The press is based on behavior patterns in the real world. Yes, optimally you won’t hit the china buffet after running a mile, but people will. It isn’t really a strawman when it argues against what people do, even if what they say is different. Yes, the way to fix it is probably smarter eating rather than not exercising, but that doesn’t change the fact that for most people, exercise has a negligible effect on calories in vs out.
I seriously doubt that much special training is required to get a horse to run long distances, beyond “I am the rider and you go at the speed I say.” I could easily be wrong and disproven by cites, though.
Problem is, the eventual results aren’t the kind of thing I’m interested in signing up for. (At least once you cross out the imaginary results like curing diabetes, and the undesirable ones like emptying my mind.)
This, boys and girls, is the textbook definition of a strawman. He literally invented a reply and put it in my mouth! It’s almost as if he somehow knew that my actual response would annihilate his argument, and was hoping to fend it off somehow.
And my actual response is, look at this sentence: “If you then eat the same lunch, the net gain is 500 calories.” The fact of life is, unless you are actively trying to control your diet, then you will eat more. You’ll snack. And unless you are limiting your snacks to things like fruits and vegetables, you will be snacking on things that take ten seconds to give you back those negligible 300 calories. Have you read a nutritional label lately?
The exercise is nothing without a proper diet. The diet is everything, even without the exercise. That’s the reality.
Thing is, though, I don’t want to quiet my mind. So the hardest part would be talking myself into even *trying *to. With the exercise, at least, I’m merely apathetic as to the results, and it’s just the costs that deter me.
The huge misconception is that in “eat less, exercise more”, the “exercise more” matters.
I strongly suspect your situation is vastly atypical of overweight persons - you simply do not get fat eating like that. The way you get fat is eating supersize meals, and/or lots of snacks, and/or having much of what you eat being high-calorie junkfood. To a person with this diet, they’ve got a lot of caloric ‘slack’ in their diet to lose before they reach equilibrium, and exercise just isn’t going to get them there. They have to alter their diet, preferably on a significant and permanent basis, perhaps to one like you describe here. That alone should make a huge difference.
Now, it may be the case that exercise plus diet control is easier for some people, but if so I suspect it would be because of the lifestyle change, not due to exercise having any noticeable effect on the calories accumulated. I can easily see how a change in lifestyle would make it easier to stick to a new diet - the hardest time for me to curb my snacking is when I am watching TV (and not on the bike), because that was my biggest snacking time in the halcyon days. If I eschewed TV entirely for some other activity, like jogging or yoga or being stretched on the rack, I wouldn’t have to deal with ingrained habits of snacking while engaging in the activity.
I just realized that in my prior post I totally opened myself up to charges of saying that exercise has no positive effects at all. :smack: Allow me to clarify. I was talking specifically about weight loss here. Exercise still has a host of benefits relating to things from six-packs to blood pressure that various people will find much more compelling and desireable than I do.
I would concur with this. (I mean, that it is true for some people – I largely believe that there is no one-size-fits-all solution for weight loss.) I have an easier time eating well on days when I’ve done a lot of exercise. One, I don’t want to torpedo the benefits of the exercise by stuffing a Triple Whopper with Cheese down my gaping maw, or whatever. Two, exercise tends to make me feel fit and energetic, and when I feel that way, I don’t crave snacks so much.
I know we’re on like page 16 of this thread and there is an excellent chance that I already made this point somewhere already, but I want to be crystal clear that for me, running is really not about weight loss. I have no doubt that it’s helping me lose weight, especially now that I’m into the 10-15 mile-per-week range, but dietary changes are where my weight loss is primarily coming from. I run to be fit and strong; I diet to lose weight. (I know some people throw a spaz when you use the word “diet” instead of “lifetime eating plan” or whatever, but let’s face it, it’s a diet. Just because I intend to stay on it permanently doesn’t make it not a diet.)
Well first, I include “staying active” as exercise. They’re not mutually exclusive. Higher levels of activity help, though. I plan to be one of those 70 year olds who goes for hikes in the mountains with his teenage grandkids. You can settle for picking up sticks in the yard if you want.
Second, there are studies like this that indicate both physical and mental benefits to being active and exercising, or this that show that a regular exercise program provides pretty significant benefits over more sedentary populations, even at older ages. Strength training and other weight-bearing activities have positive effects on bone mineral density and the associated strength gains reduce the incidence of falls and subsequent injury. And if you’re sedentary already, starting to exercise produces positive outcomes versus sitting on your ass.
Ah! Yes, I totally agree with you. I hadn’t thought about it from that perspective. If someone’s normal diet is made up of McDonalds and Dominos, exercise probably won’t be effective for weight loss. You’re right. There’s too many extra calories for exercise to make a significant dent. They would first need to alter their diet to be healthier before they could make strides towards losing weight.
I was just watching an episode of "Hoarders’. They have people who can lose their children, go to jail or get divorced because they can not get rid of trash they save. Dumping trash should not be hard to do. Just throw the crap away and the problem is gone. But it is very hard for them to do. They suffer through the process. The mental anguish is real .
So to say just exercise and stop eating so much is no great revelation. They know it as well as you do. There is a lot more involved than just being lazy and eating too much. Those are not the problems, but the symptoms. It is a lot more complicated and mentally excruciating. Please don’t congratulate yourself for displaying a great understanding. The mental complexities of people overeating and not working out are far greater than the shallow remarks here are stating.
I thought it was just a workout too, until this thread forced me to separate the exercise from the meditation. I guess I liked the meditation all along, but was always there for the workout. Fanatic? Me? Actually I just type a lot, and do a little yoga.
Anyway, I feel like I need to back off on the point that a certain level of exercise is hard to overeat. Me, I didn’t overeat it. I don’t exercise so much anymore, but apparently enough that my body seems to be staying put. But between mentions of cookies, chips, and pints of cream, I better admit over-eating exercise is do-able.
I’m curious though. What is the story behind the cream?
Athletes have always been an exception, both in the type and quantity of physical activity they did. However they have always been a vanishingly small minority of a population - until now.
And undoubtedly most people’s everyday lives were far more active before the last few decades.
But in America for the last century or two, with the exception of those with physical jobs, deliberate ‘exercise’, especially anything that would get your heart rate up for extended periods of time, outside of walking and doing household chores wasn’t something your average person was familiar with.
We were a nation of housewives after all.. and without all the amenities we had now, that took more and harder work. But taking care of 6 children and doing hard household chores doesn’t make women thin (even Amish women - average BMI of Amish women is 27, which is overweight).
I do agree with you that the body is capable of a ton! Much more than we give it credit for. What matters is the effort put forth. I too plan of being one of those super-active and capable elderly people. I put a very high premium on my fitness.
However, the elderly who do hours of yoga per week or are still mountain-climbing have no more chance of enjoying perfect health and longevity, than those who simply stay ‘moderately active’ with walking, maybe some golfing, doing their own chores and yardwork, and playing with grandkids.
You are undershooting. I am 66 and play racketball 8 to 10 hours a week. I do not have to do easy exercises to save my brittle body. I also walk 2 beagles twice a day in the park. We go more than 5 miles a day, every day.
There are guys in my group who have been doing weight lifting for many years. They do exercise bikes too. I was a competitive lifter when I was a late teen and have been lifting for many, many years. Much of age frailty is due to believing you become too old to do your activities and quitting.
The mental facilities are also enhanced by good physical health. The only one of our group who is showing any degree of Alzheimers ,is a very big drinker.
Agreed, with all points. You can usually (barring injuries/some medical conditions) do as much as you want to, to a very advanced age.
But - so far there is no particular proven benefit to extreme fitness, as opposed to good or moderate (defined as brisk walking for 1/2 hour per day) fitness.
Welllll… I don’t think any cites are necessary. Just think about this for a minute. Wild horses were hunted to extinction. Yet domesticated horses can apparently out-run the very species that hunted their wild counterparts to death.
Ok. How do horses make the leap from ‘wild’ to ‘domesticated’? They have to be broken. I can’t say I know much about this process, but obviously it involves convincing a horse to accept a rider and follow their instructions.
You may be right that horses don’t particularly need physical training to run well with a rider. But they do need mental training to reach the point where they can be ridden.
I hope you can see the analogy between this and using meditation to gain command over your diet/exercise habits/physicality aversion.
I know. Personally I think you’d want them if you really understood, but if I push that button too hard I turn into a moonbat, don’t I?
You are in fact interested in getting your weight down to 200. I assume you’re interested in avoiding blindness and amputeeism. Begbert- how are you going to achieve that??? At some point there is necessarily some action you must take to change your lifestyle/habits to achieve this goal, outside of giving up the goal. I sincerely hope you can discover something effective that doesn’t leave you feeling like you’ve compromised something important. Like your vision. Or your foot.
This is a bit of a strawman on your part. It isn’t emptying your mind, it is gaining control of your mind (please note: not somebody else gaining control over your mind). Which will give you greater control over your habits, actions, reactions. Which ultimately will make your weight a simple matter of your personal preference in time. You want to hit 200 lbs, so how then is the/a solution to your problem ‘undesirable’?
I don’t really know what you eat. What part of your diet is ‘normal’, and at what point are you ‘overeating’? What stops you from controlling your diet?
Hmpf. There are two paths to a solution as I see it (can I remind you again that I’m not all-knowing?). And, again as I see it, every time the discussion veers toward putting effort into the solution, you balk- and balk hard.
-You don’t believe exercise- which can burn a significant amount of calories btw, besides a host of other benefits- has any significant benefit, and therefore you don’t apply much effort to it. Suggestions that you give it a shot are met with your seeming belief that exercise= signing up for Marine Corps boot camp in which they relentlessly kick your ass until you are a Marine (not that I am one, this is AFAIK). But no, whether you are in charge or find some kind of expert to guide you, every single entity in the world is going to be more sympathetic to your feelings that the Marine Corps. Seriously, they won’t torture you. You will in fact be encouraged to explore and expand your limits, but if you can see any other way I’d like to hear it.
-You discount personal mind-control activities seemingly out of hand. If mind control is not what is needed to control your diet/battle your cravings/change your habits, then do tell what* is* required. Seriously, what is it then?
There are a million anecdotes that suggest exercise does matter. You’re insisting it doesn’t either because of extreme aversion to exercise or an extremely out-of-control diet. What else is there in this equation? Your best bet is to put effort into both, unless you have a better idea.
You are looking down the barrel of a lifestyle change, or I wouldn’t be concerned with this at all. Fat and happy? Good, I like happy. Go and be happy. Honest and true, I don’t give a fucking god-damn about fat if you’re cool with it. I don’t judge it, I don’t hate it, it is quite simply not my beef with the world. Fat and diabetic? Mission Control: we have a problem.
Seriously dude, I’ve watched people go through an amputation. You don’t want to be that guy. It is worth the trouble to avoid. A LOT of trouble.
The rack? Really? Is a lifestyle change really so torturous? What if you changed into a lifestyle that you enjoyed more than your current one? How about a lot more? Before you say, ‘no way’, what is your cite that your current lifestyle is the pinnacle of human enjoyment?
Points:
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I don’t see any reason to believe that wild horses were “hunted to extinction” and that domesticated horses, um, sprang out of nothing in their wake. Nor do I see much reason to think that wild horses were as a rule significantly slower (though some domesticated horse breeds were certainly bred for additional speed). What I suspect happened is that early man used hunting techniques designed to foil speed and take advantage of animal stupidity, such as sneaking up on them and/or surrounding them and/or getting them to flee and tire themselves out and/or using natural terrain to box them in and prevent them from running. All of these techniques would work on domesticated horses too, of course, regardless of their speed.
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as for the physical/mental training dichotomy, I thought we were talking about the difference between “my horse”, and “my horse that has been trained to be an endurance runner” - in both cases I assumed the horse to already be broken. So, the confusion there is likely my fault.
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I see no comparison between being broken and gaining self-control, beyond the useless baseline of “your response to certain stimuli has changed”.
I’m going to achieve this by losing the weight through diet control. Remember?
The/a “solution” to my problem is ‘undesirable’ if it has undesireable conditions, steps, or side effects that seem to surpass the expected gains. Hopefully that’s not hard to understand.
If I’m strawmanning about the mental effects of meditation, it’s because I fail to appreciate the distinctions you are trying to make, probably because I don’t really believe in the problem you propose to cure. My mind is me, and it isn’t out of my control. I’m not sure it could be, absent severe mental/psychological problems on the order of insanity. My lapses of self-control are not caused by a homunculus seizing control of my body or mind; they’re caused because I have conflicting desires and motivations and sometimes the short-term desires calculate as having a higher momentary priority than the long-term less-concrete desires, and thus they are more impelling and I choose to act on them.
How do I get greater control over my impulsions to succumb to short-term desires? Not by meditation, that’s for sure - it doesn’t address the problem of conflicting priorities (unless it is brainwashing). The correct solution is to either reduce the collective strength of the ‘snack’ impulsions, increase the collective strengh of the ‘don’t snack’ impulsions, or to alter my envornment to discourage acting on the ‘snack’ impulsions. None of these is a matter of getting control of my mind; they’re changing my priorities (or my preferred method, leveraging my quirks) so that I choose act in a different way.
Anyway, given that it’s impossible for meditiation to give me greater control over my mind (which is a nonsensical concept), I find myself viewing the effects of meditation as having the one effect you’ve described which would be a change: emptying the mind. (Certainly you described the ‘corpse pose’ as including this.) This is not something I wish to pursue.
The unhealthy parts of my diet are normal. The healthy parts are abnormal. Seriously, is it normal to be using raw cauliflour as a snack food?
What stops me from controlling my diet? My desires to eat one way interfere with my desires to eat in another way. (Clearly, elimianating all my desires isn’t going to correct this in a useful way.) To get around this I have techniques, tricks if you prefer, to adjust my behaviors without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I balk hard at putting effort into things that promise to be inefficient or ineffective in proportion to their effects. Remember, I’ve lost eighty pounds without subjecting myself to the “effort” you refer to. It’s not like I’m hunting desperately for an effective approach - so why should I give serious thought to other, likely less effective and certainly more arduous ones?
Exercise cannot burn a significant amount of calories unless you do so much ungodly horrific exercise that you probably wouldn’t have time to eat. You grossly overestimate the effectiveness of exercise and grossly underestimate the caloric content of the average food. We’re talking about a mouse in a tug of war with an elephant here, and you’re backing the mouse.
This would vary per person. My approaches tend to involve simply not buying the crap food. (Most of my snacking takes place in my apartment.) It’s recently become more evident that I need to also strike a careful balance between “snacking too much” and “not snacking at all” (if I do the latter, I will eventually crack and binge) and have literally yesterday instituted an arbitrary (and quite silly) method of monitoring this. (Because unmonitored food is a problem waiting to happen - It’a actually a little surprising I made it six months without this problem rearing its head.)
Anyway, I guess the succinct way to put it is that “mind control” is certainly not the only possible approach.
Anecdotes are crap; if a million people change their diet and start exercising, that doesn’t mean that changing their diet and not exercising wouldn’t have copmarable effects.
And I NEVER said that diet isn’t an issue.
Hence, the diet. Let’s all keep in mind that I’m not the stereotypical fat guy who sits on his couch moaning “I can’t get thin it’s impossible” between the handfuls of chips he’s stuffing in his mouth.
Running is that torturous, for me. Dunno about yoga, but I’m not that interested in finding out: nothing about it seems even slightly likely to ever appeal to me*, and it would take time away from activities which I do enjoy - enjoy rather a lot in fact. (And seriously, I already don’t have enough time in the day for all my hobbies. Why would I want to flush more time away on something I don’t want to do?)
- I am not you.
How ARE you doing with your dieting, begbert2?
Because nobody likes a skinny Santa.
Eat Papa, Eat!
Since you ask:
I don’t bother keeping track of specfic weights for specific dates (I really could take this more seriously, if I had the gumption), but generally speaking I’ve been floating between 270 and 280 for the last couple months. This stall has been entirely due to me worsening in my snacking - first with lapses in the types of snacks I was buying and eating (blasted cookies), and then when I got my act together and stopped buying those again, I (without initially noticing) started going through my ‘good’ snacks a lot faster, presumably to compensate for the loss of cookies. This bingeing wasn’t enough to make me start gaining weight to any real degree, probably because my main meals are still of a strictly limited size, but it was enough to stop the weight loss.
Starting two days ago I instituted a new (quite silly) way to visually track the amounts snacked on per day, so I can’t get away with letting excessive snacking slip by ‘off the books’. With luck, this should be sufficient rein me back in to the level of food intake I was maintaining (without additional controls) for the first several months of this diet, when I was really shedding pounds. However, it’s too soon yet to say whether it’s actually working or not.
Utterly unimportant factual correction: 260-270 pounds, not 270-280. (As of ten minutes ago 263.8.) Man is my memory for numbers bad… :smack:
Here’s a link if you would like more information on the extinction of North American horses. We could argue about how they did it as part of the larger running discussion, but- I didn’t forget what you said way back about your knees. It doesn’t sound like running is for you regardless of where arguing about horses leads.
I assumed that the horses are both broken and trained for the event. I can’t imagine it being any other way, but I admit I don’t know. I’ll continue about horses if you really want though.
The analogy is that if your desires for food are overwhelming your diet intention, there are ways to overcome that. Maybe it is a crappy analogy. I just don’t want to derail this into horses very much, sorry.
I remember. And I’m fairly well convinced that serious exercise isn’t going to be on the menu. I find that stance somewhat boggling, but don’t take that the wrong way.
It isn’t hard to understand, no. I feel like your ‘weighting’ of certain activities in the negative direction is perhaps out of proportion, though I don’t know if I can be certain of that or how to argue about it.
Someone mentioned the number of calories in a pound of body weight, something like 3600? Taking that approximate figure, if you are attempting to lose 70 more pounds, that’s a total of 252,000 calories burned more than eaten.
It’ll take time no matter what, but considering that the ‘burned calories’ is an inextricable part of this, it sure seems obvious that increasing it through exercise will help with the goal. Especially considering that exercise will raise your resting calorie burn.
We’ve been over your objections to this approach of course, namely that you’ll either over-eat the burn (avoidable through mind-control, or just plain ol’ planning) or that the effort will prove too much trouble for too little gain. I don’t agree, but I can see that you are rather firmly set in your position on this.
In this and other threads you come off as too bright to be insane. Yah, I suppose there are plenty of smart crazy people out there, but I’m reluctant to start accusations of insanity.
I suppose it is possible that you have an addiction. Maybe it is the related problem of compulsive overeating. This second one maps in part to behaviors you’ve mentioned:
But… is it a direct match? I really don’t know, and I’m not really qualified to decide either. I toss this info out there in case it is helpful or informative.
Nah. Short-term desires are the kind of thing it is good for controlling. You would form a clear intention of what your actions would be re: eating, recognize how the cravings or whatever are contrary to your plan, and disregard them.
It helped me quit smoking. I’m sure it’d help with food cravings. But… you’d have to want to try it, and you don’t seem to.
I don’t see a problem with that.
Nonsense? You have conflicting desires. The ‘clarity’ effect is, well, hard to explain I guess, but a state where it is very easy to have a single intention that isn’t swayed by these kind of conflicts. But. Not something you wish to pursue.
Hmm, I don’t know. We’d end up parsing the word ‘normal’, and could come up with different conclusions ranging from ‘common’ to ‘acceptable’ to ‘ideal’, and everything in between.
I think cauliflower is a normal snack. I can think of people around here eating a lot of carrots, grapes, almonds, raisins- people do eat lots of healthy snacks. I think cauliflower is a good one too. I’ve seen it recommended combined with tuna to get a full set of amino acids; that plus some ranch dressing to make it tasty. I eat that myself sometimes, but I may not be normal 
Doing what works is the bottom line. You don’t need any help if you can get there on your own.
I think you’ll get faster (and ultimately better) results working both sides of the calories in/calories out equation, that’s all. It strikes me as patently obvious, but then our experiences and situations were/are different, and you clearly have firm beliefs about efficacy and ardor where exercise is involved.
Nah. Say you burn 500 extra calories a day through exercise. That’s 3500 a week; in 6 months that’s 91,000. That seems a significant step toward the 252,000 needed to reach your goal.
I don’t think I grossly underestimate the caloric content of average food, and anyway it sounds like you actually are getting good at dieting, so… don’t eat it!
Sounds good. And if you think your methods are silly, try doing yoga! No wait a minute, we’ve been over that 
Agreed.
Nah. A line from a link upthread made the observation that if exercise caused people to gain weight, then they’d be the fattest, which obviously isn’t the case. Exercising trims people up. But of course there is the calories-in side of the equation. Yes, of course.
I don’t know Begbert. Keep in mind I am promoting exercise and some outside guidance/supervision so that you can learn to do it effectively. It doesn’t have to be what I do. Maybe keep all this in mind if what you’re doing begins to stall again and you are looking for a new method to apply.
Maybe you won’t need it