Atkins” in general vs. the specific effectiveness of “beef and horseradish” are different, in other words, and the software’s recommendations seem to be similar to the more effective variations within specific diets she’s tried.
I haven’t done the full analysis on myself yet, but the preliminary food list from the author’s book seems similarly correlated with my own weight loss attempts.
I will mention more when I know more, but if you’re looking for something that specifically deals with uncommon metabolic challenges, you might find it worthwhile to investigate. Certain genotype classifications are supposed to be more weight-loss resistant than others—for example, my wife’s list has a LOT fewer “eat more of this to lose weight” items than mine does in most food categories, and in some categories she has none at all.
IOW, the author’s theoretical framework includes a basis for metabolic “privilege” and “challenge”, as well as extremely-specific recommendations to accomodate them. (So specific, its recommendations distinguish which species of mushrooms and which, out of dozens of different kinds of cheese you should or shouldn’t eat.)
This system would need to be based off an awful lot of data to be producing such specific prescriptions based on a wide range of minor differences. Data which as far as I know does not exist. It would be an excellent thing to be working towards but right now does not sound credible.
Are you sure about that? Wikipedia’s Nutrigenomics page seems to reference a lot of articles on documented gene-nutrition interactions, incuding the effects of nutrients on genetic expression.
This system would need to be based off an awful lot of data to be producing such specific prescriptions
I don’t think SWAMI actually needs that many pieces of data to make strong recommendations; it claims to be using only 225 of the nutrients or substances found in 800 foods as a basis for its suggestions.
As I understand it, it’s essentially doing something like, “people with this set of genes tend to have these problems; these nutrients tend to help with that kind of problem, these others make it worse—so rate the foods containing those nutrients up or down accordingly...” and then it computes a total score for each food, and uses various cutoff levels to rank the food as “good”, “bad”, or “meh”. ;-)
IOW, it’s not using a massive array of studies on individual foods’ effects, but rather, a scoring system based on known nutrient-genome-health correlations. And statistical prediction rules can easily outperfrom human experts, so it shouldn’t be especially surprising that you could get some pretty good results out of less than “an awful lot of data”.
It would be an excellent thing to be working towards but right now does not sound credible
On my epistemically rational side, I would certainly like to see more references myself. D’Adamo’s book and software describes many kinds of “this does this to that and is related to gene XYZ-123” things that cause my brain to go “[citation needed]”—i.e., I would really like to have a better idea of what his epistemology for all this stuff is, besides, “we studied it in my lab”.
On the other hand, my instrumentally rational side has been happy enough with the results from following the book’s recommendations so far, to be willing to buy the full kit. The interesting question will be whether I can lose more than the typical “20 pounds and then start regaining” that happens when people switch to new diets, and that will take a bit longer to determine.
(OTOH, I’m already about 20 pounds down from my last major dietary change about 8 months ago… so perhaps any further weight loss will be a good sign.)
Why do you believe that? I wouldn’t be surprised if there are nutrition scientist who have a much better model of nutrition that is publicly availabe, which we can’t find or notice because of all the noise in the field.
My knowledge of the field combined with the usual meta-information that I must always use to evaluate such possibilities.
Nothing in the description here gives any of the indications that it is the herald of hidden deep wisdom from the upper echelons of the nutrition sciences that is hidden from the rest of us. It is also too many steps beyond what the more mainstream (or even ‘mainstream contrarian’) scientists present to be at all likely.
This isn’t a nutritional scientist we are talking about here. It’s a naturopathic quack. The same guy who wrote the laughable “Eat Right For Your Blood Type”.
Ok, I just took a look at the sample result set that Eby linked to, and I, like you, am not impressed. This guy is so much a part of the noise, he isn’t even the noise that could be reasonably mistaken for a real expert.
So… here’s the thing. You and wedrifid are doing something that has me concerned.
Specifically, you’re putting me into a position where, for consistency, I feel compelled to argue a case for something that I myself don’t currently have a hugely high degree of confidence in… simply because you’re not actually providing in your arguments, any information which I could either specifically agree or disagree with.
IOW, comments like, “quack”, “laughable”, and “noise” do not give me any information about your epistemology, and therefore light up on my board “[citation needed]” just as much as it did for what I’ve been reading from D’Adamo.
So, it would be nice if you could identify specific concerns instead… who knows, I might agree with them!
OTOH, my consistent experience is that just because somebody has a stupid-sounding theory, doesn’t mean their advice doesn’t actually work. (Likewise, people who have good theories are often lousy at giving usable advice.)
Heck, take Seth Roberts as an example here: the entire idea of drinking oil or sugar water to lose weight is also “laughable”, “noise” and “quack”… and yet it still seems to work for plenty of people.
Heck, there are elements of Roberts’ theory that don’t make sense to me, from a “fewest elements to make the circuit” point of view. (For example, I don’t think “set point” is a real thing; I think it’s more likely an epiphenomenon of something else.)
But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t recommend it… just that I’d avoid recommending it to people who jump to conclusions first and ask questions later. ;-)
Anyway… specifics, please. Otherwise, I’ll simply bow out of this discussion on the assumption that you don’t actually have any new evidence to present.
IOW, a knee-jerk dismissal on grounds of ridiculousness isn’t an independent data point for Bayesian analysis. Citing papers disproving D’Adamo’s hypotheses, on the other hand, would be quite welcome.
(I’ve actually googled around for criticisms of both his blood type and genotype work, and have yet to find a single cite that doesn’t have a more-recent countercite; the vast majority of criticism, however, appears to be of the, “that’s so silly I won’t even bother to argue the idea seriously” variety. Maybe this is evidence that he’s a quack, but at least his responses to the critiques include some citations in his favor.)
A big red flag is that where I expected to see an analysis of what mixture of the various ancestral types a person is, I see a declaration that the person fits into one of 6 little boxes. This despite the fact these types describe multiple features, controlled by different genes, in a sexually reproducing population that represents all types. Now, not all genes are selected for independantly, genes nearby on the same chromosone can be correletated. But a model of which dietary traits correspond to which easily measurable traits should be more complicated than assigning a cluster of dietary traits to a cluster of easily measured traits.
A big red flag is that where I expected to see an analysis of what mixture of the various ancestral types a person is, I see a declaration that the person fits into one of 6 little boxes.
FYI, my wife’s actual profile showed this; more precisely, IIRC it rated her as 44% Explorer, based on the traits given. It did not show what percentages the other 5 boxes broke down to, and I don’t know whether those factors were also taken into account in the analysis. (I also don’t know what precisely the percentage represents; i.e. is it a probability, a “percentage of your traits”...?)
The sample profile I linked appears to date from 2008; so perhaps the percentage report was added to the software later. But in both cases, if I understand correctly, the software simply presents the highest-scoring of the six boxes, rather than saying, “this is you”.
Still, compared to most ways of nutritionally grouping people, six is actually a LOT of boxes.
But a model of which dietary traits correspond to which easily measurable traits should be more complicated than assigning a cluster of dietary traits to a cluster of easily measured traits.
From what I read in his book, he describes the types in terms of basic strategies for responding to the environment, where there are only a few good choices to make. IOW, the stereotypes are supposed to represent stable strategies for responding to infections, shortages, and other stressors. That is, there are not an unlimited number of ways to do things in those areas, so you end up with large clusters.
I have not studied this in any detail, mind you; I confess my primary interest in the book was more to look at the food lists for my type, to compare against my personal dietary history.
As I said, I’m less interested in the plausibility or sensibility of a theory per se, than with the correlation of its advice with the obtaining of results… especially results for myself in particular. (And I remain cautiously optimistic on that front where his advice is concerned.)
FYI, my wife’s actual profile showed this; more precisely, IIRC it rated her as 44% Explorer, based on the traits given. It did not show what percentages the other 5 boxes broke down to, and I don’t know whether those factors were also taken into account in the analysis. (I also don’t know what precisely the percentage represents; i.e. is it a probability, a “percentage of your traits”...?)
Better, but still not good enough. If it is a mixture, what about the other 56%? Which 44% of the explorer traits? If it is a confidence level, the model doesn’t seem to rate itself very highly, so why should I be impressed with it?
From what I read in his book, he describes the types in terms of basic strategies for responding to the environment, where there are only a few good choices to make. IOW, the stereotypes are supposed to represent stable strategies for responding to infections, shortages, and other stressors. That is, there are not an unlimited number of ways to do things in those areas, so you end up with large clusters.
Suppose there are 2 stable strategies that each say how to deal with several specific problems, such that either of the 2 strategies work but a mixture somehow fails. These strategies, being complicated, are coded for by multiple genes. Suppose a man with one strategy and a women with the other strategy mate and have offspring. Those offspring are going to inherit some mixture of the two strategies, even discounting complications such as being heterzygous where the parents are homozygous, and therefore will employ an unfavorable mixture. You can not have multiple non mixable complicated traits in a sexually reproducing population, without tricks like having each member have the complete code for all possible traits, and a varying gene that switches on one of them, which we observe in sexual dimorphism at not much otherwise. Eliezer has written of this.
You can not have multiple non mixable complicated traits in a sexually reproducing population, without tricks like having each member have the complete code for all possible traits, and a varying gene that switches on one of them, which we observe in sexual dimorphism at not much otherwise.
But we do observe epigenetic traits—variations in gene expression based on environmental conditions, such as genes that act differently depending on how much exercise you get, or the level of testosterone in the fetal environment, or various other things.. D’Adamo’s claim here is that his typing groups are a combination of gene inheritance and gene expression, and his notion of “strategies” isn’t really the same as say, having a completely different way of digesting foods.
It’s more like identifying which places to store fat in first—something that (IIUC) we already know is heritable. The fact that fat gets stored isn’t changed, just how much, where, and how quickly. Something like that can make a big difference on a practical level to a person’s life, without being a particularly complex adaptation in itself.
For those who have an interest in the possible benefits of a blood type diet the wikipedia page is, as is often the case, a good place to get the basics. Particularly by following up on the references cited.
I personally am not going to investigate further, the mainstream position seems to be solid:
Nevertheless, the consensus among dieticians, physicians, and scientists is that the theory is unsupported by scientific evidence.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7]
Nevertheless, the consensus among dieticians, physicians, and scientists is that the theory is unsupported by scientific evidence.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7]
AFAICT, not one of those seven references involves a journal citation at all; they are all either “we don’t think this is credible”, or “we need more evidence”. (The seventh is a (valid, IMO) critique of D’Adamo’s epistemology.)
I notice, however, that your quotation from the Wikipedia page is from a less-informative part of the page, than say, this one:
D’Adamo’s Blood Type Diet has met with criticisms for many different reasons,[1][2][3][4][5][6][7] some of which have been addressed publicly by D’Adamo.[9]
And D’Adamo actually provides journal citations backing many of his responses. The strongest argument against him is, “not a lot of clinical evidence”, which is quite a bit different than “shown false”. (And a critique that could be equally levelled at Seth Roberts.)
Except for the (IMO valid) epistemological critique, the seven “against” references rely on either simple dismissal or attempts to refute points that D’Adamo actually has cites in his favor for.
IOW, you’re not providing any new useful information here.
Since there seems to be a persistant effect of people losing weight when they start a diet and then regaining it presumably because their digestive system learns that the food has calories and makes them crave it more, I wonder what would happen if someone changed diets everytime right after the initial weight loss from their previous diet. I have mostly only heard about this effect, so I am not sure what the timescale of each diet should be. Also, I wonder how much long term memory the digestive system has, presumably a suitably large rotation would work. (And have we historically, before advances in agriculture, been forced to do this somewhat by food going in and out of season?)
This software sounds interesting. Can you provide more information on it? Can one use it alone at home or does it require fancier tests that one would involve doctors to handle?
This software sounds interesting. Can you provide more information on it?
It’s called SWAMI Xpress—don’t ask me what the letters stand for. (It’s actually web-based; what you’re buying is a passcode that’s physically shipped to you.)
Edit to add: here’s a sample diet report (PDF) from the software, in case you’re wondering what its output looks like.
Can one use it alone at home or does it require fancier tests that one would involve doctors to handle?
ABO blood type and secreter status are the only tests that have to be sent off for lab work; the rest can be done entirely at home if you have someone to help with the measurements and observations. (For example, the PROP test is a blinded taste test, so it’s easier if somebody else administers it; other tests require inspecting the shape of your teeth, measuring the angle of your jaw, etc., which are very difficult to do by yourself.)
My wife already knew her ABO/secretor results, but she bought the home genotyping kit to get the PROP test strips and fingerprinting kit. There’s enough stuff in the kit to do at least two people—it comes with a lot of taste strips, and a bunch of the stuff (like the jaw-measuring protractor) can be reused for as many people as you like.
The book has some shortcuts you can do for a quicker but lower-accuracy grouping, using a smaller set of measurements; the software is supposed to basically take more factors into account in food selection than what can be done with the six generic charts in the book.
(As I understand it, a person can have markers from more than one group, so a weighted scoring system is used to rate the markers.)
Being immune to whatever exercise you previously tried must have been very frustrating and demotivating. As far as I can tell from brief research, exercise immunity has been demonstrated for cardio exercise, but I haven’t heard of people unable to gain strength. In my experience, even a modest gain in strength is gratifying, and this may propel you the rest of the way to ferocious manraptor.
You mentioned you’ve tried resistance machines, but machines have kind of a bad reputation among seriously strong people. Free weights are widely considered better. Trainer quality varies widely, so you might have come across a bad trainer if you were advised to use machines, and especially if you were advised to try high rep counts (like 12 or more) per set, and very especially if you were advised to focus on isolation exercises targeting one muscle at a time.
Maybe you have a hidden dark mighty side that has yet to surface. You may have read about how different human phenotypes have different proportions of slow-twitch and fast-twitch muscles, making different people suited to be endurance runners or sprinters, or just really strong people. I guess the populations of each are stable over time, since it’s advantageous to specialize in whatever skill your tribe is in short supply of. Presumably there are many genetic differences in addition to the fast-twitch/slow-twitch one that’s fairly well-known. Your body might be suited to something in particular—maybe not an activity that’s recommended to the average person. If strength isn’t it, maybe it’s something unusual. Jousting? Wrestling? Ballet? Yoga? Crossfit? Fencing?
(Or, of course, you could be a mutant, or affected by some virus, or just in possession of an unlucky genetic combination that leaves you not particularly suited for anything physical.)
You might want to talk to Patri Friedman about this in person—he is good on the topic of exercise and strength.
If you don’t mind my asking, why do you feel such a strong compulsion to lose weight? It feels to me like you’re certainly justified in giving up at this point.
If thinking about your weight brings feelings of low status, this seems like a problem worth fixing. It’s certainly much harder for me to think well when I’m feeling low status. But there are other methods for fixing low-status feelings, like having people social proof you, taking drugs, taking acting classes, meditating, giving yourself therapy, etc. (I’d be happy to elaborate on how any of these worked for me.)
I have given up, and it was indeed a great improvement in quality of life when I stopped trying to manage my weight—gave up and ate whatever, stopped going to the gym—and observed that my weight behaved in exactly the same way as before, the same slow upward creep at the same rate.
I don’t know to what degree being overweight would be less painful if there wasn’t a social stigma attached to it, but we don’t actually live in that world.
Some questions from someone who is genuinely curious and has almost zero domain knowledge (I’ve never commented on this topic before, I don’t think):
It seems to me that any social stigma would be based not on being overweight per se, but rather on the visual appearance of being overweight, i.e. being “fat”. However, I don’t find that your visual appearance is outside the normal variation that I expect to see among people in the contemporary United States. (In fact, I never would have guessed that you had an interest in this topic if you hadn’t discussed it here.) So I’m quite curious about what evidence you’ve seen that you’re suffering a social stigma.
Turning back from the social to the medical: given that you seem to naturally tend toward a certain “high” weight (I presume it doesn’t actually increase without bound!) to what extent have you considered the possibility that the medical establishment’s definition of “overweight” is wrong, or doesn’t apply to you?
Do you think you would be experiencing the same phenomenon if you were living in the ancestral environment? Why or why not?
Have you tried eating less (e.g. only one meal per day)? If so, what was the result? If not, what do you predict would happen to your weight?
I’m curious: leaving aside weight and social stigma, have you found that the different levels of diet and exercise you’ve experimented with had any positive or negative effects? (E.g., mood, energy levels, endurance, etc.?)
I don’t know to what degree being overweight would be less painful if there wasn’t a social stigma attached to it, but we don’t actually live in that world.
It’s true. But there are ways of dealing with social stigma’s psychological effects that aren’t removing the source of the stigma or changing society.
As I mentioned above, having people social proof you, taking drugs, taking acting classes, meditating, and giving yourself therapy are all techniques worth experimenting with.
I could probably write a post about how I give myself therapy, but it might be difficult because essentially my self-therapy methods amount to phrases that get triggered in certain situations that remind me that feeling unhappy is not the rational thing to feel. (Example phrases: “I can deal with this level of emotional discomfort.” “I give you my permission not to think about that.” “As an exercise, try to feel [insert emotion here].” “Work with what you have.” “Take a risk.” “If I could choose to do X, I likely would.”) It might be hard for me to extract all of my heuristics, because they get ingrained over time. (E.g. I find myself using “work with what you have” less because as a result of using it, I’ve made progress in ingraining the principle of not feeling demoralized by setbacks.)
Come to think of it, this approach (mostly implemented subconsciously) has been so effective that I’m thinking it might be a good idea to consciously invent phrases to correct other undesirable mental patterns. For example, I’ve noticed that if I hold some radical opinion, my radical opinion tends to get weaker over time—when left unmonitored, my opinions tend to drift towards socially accepted opinions. But maybe if I said “No opinion drift” to myself whenever I noticed that happening, then I’d be reminded that I should only change my opinions based on evidence and arguments and not intuitions that might be corrupted by what’s socially accepted.
Oh yeah, one disadvantage of this self-therapy stuff seems to be a decreased ability to feel strong positive emotions. Basically to a certain extent, I’ve trained myself to stop feeling more or less any strong emotion whenever I start to feel it. So it’s up to you to decide whether you want to be more of a robot or not.
Please write a post on this, if it’s at all possible to discuss how you implant these phrases and how they help. I think it would really help me as well as others.
Whenever you saw a card corresponding to a phrase, you could challenge yourself to come up with a situation in your recent past which you could have used the phrase.
Alternatively, you could describe to me what stigma you tend to experience and I could tell you which phrases to use and how they apply to your situation. If you give me your email address, I can trivially send your future self a few reminders on what you should be keeping in mind (I use http://www.boomeranggmail.com/ for sending delayed emails). And, I’m extending this offer to anyone, not just Blueberry. If people are too embarrassed to discuss the stigma they are harmed by under their Less Wrong usernames, they can create shill usernames or email me with a shill email address at dreamalgebra on google’s email service.
If you don’t mind my asking, why do you feel such a strong compulsion to lose weight?
And why do so many of us have such interest in pushing it?
http://subtractthefat.com/ is written by a guy (this guy) trying to make a simpler and more reliable version of http://www.physicsdiet.com which is based (IIRC) on the founder of Autodesk’s Hacker’s Diet method of tracking weight—daily weigh-ins displayed on a weighted average graph to give a long-term view after smoothing out daily fluctuations, and then over time estimates for calories per day too high or low.
Might be interesting to do that ( without any hope or expectation of any particular outcome ), on the idea of measure what you want to improve and to keep an accurate long term record.
Do you want to lose weight or do you want to be fit? I’ve been frustrated in the past by the fact that my body doesn’t look like the North American female ideal, but I think of the number of hours I put into exercise compared to some of my skinny but sedentary peers, and I’m sure that’s going to make a difference in future health. I think it’s generally accepted that exercise improves health INDEPENDENT of weight. (I should try to cite this but I have a midterm in an hour… If you want, I can do more in-depth research when I have time.)
BTW, exercise didn’t lead me to lose any weight whatsoever, even when combined with an attempt at the paleo diet (albeit not one that spent lots of money, or involved a personal trainer).
I think that’s true for most people. Exercise seems to be better for maintaining a given weight than for losing weight.
I was wondering (just because I can’t remember you mentioning it):
Did you try a few different sports rather than just “abstract exercising”? I tend to hate exercise in general, but I find that I like some things that do incidentally force me to do a lot of it. For example, I very much like volleyball, wall climbing, trekking (over mountains, i.e. abrupt terrain, not horizontally), skiing, and all martial arts I tried, although I hate soccer (too much running) or basketball (running, also I suck at throwing balls through hoops) or even swimming (I hate water in my eyes). I even like chopping wood :-)
When I do sports I like (I do them less than I’d like to because of time, money and difficulty of synchronizing with friends to do it with) it is very effective as exercise, in the sense that I do them until I get positively exhausted, but I don’t hate what I’m doing after sixty seconds as it happens with “just exercise”.
You might want to try some. I’m not saying it will necessarily cause you to loose weight (I’m lucky enough to stay around the weight I like without much effort), but if you find one you like (enough to keep at it) it will make you fitter, and it does have nice effects on personal image (both yours and others’ towards you).
The important thing is to try many things to find out what you like; there may be great difference in how you like even similar things (e.g., I hate snowboarding with passion, although I’d like to like it, but I love skiing). You might want to try them with friends (even doing sports I like, I get bored if I’m alone). Also, don’t try to be good at the sport. I’m far from being very good at any of the things I mentioned I like; I’m much better than someone who never did them before, but I got that way just having fun, not specifically by training.
By the way, I remembered something relevant to LessWrong, I’ll put it here even though not precisely on topic:
There is a very widespread bias in the skying world for long skis: evidence is overwhelming that for recreational skiing shorter skis are much better, but it seems almost everyone ignores it for what appear to be status reasons.
Anecdote: Having seen short skis on slopes, I once asked the guy at the rental shop about them. He dismissed them with “Oh, those are just for fun”—although it was quite obvious that I wasn’t there training for the Winter Olympics.
It so happens that short skis are much more fun than “normal” ones for normal people, but for some reason almost all the advice given is only appropriate for expert use—even when you explicitly say you never skied before and you’re in it just for fun. And I really mean the “much” in that first sentence: it’s the difference between falling constantly for a week and starting to ski from the first minute.
(Larger skis are better for going faster or skiing outside slopes, but that just doesn’t apply to most people.)
Yeah, scary. And scariest is that he said it with a dismissive tone of authority and my brain just accepted it. It took me a couple minutes to notice it and convince myself the “expert” was completely ridiculous (I was almost a complete beginner skier at the time).
By the way, it’s not like short skis are new: I checked afterwards and found that their ease of use has been known for decades. It seems trainers insist on long skis just because they can give more lessons, rental shop guys can charge more for the bigger “better” skis, and I suspect most everyone else doesn’t even try them because they’re think they look like child skis or something.
Yeah, scary. And scariest is that he said it with a dismissive tone of authority and my brain just accepted it. It took me a couple minutes to notice it and convince myself the “expert” was completely ridiculous
Up until this part I thought you were replying to an entirely different comment. Since I was just browsing my inbox I resolved ‘scary’ to the most recent thing I have declared scary here. :P
and I suspect most everyone else doesn’t even try them because they’re think they look like child skis or something.
And they are, well, smaller. Who doesn’t want the biggest tool you can get?
I’m not sure if it’s just me, but while I love skiing ever since I was a kid my instincts have screamed at me: “No! Don’t attach great big levers to each of your feet then convert your gravitational potential energy into kinetic energy. Physics doesn’t approve and your knees aren’t designed for torsion!” Shorts skiis seem like they should be slightly less dangerous.
They seem much less dangerous (besides easier to use), but then again I became a better skier in the mean-time so it’s hard to judge.
It’s not just that shorter lever means lower force on the knees. Being shorter (and lighter) they’re also much easier to maneuver around terrain irregularities, and they don’t pick up speed that fast (I think their lower surface area makes you sink a bit more in the snow).
Off-topic: I’m not sure from your wording: do you have something that notifies you of replies to your comments?
It’s clear that Shangri-La worked initially but then, contrary to all theory, it just mysteriously stopped working.
Frankly, I’m surprised that this “Shangri-La” approach is taken seriously by you and other people here on LW. I do believe that it has worked for many people, but this looks exactly like the sort of problem where placebo should be very effective on average. On the other hand, Roberts’s theories about it don’t even sound like a good just-so story.
It has calorie contents for most foods. (The calorie expenditure estimates for exercise are shady and I wouldn’t trust them.) The data is useful, regardless of what you decide to do with it. I did fitday for a year and I’m not doing it now, because it’s a bit of a hassle, but now I’m calibrated with a sense of how calories feel. (An 1100-calorie day means misery and fatigue; a 1300-calorie day is ok, but sooner or later I’ll want to eat more; 1600 feels normal, 2000 is especially tasty, 2500 is a giant feast day. Before I paid attention to my diet, every day was a giant feast day, and that was the problem.)
This site is a roiling mass of chaos, I should warn you. It is full of idiots. It is full of porn-addicted bros. It is a time-sucking Charybdis. But it is also full of people who are very, very into fitness, and in very, very good shape. Many of them are professional trainers who share a fair amount of usually proprietary advice for free. If you are specific enough about what you are doing, they will tell you what you are doing wrong.
I learned a lot there. Not least, I learned that what looked like minimal progress to me was actually good progress, and evidence that I should keep it up. A public fitness log, with significant click traffic, is really excellent motivation—intermittent feedback really does work. And it’s even better when much of that feedback is knowledgeable advice. And when you have a pseudo-peer group of people who are much better than you, and give you a sense that more is possible.
Like all forums, this one has its own etiquette—basically, post in the beginner’s section if you’re a beginner, give as much concrete data about yourself as possible if you’re asking for advice (diet, exercise program, weight, strength, age, goals), and always RTFM. If you ever get interested in doing this, I’d love it if you’d PM me your username.
The general issue here is that you’re working with some constraints—the structure of your day-to-day life, and your physiology/metabolism. You would need to figure out what part of your current situation is preventing fat loss, and if that factor can be changed. Gathering way more data and getting regular input from knowledgeable people will make that process faster. Worst case scenario, you find out exactly why you can’t lose weight, find out that it’s not something you can change or want to change, and rest easy.
And I did not become overweight again, I just gained a lot of muscle mass since 2008. There are more photos here, see for example that I still had a fat face in 2004.
Since end of 2009 I try to do the same with my education but only now I’m manging to gather momentum. It took me all of 2010 and the last two months to prepare myself.
Those effects look a lot like the ones produced by energy restriction to me.
I didn’t think that I was eating much less these days. Maybe because I stopped drinking alcohol back then? Starting to think about weight and doing exercise probably caused me to change my diet without noticing it. I’m still eating ice cream almost every evening and drink half a liter milk-cacao. Today I’m going to eat two soy cutlets with two eggs sunny side up, onions and fries with mayonnaise. In the morning I eat a pan full of oatmeal with milk and a handful of dried dates. In the evening it is often a pizza or bread with cheese and grapes.
My comment was more about what is causing you to get that exhausted from exercise, with the specific suggestion being to look into moving more efficiently and finding out if muscle tension is limiting your breathing.
Even if you are moving inefficiently, the most you might get from studying efficiency is more ability to enjoy movement. This might or might not be worth the trouble.
However, I think I’m the only commenter who said you might be up against an unusual problem.
Given that Eliezer has expressed this concern a few times already, I’d like to see someone better known than me and/or more involved with SIAI start a wepay fund to get him a personal trainer. I would contribute the first $300 to such a fund, and consider it existential risk reduction, given the cognitive and longevity benefits of physical fitness.
I’ll admit I’m no pjeby, my other-optimizing skills are no better than average. But LW seems to be willing to offer fitness advice, and that’s a huge bikeshedding problem. I’d feel much more comfortable and productive paying a professional to give fitness advice.
If it’s worth anything to you, I’m studying for ACE certification in my off time. I have all the study materials, and anything I can’t answer off the top of my head I can look up in the same reference books a certified professional would have.
Edit: only saw the local context, and interpreted it as a personal request for advice. I wouldn’t presume to tackle Eliezer’s issues from this side of the internet. Nothing Fucking Works cases are rarely truly intractable, but I wouldn’t want to deal with one with armchair diagnostics.
Also, if you can’t afford that you should really talk with me. It’s obviously a high priority.
Basic bodily maintenance—fitness, good eating and so on—is sadly neglected by quite a lot of people who live by their thinking power. But hardware maintenance is important.
My impression is that getting so tired from moderate exercise is way outside the normal range. I have no idea if it might indicate a medical problem, or is just individual variation.It may just be that the cultural belief that exercise is good for everyone is false.
There’s a certain amount of woo woo in it, but there’s also clear explanations of how to get more flexibility and relaxation so that you can get more air, and there’s a warm-up which improved my body awareness to the point that I could realize that a move which was difficult for me was because my shoulders and chest were too tight, rather than because I was an inferior person or because the universe was out to get me. I’d also hypothesized that muscle tension might be the problem, but there’s a huge difference between a hypothesis and actually feeling what was going on when I did the move.
On the other hand, the way tenseness interacts with exercise for me is that exercise tends to feel really bad to me (less so as I become less tense), and then I stop, so t don’t know whether I’d end up with that much exhaustion if I pushed.
Are you exercising to lose weight, gain strength or muscle, or increase endurance? Those three things are very different. Exercising for endurance works for everyone, AFAIK; and exercising to build muscle works for everyone up to some plateau (which is barely perceptible for women, and some men).
But exercise is not always an effective way of losing weight, because your body may make you as hungry as it needs to, to get you to make up the weight you lost during exercise. Losing weight requires being hungry, and it’s not clear that exercising gives an advantage.
For people who have that problem, exercise geared towards building muscle may be a more effective way of losing weight. You’ll get even hungrier than with endurance exercise, and eat more, but your body will probably save less of those calories as fat.
For me, if I do something really interesting all day long, I may forget to eat. But then I’m likely to binge just before bed, which negates the gain.
I haven’t found low-fat food very useful; my impression is that I eat more of it. Artificial sweeteners make me able to resist drinking soda and juice, but some experiments have shown artificial sweeteners increase weight gain in rodents and people; reasons are not known.
The real fat-builders are soda and juice. Both pack a huge, swift bolus of calories. Many people think juice is “healthy” because it’s natural, but it has hella calories. And all sorts of “diet food” and “exercise drinks”, like Gatorade and Slim-Fast, are basically flavored sugar and will make you fat.
Some people think fat calories make them fatter than sugar or carb calories. I doubt it. If anything, I’d guess sugar builds more fat per calorie, because fat needs to go through a lot of catabolic and then anabolic processing before being stored as fat. (Your body doesn’t just suck up fat globules from the lymph and deposit them into cells.) Somebody with a biology degree should know the answer.
You could experiment with when you eat, what you eat, what temperature you keep the thermostat, and other metabolism-related variables. I know one man who gets a great deal of exercise but keeps gaining weight. Perhaps not coincidentally, he keeps the temperature in his room around 80 F.
For what it’s worth, I bounced your situation off my therapist who’s also an RN and a serious martial artist. He says you’re up against something weird and he doesn’t know what it might be.
And off one of my friends who is a lay person but has a lot of medical knowledge. Very tentatively, you might be up against thyroid or adrenal issues.
Theory which is at least cheap and safe to check: you might not be eating enough salt. This can cause low energy. And if this is the case, you might need more salt than most people—one of my friends is semi-metabolically privileged (does trail running for the fun of it, is fairly fat anyway), and if he doesn’t eat a good bit of salt, he falls over.
And off one of my friends who is a lay person but has a lot of medical knowledge. Very tentatively, you might be up against thyroid or adrenal issues.
This isn’t implausible. It also prompts another safe and relatively inexpensive check—get comprehensive blood testing. This is something that most people should do and definitely anyone with any niggling health issues. It is amazing what some people discover, especially when it is issues that are easily resolved!
Pretty sure I’ve had some type of allegedly-comprehensive-but-cheap blood scan done, which didn’t turn up anything interesting. Is there somewhere I go for a more comprehensive blood scan?
Ouch, you’ve really explored your options! I must admit I’ve only really looked at places to get blood tests in Melbourne.
It sounds like you didn’t keep a copy of the scan results. If I you did have the results handy it would have been worth getting the guys at imminst.org to look at it. In the collective they seem to be an effective resource when it comes to identifying atypical yet not life threatening health issues.
What interests me in your case is whether you get the other benefits of exercise, particularly the neurological ones. Not losing weight from exercise is one thing but I wonder whether you still get the boost to neurogenesis and the increased resilience to stress that exercise provides.
An idea would be finding your old scan and getting your blood checked again every 6 months to a year. That way you can see if anything is slowly changing.
From personal experience I know it can take several years of patient vigilance to solve some medical problems.
I’ve read enough accounts from people with thyroid problems to gather that the usual tests don’t catch all of them—I don’t remember a lot of details (will check what I’ve got if anyone wants), but apparently the standard test is for a surrogate measurement which might or might not be relevant. And there’s argument about what the normal range for thyroid hormones are. However, if you’re lucky, Synthroid is effective, safe, and cheap.
More generally, another more comprehensive blood test isn’t a bad idea, but going in with more specific ideas about what you want to find out seems sensible.
Basically, this stuff is complicated enough that 5 minutes thought (and rather more time than that spent on research) is called for.
It gets better. I’ve got quantities of anecdata, but most of it is from women. I hope the situation is better for men, but I’m not counting on it being much better.
A lot of people have to go through several doctors before they find one who listens and thinks. My impression is that about 20% are competent for non-obvious problems.
Being fat and having a problem which affects your energy level are major risk factors for not being heard.
If you decide to go the medical route, there are websites where people rate their doctors.
It gets better. I’ve got quantities of anecdata, but most of it is from women. I hope the situation is better for men, but I’m not counting on it being much better.
My anecdata is skewed towards males and confirms what you are saying. 20% seems about right.
If you’re not in particularly good shape to start with, any pace you can sustain in cardiovascular exercise for a full hour may not be very effective as exercise. You might get better results by starting with shorter time periods, closer to 25-35 minutes, at sufficient intensity to induce fatigue.
Exercising for 45 minutes three times a week—enough to raise your heart rate—is the standard quantity to stay in reasonable general cardiovascular health—whatever your weight or fat level, whatever your walking speed (to some extent). If just walking exhausts you, have you sought medical advice?
Try 45 minutes of walking instead of two hours.
DDR can be done with glasses on, if they won’t fly across the room ;-) I’m afraid “I can’t do DDR without Lasik first” comes across as a mere excuse.
Yeah, that kind of advice is not going to fill any procedural knowledge gaps, sorry.
It is possible you may be generalising from one example here. nazgulnarsil’s post struck me as actually a pretty good start: it doesn’t matter tremendously much what you do as long as you do stuff.
I don’t think it’s easy to give universally-applicable exercise advice. If it were, there wouldn’t be such a huge market for exercise advice! There seem to be changes in how exercise physiologists think about certain exercises every few years. Separate abdominal strengthening exercises, for example, seem to be out of vogue with some trainers. So one piece of procedural knowledge is, you have to read about exercise, it’s not trivially obvious how to do it.
If I were going to try to give someone a universal piece of advice about how to get started, I wouldn’t say, “don’t bother with other things, try pull-ups and tricep dips,” because only a small percentage of new exercisers can even do those exercises. I’d probably say, “try taking a walk.” (But even that isn’t universally helpful, since lots of people have problems with their knees and ankles or hips or back and may need to start with something even lower impact, like swimming or yoga.) So a second piece of procedural knowledge is, everyone’s body is different, so the exercise you pick should reflect what you like and need.
Addressing the problem you pose here: Since walking is a low-impact cardiovascular exercise, why not try it for an hour every day instead of two hours every other day? That will help build endurance and make it less taxing. Or you could start with less and increase a little every day. There’s a third piece of procedural knowledge about exercise: you can increase your capacity if you add on slowly and sneak up on your body, even if your body is being recalcitrant.
I’m not sure what you mean by “immune to exercise.” Are you not experiencing endorphins from your walk? Is your heart rate staying below the target rate? Some good procedures are to walk with a friend and make sure you aren’t going too slow or too fast or bring music if you’re going to walk on a treadmill by yourself.
And if you think you’d enjoy Dance Dance Revolution, I’d say do it in your glasses—you can always wipe your face with a towel when you get sweaty. That’s what I do in the gym. I recognize that no one REALLY needs equipment to be fit, but—if you want to do that, why not? Isn’t fun one of the goals of exercise?
I don’t see a widely informed consensus about how to exercise and I don’t think it’s in the same category as some of the other questions on this thread. It’s not an ordinary skill—there’s a lot of mystique around it.
if you are capable of going for an hour you are doing it wrong. sets of sprinting once a week has better results than jogging an hour a day for many people. same thing with resistance. if you can do more than 10 you are going way too light.
this is why i suggest running up a hill. rather than traditional biking or treadmill aerobics.
If the goal in exercise is to lose weight, have you tried replacing carbohydrates with fat in your diet? Forcing yourself to exercise will serve to work up an appetite and make you hungry, but not to lose weight. There is a correlation between exercising and being thin, but the causality is generally perceived the wrong way around. There is also a correlation between exercising and (temporarily) losing weight, but that is confounded by diet changes which typically involving reducing carbohydrate intake.
Maybe this is a good topic for the group problem-solving post in Discussion? I’d have to know more specifics before I know whether I can be useful at all.
There is online personal training via Skype. That’s a cheaper version of a fitness trainer which you can do from home over video, using little or no exercise equipment. That site charges $45/session for one-on-one training, where you work with a trainer who develops workout routines for you, teaches you exercises, corrects your form, and so forth (like in-person training). They also have small group sessions, and you can try one of those for free. They also have a nutritionist.
I should mention that I know about that site because I know one of the trainers, which means that I have a fair amount of information about the site but it’s pretty one-sided. So I know they have good trainers but I don’t know what it’s actually like to get training online from them or whether there are other sites that do the same thing. I won’t say any more here, since I already sound too much like an advertisement for my taste, but if anyone is considering trying it out and has questions, you can ask me via pm (or comment, if you think there will be general interest).
The problem with “exercise” is that it takes a LOT of exercise to lose weight. To lose 20 lbs I had to do StairMaster an hour five days a week, with strength training in-between. It’s a lot more effective to eat better.
Previously I’ve tried “exercise” with fitness machines, aerobic and resistance both, an hour apiece on both, and it doesn’t seem to do anything at all
This suggests a different procedural knowledge gap: how do you tell when exercise is having an effect? Stepping on a scale doesn’t give much information, since in the ideal case you’re losing fat but replacing it with muscle. Counting weight and reps requires a reproducible routine, which I don’t have, and only works for strength training anyways. I tried measuring endurance as “minutes on a treadmill at 6mph”, but while there was a detectable upward trend it was nearly drowned out by day-to-day variance.
A good quick-and-dirty test uses the humble push-up. Periodically (every two or three days) just do as many push-ups as you can—this will likely involve moderate discomfort on the last few—and track the number you do over time. While there is some day to day variance, I think this is a pretty good rough proxy for general fitness and a few weeks of data would give you decent tracking of the trend, unless you are already in such good shape that marginal improvements are hard to discern.
Maxing out on push-ups every couple of days is good fitness advice, but using them as a proxy for general fitness is problematic: it’s very easy to exchange form for higher repetitions when doing push-ups, especially if you’re not working with a trainer or gym buddy. There’s a built-in incentive to do this if you’re using them to measure your fitness, and it’s easy to do it unconsciously. Falling into this trap gives you a false indication of progress, and also limits the quality of the exercise: you need a full range of motion to engage all the muscle groups involved.
The only way to keep yourself from doing so is to consciously prioritize form: your back should be straight, your body should just brush the floor at the bottom of its motion (chest and groin more or less simultaneously), and you should straighten your arms as far as they’ll go without locking your elbows at the top. End the set once you can no longer do this.
Previously I’ve tried “exercise” with fitness machines, aerobic and resistance both, an hour apiece on both, and it doesn’t seem to do anything at all.
It was only recently that I actually found a type of exercise that does something: doing squats, bench presses, and deadlifts with barbells. By using a lot of weight, you only need to do around 5 sets of 5, and because you’re using free weights, a few exercises work your entire body, unlike a weight machine. By increasing the weight each time you work out and doing a small number of high-weight exercises, you can build muscle quickly. It’s the only exercise routine I’ve ever found that I’ve been able to stick to.
This site gives one example of such a weight lifting program: there are others out there as well.
There is a difference between a specific exercise program not working for you and exercise working for you. About 90% of the people I see at the gym are not working effectively towards their goals.
Losing Weight: First, burning calories is not the same as burning fat. People may burn a lot of calories jogging for an homakes, but because their metabolic rate is high they are burning mostly carbohydrates. This steady state cardio results in depleted glycogen, so your body will just want more food to stock up. Additionally, steady state cardio makes your metabolism work more efficiently, which is the opposite of what you want when you are trying to lose weight. Additionally, this type of cardio breaks down muscle, which makes it even harder to lose weight. (If you don’t really have a muscular base it is more acceptable.)
Alternative: Morning fasted cardio. Wake up, pop a caffeine pill or drink some black coffee (rev up metabolism and increase utilization of fatty acids) and BEFORE EATING just walk 30-60 minutes on an incline treadmill (or around the neighborhood) With a book on tape this is easy and enjoyable. Because you have enough oxygen your body can actually burn fat. And it will not break down muscle tissue like jogging will. (If you are less averse to exercise look into HIIT, but walking every morning is easier so you are more likely to actually do it.)
Diet: I second those hating on carbohydrates. Your body likes carbs. It likes to use them for energy. Don’t let it. Make it use fat. Every time I have made great progress, it is because I made a concrete goal with a concrete time frame. Set a goal to lose x lbs by y date. Not 30 lbs in one year. Try 8 lbs in a month. Commit for that month to some sort of diet, I recommend a ketogenic (almost no carb) diet. By having that time frame it becomes a lot easier not to cheat, and you know exactly what type of progress you should be making.
Gaining weight: for all the string beans out there, there is one secret to gaining weight. Ready for it? Eat. Eat a lot. Eat all the time. I hindered my progress for years by not eating enough, and made my best progress when I was drinking a half gallon of whole milk a day. Also, if I didn’t make this clear, you have to eat.
Lifting: Heavy compound movements should be the cornerstone of any hypertrophy program. Squats, deadlifts, bench press, overhead press, pullups, rows. (Google “squat exrx” to see demonstration and description of exercise.) While I agree with nazgulnarsil that you can obtain a good level of fitness with bodyweight exercises, a lot of movements are difficult to load with your bodyweight, additionally, your bw may be too light or heavy for a movement. Moving iron, barbells and dumbbells, should by your base. Cable machines are acceptable. Machines that force motion along a track are least acceptable. Most people do not go heavy enough when lifting. You should be grimacing through all of your work sets. In general, don’t go above 12 reps, but don’t be afraid to occasionally do singles or triples. (work sets should generally be 4-10 reps.) The 5x5 method mentioned earlier is a fine program, but keep track of what works for you and adjust accordingly. Just use some program and STICK TO IT.
Make sure you consume enough protein, which will be much more than needed for sedentary individuals. You can shoot for 1g of protein per lb of body weight. Now, I mentioned eating a lot earlier. If you are naturally very thin, that is very important. If you are less so, slowly ramp up your calories, and if you start seeing a little pudge growing just scale them back slightly. But if you are gaining no weight, fat or muscle, not eating enough is probably the culprit.
Trainers: Personal training certifications are bullshit, and a lot of trainers are just bad. Luckily, you can look at a trainer and tell how good they are at training themselves. Shoot for someone who has competed in body building or figure competition or powerlifting, depending on your goals, or someone who is obviously in shape. If you see a trainer having their client standing on one foot on a bosu ball swinging a kettlebell, run the other way.
This was very rambling, but exercise is about the one subject I feel qualified to speak on, and the one subject I see so much confusion about. Feel free to message me any questions.
5 sets of 5 was eventually too hard for me (when/because I reached a plateau). Also, I’m significantly stronger than my long-ago-injured lower back can tolerate (for deadlifts and squats). These days I don’t look to get continually stronger and instead just play fun sports and fill in gaps w/ 1 or 2 weekly gym visits.
exercise:
if you just want a basic level of fitness you don’t really need to do anything besides
pullups
dips
run up hills
8 minute abs (search youtube)
don’t spend precious motivational energy on complex stuff. wait until you’ve established the exercise habit to start trying new things.
pullups and dips only require one of these
Yeah, that kind of advice is not going to fill any procedural knowledge gaps, sorry.
Previously I’ve tried “exercise” with fitness machines, aerobic and resistance both, an hour apiece on both, and it doesn’t seem to do anything at all. I currently walk a couple of hours every other day. I have no idea whether this does anything (besides exhausting me so much I don’t get any work done for the rest of the day, of course). I once read that 40% of the population is “immune to exercise” and I suspect I’m one of the 0.40.
If I have enough money at some point I’ll try hiring a fitness trainer, and then getting a larger apartment with an extra bedroom for exercise equipment (and maybe get Lasik so I don’t have to wear glasses and use a TV and Dance Dance Revolution) but such expenses are beyond the reach of my current financial balance.
EDIT: Wow, lots of advice here from metabolically privileged folks who don’t comprehend the nothing fucking works phenomenon that obtains if you’re not metabolically privileged.
I’ve been a competitive distance runner for a decade. In that time I’ve watched maybe 100 people join track or cross country teams, and every one who stays on the team more than a month has shown clear improvement, at least at first.
I’ve also known many recreational runners, and there’s a big difference between a median runner on a cross country team and a median recreational runner of the same age and gender. In fact, of the fifty or so recreational runners I’ve talked to in some depth, and thousands I’ve seen at races, I have never met someone who trained themselves independently from the beginning and could beat me at 1500 meters. Meanwhile, I’ve known scores of people who could beat me at that distance, but they all ran on teams or had run on teams in the past.
In my experience, the slowest guys who joined the team and practiced every day would run a mile in about 5:30 after a year, with a median around 5:00, and 4:40 if they kept at it for a few years. For women it was about 7:00 at slowest, median 6:00 and around 5:30 for women who trained for some time. (Talented men and women run much faster; the times I cited are typical for moderately-athletic people. I ran 4:21 and never won anything big.)
Meanwhile, recreational runners I know tell me their bests are about 6:30 median for men and 8:00 for women. I haven’t collected solid data, but the divide is so sharp I’m convinced by personal experience that being on a track or cross country team makes you much faster. This in turn implies that everyone, or almost everyone, is trainable for distance running.
My experience applies mostly to men and women age 15 − 25, so I’m not sure if the same holds for older people. There is also the possibility that only fast people, or only trainable people, would stick around on the teams, but the teams I’ve been on made no cuts and were never top contenders, so the pressure was low. We sometimes had people come in forty pounds overweight and not able to run a mile, and still stick around for the entire season of training. They all improved to the point where they could run nonstop for an hour and run pretty fast for five minutes straight.
The practical advice is that hiring an athletic trainer or joining a team may lead to a significant improvement if you’re having trouble doing it on your own. This specifically applies to running. I don’t know about lifting weights, exercise machines, yoga, walking, etc.
Okay, but which way does the causality run?
Are you suggesting that people join track teams because they have the capacity to improve at running? Maybe a third of those people had no prior experience with running and could not have known whether they would improve.
Or are you suggesting that people who don’t improve quit in less than a month? I can’t really answer that, except that it seems unlikely that all the people with no inborn ability to improve are also the people who will give up on something in less than a month.
The way it works in normal people seems to be that exercising regularly feels really awful at first, but after the first few times it doesn’t feel that bad (indeed, it starts releasing endorphins) and the person starts getting in shape.
Let’s imagine that it works like that for one segment of the population, but for another segment it never stops feeling awful and doesn’t have the same fitness effects. You’d see the exact same effect you note.
Obviously, what you say is evidence that regular running can make anyone more fit as long as they persist– but it’s not necessarily strong evidence.
I’m in a segment where it does have fitness effects, but never stops feeling awful. I was in the Army, and it was possible for me to meet the physical fitness standards, but even exercising strenuously every day during eight weeks of Basic Training never produced the exercise high that people speak of.
This is addressed in the parent’s next-to-last paragraph (which may have been a late edit, for all that I know).
Are you sure you considered the selection effect (those likely to join a team have what unusual properties?) as well as further selection after joining from dropouts?
However, I can’t argue against your 6:30 recreational median. I trained for a half marathon for a few months and indeed got stuck at around a 6:10 mile (at 185lb).
No, I’m not sure how strong the selection effects are. In fact it’s seems certain that some selection effects exist, and I don’t know how to estimate them. But the signal is so strong that I didn’t think selection effects could explain all of it. It might be an interesting question to investigate. Presumably there are studies done on making out-of-shape people exercise. Military recruiting and training could also provide a lot of data.
I have less experience, but this matches what I saw and experienced in cross country exactly.
My starting point: couldn’t run a quarter mile. After a few years: 6:30 mile, didn’t have much trouble with a 12 mile run.
I basically would be extremely surprised if a serious exercise program didn’t improve performance. The only caveat is if we’re talking about someone who can’t run, due to bad knees or something. I’ve known people like that and I don’t know how to get around it safely.
If you mean, 40% of people don’t lose weight by exercising, that’s probably correct. The OP said “basic level of fitness”, though, which does not necessarily mean weight loss.
There is a fair amount of study (for citations see “Body By Science”) that longer exercise does not result in greater health gains, and that it is rather the intensity of exercise that makes the difference.
In my own personal experience, long walks are pleasant, but I felt a greater increase in energy levels from using one of Sears’s 10-minute PACE workouts (1 minute walking, 1 minute all-out running, repeat 5 times, then cool down). A few days of this and my general energy levels throughout the day went up. (I would guess the OP’s suggestion of hill sprints is based on the same principle of alternating high intensity and low intensity activity for a short period.)
There are quite a few ways in which conventional or popular wisdom about exercise is wrong; the idea that more exercise is better is one of them. (The idea that exercise will help or cause you to lose weight is another.)
This is confusing. It seems like somehting a good rationalist should not have any problem with. And you’re supposedly the greatest rationalist around. Are you sure you’ve actually applied your rationality skills and done stuff like sat down for 5 minutes (each) and thought about questions like “What exactly am I trying to accomplish with exercise, and is there any other way to accomplish it”, “How can I find out what kinds of exercise will give results” , “can I replicate what a fitness trainer does myself, find the information online, or find someone willing to act as one for free?”, etc.
There are probably a decent number of people with medical knowledge here, who knows these things. Heck, if a few things (like living on the wrong continent) were different I could’ve just given you my athlete sisters number.
Edit: Also, why is everyone talking about expensive equipment? I’m pretty sure you only need equipment for advanced training if you want to compete or because it’s easier/more comfortable, general fitness and health I can see no reason to do anything other than running and stretching and push-ups and such. I’m also pretty sure you can use normal stuff lieing around even for the things you need props for. I’m no expert thou.
… goodness I can’t believe I just typed this. -_- Feels like heresy telling Eliezer what to do, especially in an area I consider myself to know nothing about. I’m fully prepared for this to be down-voted to oblivion.
I had the same confusion, and interpreted it as: he’s just exceptionally un-athletic by nature—that there’s no rationality failure. Perhaps he has a little less willingness to overcome all obstacles than I’d expect, but then again, living slightly longer (debatable) or looking trim aren’t as important a prize as saving the world.
Yea, that’s one possibility, but my prior for it is pretty low. There does seem to be some evidence in that direction, but my meta uncertainty is to great to really say in which direction I’m leaning.
Where did you read that?
(I’d be pretty surprised if that turned out not to be untrue, overstated, or overgeneralized.)
I am hoping it was advice specifically given for wait loss, emphasising that just adding light exercise will not see large results in many cases. As an independent observation it would be terrible.
I was skeptical as well, but Googling for “immune to exercise” produced this: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6735-some-people-are-immune-to-exercise.html. It seems like an area that could really use further research; if the universally-dispensed advice is ineffective for nearly half the population, that’s a huge problem.
Yes, but that shows that Eliezer probably misremembered what the 40% referred to. In that study, “40%” refers not to how many didn’t benefit, but rather to the maximal benefit on a particular measure of fitness received by any of the participants:
Alternately, he might’ve been rounding the subsequent statistic:
So, how many is many? What fraction of the subjects were resistant on the various metrics? Unfortunately, the NS article doesn’t give exactly what we want to know, so we need to find the original scientific papers to figure it out ourselves, but the NS article doesn’t give citations either, forcing us to fact-check it the hard way (a long time in Google Scholar punching in names and keywords).
Tracking down sources for this article is quite difficult. Bouchard quickly pulls up a bunch of papers all revolving around similar data from what is called the HERITAGE Family Study, which has apparently been running since 1995 (the abstract to “The HERITAGE family study: Aims, design, and measurement protocol”, 1995, describes it as in-progress) and there are a lot of papers on various minutia of it. So we need to search with ‘HERITAGE’.
The final paragraph about the 51⁄72 genes seems to be sourced from “Endurance training-induced changes in insulin sensitivity and gene expression”, which was published around 2004, consistent with the NS date. The general stuff about responses to exercise is much harder to track down, but after quite a bit of browsing through Google Scholar, I think it’s all summarized in “Individual differences in response to regular physical activity”, Bouchard & Rankinen 2001, which sounds promising since its abstract mentions “For example, Vo2_max responses to standardized training programs have ranged from almost no gain up to 100% increase in large groups of sedentary individuals”.
This review covers 4 major categories:
VO2_max: “The average increase reached 384 mL O 2 with an SD of 202 mL O 2”; citing:
BOUCHARD , C., P. A N , T. RICE , et al. Familial aggregation of VO2max response to exercise training: results from the HERITAGE Family Study. J. Appl. Physiol. 87:1003–1008, 1999.
heart-rate during exercise, “heart rate during submaximal exercise at 50 W” ; “A mean decrease of 11 beats·min −1 was observed among the 727 subjects with complete data. However, the SD reached 10 beats.”
original to this review, it seems
blood lipids, HDL-C: “They found that when the distribution of the percent changes in HDL-C was broken down into quartiles, the first quartile actually experienced a decrease in HDL-C of 9.3%, whereas the fourth quartile registered a mean increase of 18%.” Cited to:
LEON , A. S., T. RICE , S. MANDEL , et al. Blood lipid response to 20 weeks of supervised exercise in a large biracial population: the HERITAGE Family Study. Metabolism 49:513–520, 2000.
blood pressure, “systolic blood pressure during exercise in relative steady state at 50 W”; “Among these subjects, the mean decrease in SBP during cycling at 50 W was 8.2 mm Hg (SD 11.8)”
original to this review
So that covers 4 of the markers mentioned in the NS link. In those 4 cases, going by the graphs (the data is highly non-normal so you can’t just estimate from the mean/SD), I’d guesstimate that 5-20% of each show <=0 benefit from the 20-weeks of endurance exercise.
That leaves the insulin sensitivity one, which seems to be “Effects of Exercise Training on Glucose Homeostasis: The HERITAGE Family Study”, Boulé et al 2005. The graphs are hilarious, almost exactly 50-50 looking, and so correspond to the NS summary of 58%/42%.
(The papers don’t seem to include any correlation matrixes, but this is definitely a problem which calls out for dimensionality reduction: presumably resistance on all 4 measurements correlates and you could extract a ‘exercise resistance factor’ which would be more informative than looking at things piecemeal. Since correlations between the 4 measurements are not given, it’s possible that they are independent and so only ~0.2^4 or <1% of the subjects were exercise-resistant on all 4 measures, but that would surprise me: it would be strange if one’s insulin improved but not VO2_max or cholesterol. I don’t have any guesses on how large this ‘exercise-resistant factor’ might be, though.)
Not all of these are as important as one another and weight does not seem to be included judging by Bouchard’s silence on individual differences w/r/t that. He does cite some interesting studies on resistance of body weight to change like two twin studies.
So going by the HERITAGE data described in that NS link, exercise resistance is a thing in maybe a fifth of the population but mostly on invisible things. 40%, however, is too high, since only 1 of the 5 measured things seemed to go that high, and the specific fractions were not mentioned, so most likely Eliezer was misremembering the other two stats as the more important stat.
I recall originally reading something about a measure of exercise-linked gene expression and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t that New Scientist article, but regardless, it’s plausible that some mismemory occurred and this more detailed search screens off my memory either way. 20% of the population being immune to exercise seems to match real-world experience a bit better than 40% so far as my own eye can see—I eyeball-feel more like a 20% minority than a 40% minority, if that makes sense. I have revised my beliefs to match your statements. Thank you for tracking that down!
That’s certainly possible. Bouchard and others, after observing that some subjects were exercise-resistant and finding that like everything else it’s heritable, have moved onto gene expression and GWAS hits. Any of those papers could’ve generated some journalism covering the earlier HERITAGE results as background.
Another study suggests it’s more like 7%. Probably hard to get a real estimate: how do you do the aggregation across multiple measured traits? If someone appears to be exercise resistant on visceral fat, but not blood glucose levels, do you count them as a case of exercise resistance? On top of the usual sampling error.
Do you have an opinion concerning whether this is better characterized as “non-response to the benefits of exercise due to pathology” vs. “immunity to the harmful effects of a sedentary lifestyle”?
Basically, is being a non-responder good or bad? Eyeballing that graph it does look like untrained non-responders might be a bit fitter than responders—but of course the first thing we should assume is ceiling effect.
(And of course there’s many 3rd options—orchid/dandelion trade offs and such)
I don’t have a specific link on hand, but I remember the term being “metabolic set point”. The idea is that some low level feedback loop in the old brain sets your weight, and it can easily compensate for exercise. Along with that theory goes the idea that only dietary changes may be effective.
.4 of the population unlikely to have evolved? I can’t take this too seriously I suppose.
Did you try working on strength first? A lot of cardio is claimed to not be very helpful.
Also, consider a coach or a fellow rationalist with some domain knowledge to work with, it’s pretty important to optimize this area (esp. if it puts you out of commission for the rest of the day).
One hack that helped me work throughout the annoyance is reading kindle on a stationary bike. Lost 20 with that trick.
Pounds or kilos? (I’ll assume not stone.)
pounds
Why not just use a trainer at the gym. Also, if you can’t afford that you should really talk with me. It’s obviously a high priority.
At this point, my Expectancy for positive results from single changes like “just use a trainer at the gym” has hit essentially zero—I’ve tried all sorts of stuff, nothing ever fucking works—so I’m not willing to spend the incremental money. If I have a lot of money to spend, I’ll try throwing a higher level of money at all aspects of the problem—get a trainer on weights, try the latest fad of “short interval bursts” for aerobic exercise, get LASIK and a big TV and a separate room of the apartment to make exercising less unpleasant (no, dears, I don’t get any endorphins whatsoever), buy a wide variety of grass-fed organic meats and take one last shot at the paleo diet again, and… actually I think that’s most of what I’d do. That way I’d be able to scrape up enough hope to make it worth a shot. Trying one item from that list doesn’t seem worth the bother.
I did try Shangri-La again when Seth Roberts contacted me personally and asked me to take another shot. It was just wearing tight, uncomfortable noseplugs while eating all my food and clearing out time at night to make sure I took oil 1 hour away from eating any other food or brushing my teeth, a trivial inconvenience when I’d walk over broken glass to lose weight. I lost 20 pounds and then despite trying out around 10 different things Seth Roberts said to do, my weight slowly started creeping up again, and when after a while I gave up and stopped taking the oil to see what would happen, there was no change in the behavior of my weight—the same slow creep. It’s clear that Shangri-La worked initially but then, contrary to all theory, it just mysteriously stopped working. So far I’ve gained 10 of those 20 pounds back, in accordance with the one truly reliable law of dietary science: 95% of the people who manage to lose weight put it back on shortly thereafter. BTW, exercise didn’t lead me to lose any weight whatsoever, even when combined with an attempt at the paleo diet (albeit not one that spent lots of money, or involved a personal trainer).
So far as I can tell, all the advice here is from metabolically privileged folks who don’t know they’re metabolically privileged and don’t comprehend the nothing fucking works phenomenon that obtains if you’re not metabolically privileged.
If you want to give advice, that’s fine. Don’t tell me how well it’s going to work or how easy it’s going to be; that just tells me you’re clueless.
I replied to your other comment without being sure whether the “nothing works” part was about weight loss or the ability to gain strength and conditioning from exercise.
There is a current idea that exercise is beneficial no matter what you weigh. See for example http://haescommunity.org/ and this new article on exercise and depression: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lloyd-i-sederer-md/depression-treatment-_b_819798.html?ir=Living
I have a hard time not following the herd mentality and trying to measure my success with exercise by my size and shape. I can and generally do use another measure of success for exercise than what I weigh. You can measure increased strength either by seeing how much weight you can lift or how many push-ups or pull-ups you can do, or you can measure your increased cardiovascular fitness with your standing pulse rate, or how long you can walk or run without becoming exhausted. (I’m shooting for 45 push-ups in a row by age 45.)
Then it doesn’t actually matter whether you’re metabolically privileged. Or privileged with relation to losing weight anyway, some people would say your metabolism—and mine!--make total sense in a starvation environment. The problem getting the endorphins to let down is a big disadvantage, but you may be able to figure out a duration and intensity of exercise that will release endorphins. (And that would be a good goal to replace weight loss, too.)
I think the main thing is to stop walking over broken glass to get thinner. Where’s the utility in that? Exercise is still going to benefit you, even if you stay at your current weight and grumpy every minute of your walk.
If I were in your situation, I would start to take a technical interest in the biomechanics of fat deposition in male bodies, differential retention of water in body tissues, the genetics of metabolism, the adipocyte cell cycle in visceral fat—as much causal and molecular detail as I could bring myself to assimilate. Just for a few hours, I would proceed as if I was going to tackle the problem by understanding what’s happening from the molecular level up, genuinely identifying exactly where a change needs to occur, and fashioning an appropriate intervention.
The logic of this approach is that we are now in a time when such overkill analysis of all biological processes has become possible, and that you personally are smart and informed enough to be able to perform that analysis, “in principle”. “In principle” means that if you devoted the next several years of your life to nothing but the intensive study of those topics, you would almost assuredly make useful progress. In reality you have other priorities which guarantee that you won’t turn yourself into a research biologist. But just for a while proceed as if you were going to tackle this problem with the thoroughness and dedication you might reserve for problems in FAI theory, and knowing that it might have to be you personally who solves it (on the level of theory, not just the level of practice). You will undoubtedly learn relevant things if you do this, and if you manage to make a persistent hobby of it, your ability to tap into existing research literature and existing networks of expertise will eventually be transformed in an incredibly empowering way.
Also, you live in California. You could try to tap into the diy-bio scene, 23AndMe-style personal genomics, and the whole emerging bio-culture. Again, I’m not suggesting that you become in your own person an adipose-tissue hacker, but proceeding for a while as if you were going to do that will open doors and reveal perspectives that should actually be useful later on.
What do you mean by “nothing works”?
I have heard pretty good evidence that some people have a very hard time losing weight. I’ve also seen physiological reasons for why that might be.
I have never heard of “resistance to exercise” in the sense that you could exercise and never get stronger or fitter. I just don’t see how that would work, physiologically. Honestly—is this a documented phenomenon?
This is more of an anecdote than advice, but my wife has had some similar issues, i.e. being able to lose weight on occasion in some fashion, but then becoming immune to it and having it creep back on. Recently, she got some software that makes dietary recommendations based on genotype information—a combination of blood type, body proportions, PROP tasting ability, tooth shapes, etc. etc. (It took an hour or two to take all the measurements, tests, and observations required.)
The theory behind the software is that humans are evolved to thrive on different sorts of foods; even if you are going to eat “paleo”, your ancestral geography will make a difference as to which specific fruits, nuts, roots, eggs, and meats you’re going to thrive on. So, the software uses a bunch of known physical genetic markers (like torso length to leg length ratio, index/ring finger ratio, etc.) to identify a dietary genotype grouping.
From these measurements, the software spat out a list of foods to eat, avoid, or eat more of to lose weight… and many of the things to eat to lose weight were pretty obscure, while many of the things to avoid were things she ate a lot of. After cutting out all the things to avoid, her weight has started drifting down instead of up.
It’s still early days yet, in that one would expect this effect per Roberts’ hypothesis. However, one of the interesting things is that the foods the diet recommended just happened to also match things she’d been eating on previous diets when she lost weight… and many of the “avoid” items were things she’d been eating a lot of when struggling to stop gaining.
That is, if you looked at it in terms of “doing the X diet”, “doing the Y diet”, and so on, her results would appear more mixed than if you looked at the detail of, “doing the X diet eating food A” versus “doing the X diet eating food B.” For example, “doing Atkins eating beef and horseradish”, vs. “doing Atkins eating lots of whey protein bars and chicken.” The overall effectiveness of “Atkins” in general vs. the specific effectiveness of “beef and horseradish” are different, in other words, and the software’s recommendations seem to be similar to the more effective variations within specific diets she’s tried.
I haven’t done the full analysis on myself yet, but the preliminary food list from the author’s book seems similarly correlated with my own weight loss attempts.
I will mention more when I know more, but if you’re looking for something that specifically deals with uncommon metabolic challenges, you might find it worthwhile to investigate. Certain genotype classifications are supposed to be more weight-loss resistant than others—for example, my wife’s list has a LOT fewer “eat more of this to lose weight” items than mine does in most food categories, and in some categories she has none at all.
IOW, the author’s theoretical framework includes a basis for metabolic “privilege” and “challenge”, as well as extremely-specific recommendations to accomodate them. (So specific, its recommendations distinguish which species of mushrooms and which, out of dozens of different kinds of cheese you should or shouldn’t eat.)
This system would need to be based off an awful lot of data to be producing such specific prescriptions based on a wide range of minor differences. Data which as far as I know does not exist. It would be an excellent thing to be working towards but right now does not sound credible.
Are you sure about that? Wikipedia’s Nutrigenomics page seems to reference a lot of articles on documented gene-nutrition interactions, incuding the effects of nutrients on genetic expression.
I don’t think SWAMI actually needs that many pieces of data to make strong recommendations; it claims to be using only 225 of the nutrients or substances found in 800 foods as a basis for its suggestions.
As I understand it, it’s essentially doing something like, “people with this set of genes tend to have these problems; these nutrients tend to help with that kind of problem, these others make it worse—so rate the foods containing those nutrients up or down accordingly...” and then it computes a total score for each food, and uses various cutoff levels to rank the food as “good”, “bad”, or “meh”. ;-)
IOW, it’s not using a massive array of studies on individual foods’ effects, but rather, a scoring system based on known nutrient-genome-health correlations. And statistical prediction rules can easily outperfrom human experts, so it shouldn’t be especially surprising that you could get some pretty good results out of less than “an awful lot of data”.
On my epistemically rational side, I would certainly like to see more references myself. D’Adamo’s book and software describes many kinds of “this does this to that and is related to gene XYZ-123” things that cause my brain to go “[citation needed]”—i.e., I would really like to have a better idea of what his epistemology for all this stuff is, besides, “we studied it in my lab”.
On the other hand, my instrumentally rational side has been happy enough with the results from following the book’s recommendations so far, to be willing to buy the full kit. The interesting question will be whether I can lose more than the typical “20 pounds and then start regaining” that happens when people switch to new diets, and that will take a bit longer to determine.
(OTOH, I’m already about 20 pounds down from my last major dietary change about 8 months ago… so perhaps any further weight loss will be a good sign.)
Why do you believe that? I wouldn’t be surprised if there are nutrition scientist who have a much better model of nutrition that is publicly availabe, which we can’t find or notice because of all the noise in the field.
My knowledge of the field combined with the usual meta-information that I must always use to evaluate such possibilities.
Nothing in the description here gives any of the indications that it is the herald of hidden deep wisdom from the upper echelons of the nutrition sciences that is hidden from the rest of us. It is also too many steps beyond what the more mainstream (or even ‘mainstream contrarian’) scientists present to be at all likely.
This isn’t a nutritional scientist we are talking about here. It’s a naturopathic quack. The same guy who wrote the laughable “Eat Right For Your Blood Type”.
Ok, I just took a look at the sample result set that Eby linked to, and I, like you, am not impressed. This guy is so much a part of the noise, he isn’t even the noise that could be reasonably mistaken for a real expert.
So… here’s the thing. You and wedrifid are doing something that has me concerned.
Specifically, you’re putting me into a position where, for consistency, I feel compelled to argue a case for something that I myself don’t currently have a hugely high degree of confidence in… simply because you’re not actually providing in your arguments, any information which I could either specifically agree or disagree with.
IOW, comments like, “quack”, “laughable”, and “noise” do not give me any information about your epistemology, and therefore light up on my board “[citation needed]” just as much as it did for what I’ve been reading from D’Adamo.
So, it would be nice if you could identify specific concerns instead… who knows, I might agree with them!
OTOH, my consistent experience is that just because somebody has a stupid-sounding theory, doesn’t mean their advice doesn’t actually work. (Likewise, people who have good theories are often lousy at giving usable advice.)
Heck, take Seth Roberts as an example here: the entire idea of drinking oil or sugar water to lose weight is also “laughable”, “noise” and “quack”… and yet it still seems to work for plenty of people.
Heck, there are elements of Roberts’ theory that don’t make sense to me, from a “fewest elements to make the circuit” point of view. (For example, I don’t think “set point” is a real thing; I think it’s more likely an epiphenomenon of something else.)
But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t recommend it… just that I’d avoid recommending it to people who jump to conclusions first and ask questions later. ;-)
Anyway… specifics, please. Otherwise, I’ll simply bow out of this discussion on the assumption that you don’t actually have any new evidence to present.
IOW, a knee-jerk dismissal on grounds of ridiculousness isn’t an independent data point for Bayesian analysis. Citing papers disproving D’Adamo’s hypotheses, on the other hand, would be quite welcome.
(I’ve actually googled around for criticisms of both his blood type and genotype work, and have yet to find a single cite that doesn’t have a more-recent countercite; the vast majority of criticism, however, appears to be of the, “that’s so silly I won’t even bother to argue the idea seriously” variety. Maybe this is evidence that he’s a quack, but at least his responses to the critiques include some citations in his favor.)
A big red flag is that where I expected to see an analysis of what mixture of the various ancestral types a person is, I see a declaration that the person fits into one of 6 little boxes. This despite the fact these types describe multiple features, controlled by different genes, in a sexually reproducing population that represents all types. Now, not all genes are selected for independantly, genes nearby on the same chromosone can be correletated. But a model of which dietary traits correspond to which easily measurable traits should be more complicated than assigning a cluster of dietary traits to a cluster of easily measured traits.
FYI, my wife’s actual profile showed this; more precisely, IIRC it rated her as 44% Explorer, based on the traits given. It did not show what percentages the other 5 boxes broke down to, and I don’t know whether those factors were also taken into account in the analysis. (I also don’t know what precisely the percentage represents; i.e. is it a probability, a “percentage of your traits”...?)
The sample profile I linked appears to date from 2008; so perhaps the percentage report was added to the software later. But in both cases, if I understand correctly, the software simply presents the highest-scoring of the six boxes, rather than saying, “this is you”.
Still, compared to most ways of nutritionally grouping people, six is actually a LOT of boxes.
From what I read in his book, he describes the types in terms of basic strategies for responding to the environment, where there are only a few good choices to make. IOW, the stereotypes are supposed to represent stable strategies for responding to infections, shortages, and other stressors. That is, there are not an unlimited number of ways to do things in those areas, so you end up with large clusters.
I have not studied this in any detail, mind you; I confess my primary interest in the book was more to look at the food lists for my type, to compare against my personal dietary history.
As I said, I’m less interested in the plausibility or sensibility of a theory per se, than with the correlation of its advice with the obtaining of results… especially results for myself in particular. (And I remain cautiously optimistic on that front where his advice is concerned.)
Better, but still not good enough. If it is a mixture, what about the other 56%? Which 44% of the explorer traits? If it is a confidence level, the model doesn’t seem to rate itself very highly, so why should I be impressed with it?
Suppose there are 2 stable strategies that each say how to deal with several specific problems, such that either of the 2 strategies work but a mixture somehow fails. These strategies, being complicated, are coded for by multiple genes. Suppose a man with one strategy and a women with the other strategy mate and have offspring. Those offspring are going to inherit some mixture of the two strategies, even discounting complications such as being heterzygous where the parents are homozygous, and therefore will employ an unfavorable mixture. You can not have multiple non mixable complicated traits in a sexually reproducing population, without tricks like having each member have the complete code for all possible traits, and a varying gene that switches on one of them, which we observe in sexual dimorphism at not much otherwise. Eliezer has written of this.
But we do observe epigenetic traits—variations in gene expression based on environmental conditions, such as genes that act differently depending on how much exercise you get, or the level of testosterone in the fetal environment, or various other things.. D’Adamo’s claim here is that his typing groups are a combination of gene inheritance and gene expression, and his notion of “strategies” isn’t really the same as say, having a completely different way of digesting foods.
It’s more like identifying which places to store fat in first—something that (IIUC) we already know is heritable. The fact that fat gets stored isn’t changed, just how much, where, and how quickly. Something like that can make a big difference on a practical level to a person’s life, without being a particularly complex adaptation in itself.
I don’t think that this evidence means what you think it means.
For those who have an interest in the possible benefits of a blood type diet the wikipedia page is, as is often the case, a good place to get the basics. Particularly by following up on the references cited.
I personally am not going to investigate further, the mainstream position seems to be solid:
I’m going with that.
AFAICT, not one of those seven references involves a journal citation at all; they are all either “we don’t think this is credible”, or “we need more evidence”. (The seventh is a (valid, IMO) critique of D’Adamo’s epistemology.)
I notice, however, that your quotation from the Wikipedia page is from a less-informative part of the page, than say, this one:
And D’Adamo actually provides journal citations backing many of his responses. The strongest argument against him is, “not a lot of clinical evidence”, which is quite a bit different than “shown false”. (And a critique that could be equally levelled at Seth Roberts.)
Except for the (IMO valid) epistemological critique, the seven “against” references rely on either simple dismissal or attempts to refute points that D’Adamo actually has cites in his favor for.
IOW, you’re not providing any new useful information here.
I have stated my decision to defer to mainstream consensus in the face of, basically, very little that would leave me to doubt it.
Since there seems to be a persistant effect of people losing weight when they start a diet and then regaining it presumably because their digestive system learns that the food has calories and makes them crave it more, I wonder what would happen if someone changed diets everytime right after the initial weight loss from their previous diet. I have mostly only heard about this effect, so I am not sure what the timescale of each diet should be. Also, I wonder how much long term memory the digestive system has, presumably a suitably large rotation would work. (And have we historically, before advances in agriculture, been forced to do this somewhat by food going in and out of season?)
This software sounds interesting. Can you provide more information on it? Can one use it alone at home or does it require fancier tests that one would involve doctors to handle?
It’s called SWAMI Xpress—don’t ask me what the letters stand for. (It’s actually web-based; what you’re buying is a passcode that’s physically shipped to you.)
Edit to add: here’s a sample diet report (PDF) from the software, in case you’re wondering what its output looks like.
ABO blood type and secreter status are the only tests that have to be sent off for lab work; the rest can be done entirely at home if you have someone to help with the measurements and observations. (For example, the PROP test is a blinded taste test, so it’s easier if somebody else administers it; other tests require inspecting the shape of your teeth, measuring the angle of your jaw, etc., which are very difficult to do by yourself.)
My wife already knew her ABO/secretor results, but she bought the home genotyping kit to get the PROP test strips and fingerprinting kit. There’s enough stuff in the kit to do at least two people—it comes with a lot of taste strips, and a bunch of the stuff (like the jaw-measuring protractor) can be reused for as many people as you like.
The book has some shortcuts you can do for a quicker but lower-accuracy grouping, using a smaller set of measurements; the software is supposed to basically take more factors into account in food selection than what can be done with the six generic charts in the book.
(As I understand it, a person can have markers from more than one group, so a weighted scoring system is used to rate the markers.)
Hey, metabolically privileged guy here.
Being immune to whatever exercise you previously tried must have been very frustrating and demotivating. As far as I can tell from brief research, exercise immunity has been demonstrated for cardio exercise, but I haven’t heard of people unable to gain strength. In my experience, even a modest gain in strength is gratifying, and this may propel you the rest of the way to ferocious manraptor.
You mentioned you’ve tried resistance machines, but machines have kind of a bad reputation among seriously strong people. Free weights are widely considered better. Trainer quality varies widely, so you might have come across a bad trainer if you were advised to use machines, and especially if you were advised to try high rep counts (like 12 or more) per set, and very especially if you were advised to focus on isolation exercises targeting one muscle at a time.
Maybe you have a hidden dark mighty side that has yet to surface. You may have read about how different human phenotypes have different proportions of slow-twitch and fast-twitch muscles, making different people suited to be endurance runners or sprinters, or just really strong people. I guess the populations of each are stable over time, since it’s advantageous to specialize in whatever skill your tribe is in short supply of. Presumably there are many genetic differences in addition to the fast-twitch/slow-twitch one that’s fairly well-known. Your body might be suited to something in particular—maybe not an activity that’s recommended to the average person. If strength isn’t it, maybe it’s something unusual. Jousting? Wrestling? Ballet? Yoga? Crossfit? Fencing?
(Or, of course, you could be a mutant, or affected by some virus, or just in possession of an unlucky genetic combination that leaves you not particularly suited for anything physical.)
You might want to talk to Patri Friedman about this in person—he is good on the topic of exercise and strength.
Is it just me or does the “nothing fucking works phenomenon” be very much rarer outside of the US?
While this comment might point towards a real phenomenon, it’s phrased in a way I read as passive-aggressive. Tentatively weakly downvoted.
If you don’t mind my asking, why do you feel such a strong compulsion to lose weight? It feels to me like you’re certainly justified in giving up at this point.
If thinking about your weight brings feelings of low status, this seems like a problem worth fixing. It’s certainly much harder for me to think well when I’m feeling low status. But there are other methods for fixing low-status feelings, like having people social proof you, taking drugs, taking acting classes, meditating, giving yourself therapy, etc. (I’d be happy to elaborate on how any of these worked for me.)
I have given up, and it was indeed a great improvement in quality of life when I stopped trying to manage my weight—gave up and ate whatever, stopped going to the gym—and observed that my weight behaved in exactly the same way as before, the same slow upward creep at the same rate.
I don’t know to what degree being overweight would be less painful if there wasn’t a social stigma attached to it, but we don’t actually live in that world.
Some questions from someone who is genuinely curious and has almost zero domain knowledge (I’ve never commented on this topic before, I don’t think):
It seems to me that any social stigma would be based not on being overweight per se, but rather on the visual appearance of being overweight, i.e. being “fat”. However, I don’t find that your visual appearance is outside the normal variation that I expect to see among people in the contemporary United States. (In fact, I never would have guessed that you had an interest in this topic if you hadn’t discussed it here.) So I’m quite curious about what evidence you’ve seen that you’re suffering a social stigma.
Turning back from the social to the medical: given that you seem to naturally tend toward a certain “high” weight (I presume it doesn’t actually increase without bound!) to what extent have you considered the possibility that the medical establishment’s definition of “overweight” is wrong, or doesn’t apply to you?
Do you think you would be experiencing the same phenomenon if you were living in the ancestral environment? Why or why not?
Have you tried eating less (e.g. only one meal per day)? If so, what was the result? If not, what do you predict would happen to your weight?
EY describes what happens when he eats less here:
Best wishes, the Unofficial Guide to Less Wrong (take that, Zack M. Davis!).
Yes, but I was asking specifically about the effect on weight.
(And notice that this also reinforces the relevance of my question #2 above.)
I’m curious: leaving aside weight and social stigma, have you found that the different levels of diet and exercise you’ve experimented with had any positive or negative effects? (E.g., mood, energy levels, endurance, etc.?)
I can walk farther after getting in a couple of weeks of regular walking.
That’s it.
Basically, “no effect that I can detect with the naked eye”.
It’s true. But there are ways of dealing with social stigma’s psychological effects that aren’t removing the source of the stigma or changing society.
Could you expand on that?
As I mentioned above, having people social proof you, taking drugs, taking acting classes, meditating, and giving yourself therapy are all techniques worth experimenting with.
I could probably write a post about how I give myself therapy, but it might be difficult because essentially my self-therapy methods amount to phrases that get triggered in certain situations that remind me that feeling unhappy is not the rational thing to feel. (Example phrases: “I can deal with this level of emotional discomfort.” “I give you my permission not to think about that.” “As an exercise, try to feel [insert emotion here].” “Work with what you have.” “Take a risk.” “If I could choose to do X, I likely would.”) It might be hard for me to extract all of my heuristics, because they get ingrained over time. (E.g. I find myself using “work with what you have” less because as a result of using it, I’ve made progress in ingraining the principle of not feeling demoralized by setbacks.)
Come to think of it, this approach (mostly implemented subconsciously) has been so effective that I’m thinking it might be a good idea to consciously invent phrases to correct other undesirable mental patterns. For example, I’ve noticed that if I hold some radical opinion, my radical opinion tends to get weaker over time—when left unmonitored, my opinions tend to drift towards socially accepted opinions. But maybe if I said “No opinion drift” to myself whenever I noticed that happening, then I’d be reminded that I should only change my opinions based on evidence and arguments and not intuitions that might be corrupted by what’s socially accepted.
Oh yeah, one disadvantage of this self-therapy stuff seems to be a decreased ability to feel strong positive emotions. Basically to a certain extent, I’ve trained myself to stop feeling more or less any strong emotion whenever I start to feel it. So it’s up to you to decide whether you want to be more of a robot or not.
Please write a post on this, if it’s at all possible to discuss how you implant these phrases and how they help. I think it would really help me as well as others.
This isn’t how I implanted them, but you could try using a spaced repetition system such as Anki:
http://ankisrs.net/
Whenever you saw a card corresponding to a phrase, you could challenge yourself to come up with a situation in your recent past which you could have used the phrase.
Alternatively, you could describe to me what stigma you tend to experience and I could tell you which phrases to use and how they apply to your situation. If you give me your email address, I can trivially send your future self a few reminders on what you should be keeping in mind (I use http://www.boomeranggmail.com/ for sending delayed emails). And, I’m extending this offer to anyone, not just Blueberry. If people are too embarrassed to discuss the stigma they are harmed by under their Less Wrong usernames, they can create shill usernames or email me with a shill email address at dreamalgebra on google’s email service.
Also, I wonder if the system can be tweaked so that it doesn’t undercut strong positive emotions which are in the harmless-to-useful range.
And why do so many of us have such interest in pushing it?
http://subtractthefat.com/ is written by a guy (this guy) trying to make a simpler and more reliable version of http://www.physicsdiet.com which is based (IIRC) on the founder of Autodesk’s Hacker’s Diet method of tracking weight—daily weigh-ins displayed on a weighted average graph to give a long-term view after smoothing out daily fluctuations, and then over time estimates for calories per day too high or low.
Might be interesting to do that ( without any hope or expectation of any particular outcome ), on the idea of measure what you want to improve and to keep an accurate long term record.
Do you want to lose weight or do you want to be fit? I’ve been frustrated in the past by the fact that my body doesn’t look like the North American female ideal, but I think of the number of hours I put into exercise compared to some of my skinny but sedentary peers, and I’m sure that’s going to make a difference in future health. I think it’s generally accepted that exercise improves health INDEPENDENT of weight. (I should try to cite this but I have a midterm in an hour… If you want, I can do more in-depth research when I have time.)
I think that’s true for most people. Exercise seems to be better for maintaining a given weight than for losing weight.
I was wondering (just because I can’t remember you mentioning it):
Did you try a few different sports rather than just “abstract exercising”? I tend to hate exercise in general, but I find that I like some things that do incidentally force me to do a lot of it. For example, I very much like volleyball, wall climbing, trekking (over mountains, i.e. abrupt terrain, not horizontally), skiing, and all martial arts I tried, although I hate soccer (too much running) or basketball (running, also I suck at throwing balls through hoops) or even swimming (I hate water in my eyes). I even like chopping wood :-)
When I do sports I like (I do them less than I’d like to because of time, money and difficulty of synchronizing with friends to do it with) it is very effective as exercise, in the sense that I do them until I get positively exhausted, but I don’t hate what I’m doing after sixty seconds as it happens with “just exercise”.
You might want to try some. I’m not saying it will necessarily cause you to loose weight (I’m lucky enough to stay around the weight I like without much effort), but if you find one you like (enough to keep at it) it will make you fitter, and it does have nice effects on personal image (both yours and others’ towards you).
The important thing is to try many things to find out what you like; there may be great difference in how you like even similar things (e.g., I hate snowboarding with passion, although I’d like to like it, but I love skiing). You might want to try them with friends (even doing sports I like, I get bored if I’m alone). Also, don’t try to be good at the sport. I’m far from being very good at any of the things I mentioned I like; I’m much better than someone who never did them before, but I got that way just having fun, not specifically by training.
By the way, I remembered something relevant to LessWrong, I’ll put it here even though not precisely on topic:
There is a very widespread bias in the skying world for long skis: evidence is overwhelming that for recreational skiing shorter skis are much better, but it seems almost everyone ignores it for what appear to be status reasons.
Anecdote: Having seen short skis on slopes, I once asked the guy at the rental shop about them. He dismissed them with “Oh, those are just for fun”—although it was quite obvious that I wasn’t there training for the Winter Olympics.
It so happens that short skis are much more fun than “normal” ones for normal people, but for some reason almost all the advice given is only appropriate for expert use—even when you explicitly say you never skied before and you’re in it just for fun. And I really mean the “much” in that first sentence: it’s the difference between falling constantly for a week and starting to ski from the first minute.
(Larger skis are better for going faster or skiing outside slopes, but that just doesn’t apply to most people.)
Wow. I didn’t know that one. Thanks.
That is scary. Just for fun? At a rental shop? Because professionals don’t own their own skis...
Yeah, scary. And scariest is that he said it with a dismissive tone of authority and my brain just accepted it. It took me a couple minutes to notice it and convince myself the “expert” was completely ridiculous (I was almost a complete beginner skier at the time).
By the way, it’s not like short skis are new: I checked afterwards and found that their ease of use has been known for decades. It seems trainers insist on long skis just because they can give more lessons, rental shop guys can charge more for the bigger “better” skis, and I suspect most everyone else doesn’t even try them because they’re think they look like child skis or something.
Up until this part I thought you were replying to an entirely different comment. Since I was just browsing my inbox I resolved ‘scary’ to the most recent thing I have declared scary here. :P
And they are, well, smaller. Who doesn’t want the biggest tool you can get?
I’m not sure if it’s just me, but while I love skiing ever since I was a kid my instincts have screamed at me: “No! Don’t attach great big levers to each of your feet then convert your gravitational potential energy into kinetic energy. Physics doesn’t approve and your knees aren’t designed for torsion!” Shorts skiis seem like they should be slightly less dangerous.
They seem much less dangerous (besides easier to use), but then again I became a better skier in the mean-time so it’s hard to judge.
It’s not just that shorter lever means lower force on the knees. Being shorter (and lighter) they’re also much easier to maneuver around terrain irregularities, and they don’t pick up speed that fast (I think their lower surface area makes you sink a bit more in the snow).
Off-topic: I’m not sure from your wording: do you have something that notifies you of replies to your comments?
The envelope under your username turns red if you have a reply or pm
Thanks Barry, I never noticed that!
Frankly, I’m surprised that this “Shangri-La” approach is taken seriously by you and other people here on LW. I do believe that it has worked for many people, but this looks exactly like the sort of problem where placebo should be very effective on average. On the other hand, Roberts’s theories about it don’t even sound like a good just-so story.
If you’re still interested in weight loss (or any kind of fitness) I have two recommendations.
One: track everything you eat on fitday.
It has calorie contents for most foods. (The calorie expenditure estimates for exercise are shady and I wouldn’t trust them.) The data is useful, regardless of what you decide to do with it. I did fitday for a year and I’m not doing it now, because it’s a bit of a hassle, but now I’m calibrated with a sense of how calories feel. (An 1100-calorie day means misery and fatigue; a 1300-calorie day is ok, but sooner or later I’ll want to eat more; 1600 feels normal, 2000 is especially tasty, 2500 is a giant feast day. Before I paid attention to my diet, every day was a giant feast day, and that was the problem.)
Two: start a log on T-Nation.
This site is a roiling mass of chaos, I should warn you. It is full of idiots. It is full of porn-addicted bros. It is a time-sucking Charybdis. But it is also full of people who are very, very into fitness, and in very, very good shape. Many of them are professional trainers who share a fair amount of usually proprietary advice for free. If you are specific enough about what you are doing, they will tell you what you are doing wrong.
I learned a lot there. Not least, I learned that what looked like minimal progress to me was actually good progress, and evidence that I should keep it up. A public fitness log, with significant click traffic, is really excellent motivation—intermittent feedback really does work. And it’s even better when much of that feedback is knowledgeable advice. And when you have a pseudo-peer group of people who are much better than you, and give you a sense that more is possible.
Like all forums, this one has its own etiquette—basically, post in the beginner’s section if you’re a beginner, give as much concrete data about yourself as possible if you’re asking for advice (diet, exercise program, weight, strength, age, goals), and always RTFM. If you ever get interested in doing this, I’d love it if you’d PM me your username.
The general issue here is that you’re working with some constraints—the structure of your day-to-day life, and your physiology/metabolism. You would need to figure out what part of your current situation is preventing fat loss, and if that factor can be changed. Gathering way more data and getting regular input from knowledgeable people will make that process faster. Worst case scenario, you find out exactly why you can’t lose weight, find out that it’s not something you can change or want to change, and rest easy.
For how long have you tried? It took me about 3 years and I still have to do sports 3 times a week to keep my current weight.
Compare:
XiXiDu_2003
XiXiDu_2008
And I did not become overweight again, I just gained a lot of muscle mass since 2008. There are more photos here, see for example that I still had a fat face in 2004.
Since end of 2009 I try to do the same with my education but only now I’m manging to gather momentum. It took me all of 2010 and the last two months to prepare myself.
Careful with the ‘helpful’ suggestions. I think Eliezer has put enough effort into this that he will not respond well to this sort of assumption.
For many the benefits of exercise will not be in weight loss but rather the effects on health and mental performance.
I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude. Now going to remove that sentence.
Not rude, just a sensitive subject in this instance. I inferred this due to either my exquisitely refined social sensitivity or the bold profanity. ;)
You attribute that to exercise?
Those effects look a lot like the ones produced by energy restriction to me.
I didn’t think that I was eating much less these days. Maybe because I stopped drinking alcohol back then? Starting to think about weight and doing exercise probably caused me to change my diet without noticing it. I’m still eating ice cream almost every evening and drink half a liter milk-cacao. Today I’m going to eat two soy cutlets with two eggs sunny side up, onions and fries with mayonnaise. In the morning I eat a pan full of oatmeal with milk and a handful of dried dates. In the evening it is often a pizza or bread with cheese and grapes.
My comment was more about what is causing you to get that exhausted from exercise, with the specific suggestion being to look into moving more efficiently and finding out if muscle tension is limiting your breathing.
Even if you are moving inefficiently, the most you might get from studying efficiency is more ability to enjoy movement. This might or might not be worth the trouble.
However, I think I’m the only commenter who said you might be up against an unusual problem.
Given that Eliezer has expressed this concern a few times already, I’d like to see someone better known than me and/or more involved with SIAI start a wepay fund to get him a personal trainer. I would contribute the first $300 to such a fund, and consider it existential risk reduction, given the cognitive and longevity benefits of physical fitness.
I think that the guilt and loss of self esteem that that would cause might outweigh the benefits, causing an existential risk increase.
I’ll admit I’m no pjeby, my other-optimizing skills are no better than average. But LW seems to be willing to offer fitness advice, and that’s a huge bikeshedding problem. I’d feel much more comfortable and productive paying a professional to give fitness advice.
If it’s worth anything to you, I’m studying for ACE certification in my off time. I have all the study materials, and anything I can’t answer off the top of my head I can look up in the same reference books a certified professional would have.
Edit: only saw the local context, and interpreted it as a personal request for advice. I wouldn’t presume to tackle Eliezer’s issues from this side of the internet. Nothing Fucking Works cases are rarely truly intractable, but I wouldn’t want to deal with one with armchair diagnostics.
Basic bodily maintenance—fitness, good eating and so on—is sadly neglected by quite a lot of people who live by their thinking power. But hardware maintenance is important.
My impression is that getting so tired from moderate exercise is way outside the normal range. I have no idea if it might indicate a medical problem, or is just individual variation.It may just be that the cultural belief that exercise is good for everyone is false.
An alternate possibility is that you move very inefficiently. I was shocked to find out how much muscle tension was restricting my breathing, and how much difference it made to loosen up even somewhat. The best book I’ve seen for exploring that is The 10-Minute Rejuvenation Plan: T5T: The Revolutionary Exercise Program That Restores Your Body and Mind.
There’s a certain amount of woo woo in it, but there’s also clear explanations of how to get more flexibility and relaxation so that you can get more air, and there’s a warm-up which improved my body awareness to the point that I could realize that a move which was difficult for me was because my shoulders and chest were too tight, rather than because I was an inferior person or because the universe was out to get me. I’d also hypothesized that muscle tension might be the problem, but there’s a huge difference between a hypothesis and actually feeling what was going on when I did the move.
On the other hand, the way tenseness interacts with exercise for me is that exercise tends to feel really bad to me (less so as I become less tense), and then I stop, so t don’t know whether I’d end up with that much exhaustion if I pushed.
Are you exercising to lose weight, gain strength or muscle, or increase endurance? Those three things are very different. Exercising for endurance works for everyone, AFAIK; and exercising to build muscle works for everyone up to some plateau (which is barely perceptible for women, and some men).
But exercise is not always an effective way of losing weight, because your body may make you as hungry as it needs to, to get you to make up the weight you lost during exercise. Losing weight requires being hungry, and it’s not clear that exercising gives an advantage.
For people who have that problem, exercise geared towards building muscle may be a more effective way of losing weight. You’ll get even hungrier than with endurance exercise, and eat more, but your body will probably save less of those calories as fat.
For me, if I do something really interesting all day long, I may forget to eat. But then I’m likely to binge just before bed, which negates the gain.
I haven’t found low-fat food very useful; my impression is that I eat more of it. Artificial sweeteners make me able to resist drinking soda and juice, but some experiments have shown artificial sweeteners increase weight gain in rodents and people; reasons are not known.
The real fat-builders are soda and juice. Both pack a huge, swift bolus of calories. Many people think juice is “healthy” because it’s natural, but it has hella calories. And all sorts of “diet food” and “exercise drinks”, like Gatorade and Slim-Fast, are basically flavored sugar and will make you fat.
Some people think fat calories make them fatter than sugar or carb calories. I doubt it. If anything, I’d guess sugar builds more fat per calorie, because fat needs to go through a lot of catabolic and then anabolic processing before being stored as fat. (Your body doesn’t just suck up fat globules from the lymph and deposit them into cells.) Somebody with a biology degree should know the answer.
You could experiment with when you eat, what you eat, what temperature you keep the thermostat, and other metabolism-related variables. I know one man who gets a great deal of exercise but keeps gaining weight. Perhaps not coincidentally, he keeps the temperature in his room around 80 F.
For what it’s worth, I bounced your situation off my therapist who’s also an RN and a serious martial artist. He says you’re up against something weird and he doesn’t know what it might be.
And off one of my friends who is a lay person but has a lot of medical knowledge. Very tentatively, you might be up against thyroid or adrenal issues.
Theory which is at least cheap and safe to check: you might not be eating enough salt. This can cause low energy. And if this is the case, you might need more salt than most people—one of my friends is semi-metabolically privileged (does trail running for the fun of it, is fairly fat anyway), and if he doesn’t eat a good bit of salt, he falls over.
This isn’t implausible. It also prompts another safe and relatively inexpensive check—get comprehensive blood testing. This is something that most people should do and definitely anyone with any niggling health issues. It is amazing what some people discover, especially when it is issues that are easily resolved!
Pretty sure I’ve had some type of allegedly-comprehensive-but-cheap blood scan done, which didn’t turn up anything interesting. Is there somewhere I go for a more comprehensive blood scan?
Ouch, you’ve really explored your options! I must admit I’ve only really looked at places to get blood tests in Melbourne.
It sounds like you didn’t keep a copy of the scan results. If I you did have the results handy it would have been worth getting the guys at imminst.org to look at it. In the collective they seem to be an effective resource when it comes to identifying atypical yet not life threatening health issues.
What interests me in your case is whether you get the other benefits of exercise, particularly the neurological ones. Not losing weight from exercise is one thing but I wonder whether you still get the boost to neurogenesis and the increased resilience to stress that exercise provides.
An idea would be finding your old scan and getting your blood checked again every 6 months to a year. That way you can see if anything is slowly changing.
From personal experience I know it can take several years of patient vigilance to solve some medical problems.
I’ve read enough accounts from people with thyroid problems to gather that the usual tests don’t catch all of them—I don’t remember a lot of details (will check what I’ve got if anyone wants), but apparently the standard test is for a surrogate measurement which might or might not be relevant. And there’s argument about what the normal range for thyroid hormones are. However, if you’re lucky, Synthroid is effective, safe, and cheap.
More generally, another more comprehensive blood test isn’t a bad idea, but going in with more specific ideas about what you want to find out seems sensible.
Basically, this stuff is complicated enough that 5 minutes thought (and rather more time than that spent on research) is called for.
It gets better. I’ve got quantities of anecdata, but most of it is from women. I hope the situation is better for men, but I’m not counting on it being much better.
A lot of people have to go through several doctors before they find one who listens and thinks. My impression is that about 20% are competent for non-obvious problems.
Being fat and having a problem which affects your energy level are major risk factors for not being heard.
If you decide to go the medical route, there are websites where people rate their doctors.
My anecdata is skewed towards males and confirms what you are saying. 20% seems about right.
If you’re not in particularly good shape to start with, any pace you can sustain in cardiovascular exercise for a full hour may not be very effective as exercise. You might get better results by starting with shorter time periods, closer to 25-35 minutes, at sufficient intensity to induce fatigue.
Exercising for 45 minutes three times a week—enough to raise your heart rate—is the standard quantity to stay in reasonable general cardiovascular health—whatever your weight or fat level, whatever your walking speed (to some extent). If just walking exhausts you, have you sought medical advice?
Try 45 minutes of walking instead of two hours.
DDR can be done with glasses on, if they won’t fly across the room ;-) I’m afraid “I can’t do DDR without Lasik first” comes across as a mere excuse.
It is possible you may be generalising from one example here. nazgulnarsil’s post struck me as actually a pretty good start: it doesn’t matter tremendously much what you do as long as you do stuff.
I don’t think it’s easy to give universally-applicable exercise advice. If it were, there wouldn’t be such a huge market for exercise advice! There seem to be changes in how exercise physiologists think about certain exercises every few years. Separate abdominal strengthening exercises, for example, seem to be out of vogue with some trainers. So one piece of procedural knowledge is, you have to read about exercise, it’s not trivially obvious how to do it.
If I were going to try to give someone a universal piece of advice about how to get started, I wouldn’t say, “don’t bother with other things, try pull-ups and tricep dips,” because only a small percentage of new exercisers can even do those exercises. I’d probably say, “try taking a walk.” (But even that isn’t universally helpful, since lots of people have problems with their knees and ankles or hips or back and may need to start with something even lower impact, like swimming or yoga.) So a second piece of procedural knowledge is, everyone’s body is different, so the exercise you pick should reflect what you like and need.
Addressing the problem you pose here: Since walking is a low-impact cardiovascular exercise, why not try it for an hour every day instead of two hours every other day? That will help build endurance and make it less taxing. Or you could start with less and increase a little every day. There’s a third piece of procedural knowledge about exercise: you can increase your capacity if you add on slowly and sneak up on your body, even if your body is being recalcitrant.
I’m not sure what you mean by “immune to exercise.” Are you not experiencing endorphins from your walk? Is your heart rate staying below the target rate? Some good procedures are to walk with a friend and make sure you aren’t going too slow or too fast or bring music if you’re going to walk on a treadmill by yourself.
And if you think you’d enjoy Dance Dance Revolution, I’d say do it in your glasses—you can always wipe your face with a towel when you get sweaty. That’s what I do in the gym. I recognize that no one REALLY needs equipment to be fit, but—if you want to do that, why not? Isn’t fun one of the goals of exercise?
I don’t see a widely informed consensus about how to exercise and I don’t think it’s in the same category as some of the other questions on this thread. It’s not an ordinary skill—there’s a lot of mystique around it.
if you are capable of going for an hour you are doing it wrong. sets of sprinting once a week has better results than jogging an hour a day for many people. same thing with resistance. if you can do more than 10 you are going way too light.
this is why i suggest running up a hill. rather than traditional biking or treadmill aerobics.
If the goal in exercise is to lose weight, have you tried replacing carbohydrates with fat in your diet? Forcing yourself to exercise will serve to work up an appetite and make you hungry, but not to lose weight. There is a correlation between exercising and being thin, but the causality is generally perceived the wrong way around. There is also a correlation between exercising and (temporarily) losing weight, but that is confounded by diet changes which typically involving reducing carbohydrate intake.
I’ve heard you mention Gary Taube’s work, but not that you’ve read it. If you haven’t read his book he has a new shorter on which is well worth reading, linked here: http://www.garytaubes.com/2010/12/inanity-of-overeating/ The appendix has specific diet recommendations. Also good are these notes: http://higher-thought.net/complete-notes-to-good-calories-bad-calories/
Yes, the refined carbohydrates are the real killer here. Eat as much meat as you want but no more white bread!
The complete notes are a fantastic summary.
Maybe this is a good topic for the group problem-solving post in Discussion? I’d have to know more specifics before I know whether I can be useful at all.
Check out the book called “The 4-Hour Body” by Tim Ferris
Yeah, I listened to the patronizingly-abridged 4-hour audiobook and it’s good.
I got two main things out of it:
I should try to be like Tim Ferriss and get disproportionate results for small time investments.
Hitting a muscle group with just one set of 10 slow reps (5 seconds up, 5 seconds down) is great! It’s over really fast.
There is online personal training via Skype. That’s a cheaper version of a fitness trainer which you can do from home over video, using little or no exercise equipment. That site charges $45/session for one-on-one training, where you work with a trainer who develops workout routines for you, teaches you exercises, corrects your form, and so forth (like in-person training). They also have small group sessions, and you can try one of those for free. They also have a nutritionist.
I should mention that I know about that site because I know one of the trainers, which means that I have a fair amount of information about the site but it’s pretty one-sided. So I know they have good trainers but I don’t know what it’s actually like to get training online from them or whether there are other sites that do the same thing. I won’t say any more here, since I already sound too much like an advertisement for my taste, but if anyone is considering trying it out and has questions, you can ask me via pm (or comment, if you think there will be general interest).
The problem with “exercise” is that it takes a LOT of exercise to lose weight. To lose 20 lbs I had to do StairMaster an hour five days a week, with strength training in-between. It’s a lot more effective to eat better.
This suggests a different procedural knowledge gap: how do you tell when exercise is having an effect? Stepping on a scale doesn’t give much information, since in the ideal case you’re losing fat but replacing it with muscle. Counting weight and reps requires a reproducible routine, which I don’t have, and only works for strength training anyways. I tried measuring endurance as “minutes on a treadmill at 6mph”, but while there was a detectable upward trend it was nearly drowned out by day-to-day variance.
A good quick-and-dirty test uses the humble push-up. Periodically (every two or three days) just do as many push-ups as you can—this will likely involve moderate discomfort on the last few—and track the number you do over time. While there is some day to day variance, I think this is a pretty good rough proxy for general fitness and a few weeks of data would give you decent tracking of the trend, unless you are already in such good shape that marginal improvements are hard to discern.
Maxing out on push-ups every couple of days is good fitness advice, but using them as a proxy for general fitness is problematic: it’s very easy to exchange form for higher repetitions when doing push-ups, especially if you’re not working with a trainer or gym buddy. There’s a built-in incentive to do this if you’re using them to measure your fitness, and it’s easy to do it unconsciously. Falling into this trap gives you a false indication of progress, and also limits the quality of the exercise: you need a full range of motion to engage all the muscle groups involved.
The only way to keep yourself from doing so is to consciously prioritize form: your back should be straight, your body should just brush the floor at the bottom of its motion (chest and groin more or less simultaneously), and you should straighten your arms as far as they’ll go without locking your elbows at the top. End the set once you can no longer do this.
Bodyrock.tv is the most motivating workout I know of.
It was only recently that I actually found a type of exercise that does something: doing squats, bench presses, and deadlifts with barbells. By using a lot of weight, you only need to do around 5 sets of 5, and because you’re using free weights, a few exercises work your entire body, unlike a weight machine. By increasing the weight each time you work out and doing a small number of high-weight exercises, you can build muscle quickly. It’s the only exercise routine I’ve ever found that I’ve been able to stick to.
This site gives one example of such a weight lifting program: there are others out there as well.
There is a difference between a specific exercise program not working for you and exercise working for you. About 90% of the people I see at the gym are not working effectively towards their goals.
Losing Weight: First, burning calories is not the same as burning fat. People may burn a lot of calories jogging for an homakes, but because their metabolic rate is high they are burning mostly carbohydrates. This steady state cardio results in depleted glycogen, so your body will just want more food to stock up. Additionally, steady state cardio makes your metabolism work more efficiently, which is the opposite of what you want when you are trying to lose weight. Additionally, this type of cardio breaks down muscle, which makes it even harder to lose weight. (If you don’t really have a muscular base it is more acceptable.)
Alternative: Morning fasted cardio. Wake up, pop a caffeine pill or drink some black coffee (rev up metabolism and increase utilization of fatty acids) and BEFORE EATING just walk 30-60 minutes on an incline treadmill (or around the neighborhood) With a book on tape this is easy and enjoyable. Because you have enough oxygen your body can actually burn fat. And it will not break down muscle tissue like jogging will. (If you are less averse to exercise look into HIIT, but walking every morning is easier so you are more likely to actually do it.)
Diet: I second those hating on carbohydrates. Your body likes carbs. It likes to use them for energy. Don’t let it. Make it use fat. Every time I have made great progress, it is because I made a concrete goal with a concrete time frame. Set a goal to lose x lbs by y date. Not 30 lbs in one year. Try 8 lbs in a month. Commit for that month to some sort of diet, I recommend a ketogenic (almost no carb) diet. By having that time frame it becomes a lot easier not to cheat, and you know exactly what type of progress you should be making.
Gaining weight: for all the string beans out there, there is one secret to gaining weight. Ready for it? Eat. Eat a lot. Eat all the time. I hindered my progress for years by not eating enough, and made my best progress when I was drinking a half gallon of whole milk a day. Also, if I didn’t make this clear, you have to eat.
Lifting: Heavy compound movements should be the cornerstone of any hypertrophy program. Squats, deadlifts, bench press, overhead press, pullups, rows. (Google “squat exrx” to see demonstration and description of exercise.) While I agree with nazgulnarsil that you can obtain a good level of fitness with bodyweight exercises, a lot of movements are difficult to load with your bodyweight, additionally, your bw may be too light or heavy for a movement. Moving iron, barbells and dumbbells, should by your base. Cable machines are acceptable. Machines that force motion along a track are least acceptable. Most people do not go heavy enough when lifting. You should be grimacing through all of your work sets. In general, don’t go above 12 reps, but don’t be afraid to occasionally do singles or triples. (work sets should generally be 4-10 reps.) The 5x5 method mentioned earlier is a fine program, but keep track of what works for you and adjust accordingly. Just use some program and STICK TO IT.
Make sure you consume enough protein, which will be much more than needed for sedentary individuals. You can shoot for 1g of protein per lb of body weight. Now, I mentioned eating a lot earlier. If you are naturally very thin, that is very important. If you are less so, slowly ramp up your calories, and if you start seeing a little pudge growing just scale them back slightly. But if you are gaining no weight, fat or muscle, not eating enough is probably the culprit.
Trainers: Personal training certifications are bullshit, and a lot of trainers are just bad. Luckily, you can look at a trainer and tell how good they are at training themselves. Shoot for someone who has competed in body building or figure competition or powerlifting, depending on your goals, or someone who is obviously in shape. If you see a trainer having their client standing on one foot on a bosu ball swinging a kettlebell, run the other way.
This was very rambling, but exercise is about the one subject I feel qualified to speak on, and the one subject I see so much confusion about. Feel free to message me any questions.
5 sets of 5 was eventually too hard for me (when/because I reached a plateau). Also, I’m significantly stronger than my long-ago-injured lower back can tolerate (for deadlifts and squats). These days I don’t look to get continually stronger and instead just play fun sports and fill in gaps w/ 1 or 2 weekly gym visits.
Some routines like SimpleFit or the CrossFit Cindy exercise seem to get along with just pullups, pushups and squats.