Maggie's Farm

Since it was a bit of a hiking weekend, I decided to consider the topic from a health and fitness standpoint rather than from a fun and adventure standpoint. What I will say generally applies to all aerobic activities (ie rowing, biking, swimming, etc).

- First off, most articles we search discuss these topics in terms of weight loss and calorie-burning. That is nonsense. Unless you devote several hours/day to these things with a carb-restricted diet, they will do nothing for your fat. Let's take that off the table and accept that body fat is about nutritional choices and nothing else.

-  Second, we are talking about things which are often referred to as "cardio" fitness and cardio training. They really are not cardio training without the high heart rate which can not be attained for healthy people through walking or jogging. Similarly for skeletal muscle strength. For general endurance, good. True "cardio training" entails repeated anaerobic sprints of almost any activity (often termed HIIT. You can do HIIT with kettlebell swings, wall ball slams, road-sprints, sprint pool laps, or anything that stresses the heck out of you for 30-60 seconds). 15-20 minutes (including rests) of HIIT accomplishes far more for cardio fitness than an hour of aerobic activity.

Third, recreational hiking, jogging, swimming, biking, rowing are more the happy rewards of fitness than stimuli to increased fitness. I can hike 10 miles because I am somewhat fit, not to become fit. Nonetheless, they are the sorts of things that distinguish an "active" person from a "sedentary".  "Sedentary" roughly refers to a person with less than 8-10 hours/week of intentional, vigorous physical activity (not strolling, or housework or easy stuff), or less than 6 hours of high-intensity physical activity/week. A good measure of "high-intensity" is that you are short of breath most of the time.

- Except for newbies, the elderly, or the infirm, the above relatively low-intensity aerobic activities (I hesitate to term them "exercise" because they lack the high exertion component) are just fine for maintaining mobility and endurance for casual activities. They do not increase fitness once you can do them. Any healthy person can walk 10 miles, jog 3-5 miles, or swim a mile of laps. Still, aerobic endurance is a handy thing for life enjoyment.

- Walking and jogging put the same lower-body muscles to use. Both are easy on the hamstrings, which can lead to a muscle imbalance if jogging is your only activity. Anyway, these are not strength-builders or meaningful cardio training (because there is not a high-enough cardio stress once you have adapted to them).

- Jogging on cement or asphalt on a daily basis will come back to your joints at some point. For "long, slow", once/week is enough for a fit person who works out daily in other ways along with recreational physical activities such as sports. Running is speedy jogging with a long stride and sprinting is sprinting.

More on the topic below the fold - 

There is nothing healthier than taking on things to dispel our self-esteem despite the ego-protective temptation to hide and avoid them. Into life, outside the comfort zone. Here are some of the things that work well:

- Socializing with high-achieving, highly life-competent witty people
- Taking a calisthenics/fitness class at the gym
- Taking the Great Courses Intro to Calculus or Intro to Immunology Class and discover your IQ limits
- Joining a Bible, or classical music/opera study group and discover your ignorance and lack of insight 
- Accepting the duty of running a small volunteer organization
- Inspecting your naked body carefully in a mirror
- Reflecting on one's mortality and what good one will have left behind
- Taking an advanced yoga class
- Try to get your book published
- Go to a new city or woods without a GPS and make yourself get lost
- Reach out to befriend somebody you feel is smart, fun and interesting, and get the brush-off
- Learn a new sport or skill from scratch
- Go on a job search
- Get into weight-lifting

I welcome your suggestions for deeper humility in the comments - 

Magical thinking about food and nutrition is pervasive in wealthy parts of the world where nutrition is over-abundant and biological knowledge minimal. The classic example in the US is Whole Foods - organic non-GMO foods and supplements for the rich. A scam, like this one:

 Another Nail in the Coffin for Fish Oil 

The old idea of the virtue of a low-fat diet is in the dustbin of history. There is no correlation between dietary fats and heart disease. However, there is a high correlation between being overweight and heart disease - especially "pear-shape" (abdominal) fat. Indeed, being overweight or fat correlates with many diseases: heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, several cancers including breast cancer, arterial disease, joint ailments and arthritis, Alzheimer's - the list goes on and on. Humans were not designed for dietary abundance, but for caloric scarcity.

That is about dietary fat. If you are concerned about hyperlipidemia, let your doc treat it if it concerns you. There are many alternatives for that. 

To lose body fat, only a low carb diet works. Your body converts all carbs to sugar and then stores the excess sugar as fat. Dietary fat doesn't make people fat. Everybody knows what carbs are: sweets, fruits, dessert, root vegetables, juices, beer, grains, grain products eg pasta and bread, beans, corn, etc. The comfort foods.

To gain or maintain weight, eat plenty of everything including apple pie, ice cream, beer, Big Macs - and 70-100 gms of protein daily if you do heavy exercise (eg weights).   

Can you lose weight with an hour of daily exercise? It depends on the intensity of that hour, but it's not a realistic effect for most. Still, it is worth doing for countless other good reasons including mental well-being and energy. Intense exercise tends to reduce appetite, so there's that too.

Powerline's Scott Johnson got the memo.

Barbara Bush in failing health, won’t seek additional treatment

That's the right thing to do. It is unwise and inhumane to continue to treat people medically when it is clearly their time to go.

From a review of Antonio Damasio's new book on consciousness:

 Damasio does not view consciousness and culture as resulting from some additive ingredient unique to human beings: reason, logic, or language. In this story, a form of awareness appears in all animals equipped with nervous systems. Differences in animal mental life emerge with increasing anatomical complexity. Human beings are sophisticated, feeling, affective, social body-subjects who may speak, write, make art, and build technologies, but we share the homeostatic impulse with all other living things.

Rats can do it, but adult humans have no capacity for growing new brain nerve cells (neurons). The idea that humans could do that (with exercise, etc) has been a hot topic for over a decade.

From Adult Neurogenesis:

We know many scientific studies are false. But we usually find this out one-at-a-time. This – again, assuming the new study is true, which it might not be – is a massacre. It offers an unusually good chance for reflection.

And looking over the brutal aftermath, I’m struck by how prosocial a lot of the felled studies are. Neurogenesis shows you should exercise more! Neurogenesis shows antidepressants work! Neurogenesis shows we need more enriched environments! Neurogenesis proves growth mindset! I’m in favor of exercise and antidepressants and enriched environments, but this emphasizes how if we want to believe something, it will accrete a protective layer of positive studies whether it’s true or not.

I’m also struck by how many of the offending studies begin by repeating how dogmatic past neuroscientists were for not recognizing the existence of adult neurogenesis sooner... 

Prof. Ionnadis, who has spent years proving the unreliability of biomedical studies,  discusses The Proposal to Lower P Value Thresholds to .005.

At the least, he recommends it for new research findings. A good discussion. 

One might think that there is an epidemic of Alzheimer's deaths, and those who seek funding for Alzheimer's will tell you so.  The reality is that the rising deaths from Alzheimer's is a measure of medical success in dealing with the other ailments which have tended to kill people sooner than Alzheimer's.

We'll all die from something. Eventually something gives out, even the brain. Carpe diem, and try not to have a family history of Alzheimer's.

This is part of the backlash against the silly "self-esteem" movement of the 1980s.

We have discussed the topic in the past. Muscle degradation occurs partly from disuse, but also from age. It ramps up in middle age. Low energy, feebleness, frailty, and bone fragility are the final results. The older you get, the more difficult it becomes to build and maintain muscle functioning so the ideal approach is to get on board before the deterioration becomes measurable.

From what is known now, only intense physical effort can delay it (ie heavy weights, sprints, maybe high-volume anaerobic calisthenics, and the like. Comfortable or aerobic exercise doesn't help). Many claim it can be reversed to some extent, and I think it can. 

 We will all experience a 10% decline in muscle mass between the ages of 25 and 50 and a further 45% shrinkage by our eighth decade – if we do nothing about it. To illustrate this decline by example, the biceps muscle of a newborn baby has around 500,000 fibres while that of an 80-year-old has a mere 300,000. As we age, we also produce less growth hormone, which leads to reduced levels of protein synthesis and, again, muscle atrophy. This is not the kind of acceleration needed by the veteran athlete in search of speed, as decreased muscle equates to reduced strength and power and less ‘oomph’ ...

That is from a somewhat grim article explaining physical performance and ageing, mainly focused on running but applicable to all physical activity. Yes, high-intensity exertion does raise levels of growth hormone, and that is good.

They also recommend supplemental creatine for middle-aged, and above, heavy daily exercisers. There is good evidence for its helpfulness. Especially for those over age 30, supplemental creatine (naturally found mostly in red meat and especially in rare red meat) permits a higher level of intensity of exertion for sprinting and weight-lifting, resulting in more muscle stress, resulting in stronger muscle repair (protein synthesis) during a recovery day or two. 

Strength Training Helps to Stop Age Related Muscle Loss. Mind you, "training" means it is unpleasant and highly aversive for good reason: it's hateful, stressful work requiring delayed gratification, not recreation. Not for everybody (obviously).

A new (and valuable) word for me.

A funny-sounding word, almost as if it were the opposite of paranoia (which entails projecting one's bad stuff into the outside world.) Metanoia is usually used for spiritually-based internal changes based on a deep and ruthless personal review, followed by penitence and/or confession.  In fact, tenets of AA are based on the concept of metanoia.

In a more secular context (despite just coming off of Lent), it is never a bad idea, however unpleasant, to fearlessly do an honest review of one's character flaws and weaknesses, covert malevolences, selfishness, evil thoughts, unhelpful impulses, life errors, failures, ignorances, etc. etc.  It's assumed that everybody is a mess or insufficient in some way, or in many ways.  It takes great courage to review one's terrible shortcomings, and not one of us is all we can be.

I generally advise people to appraise their strengths, competencies, potentials, and virtues at the same time.  Still, it's the flaws that need attention.

I learned the term from this wonderful and wide-ranging (including God and Jesus, free speech, and lots of history) conversation between Prof. Peterson and the thoughtful Australian politician John Anderson. An intellectual treat:

At Quillette, The Tyranny of the Subjective.

Most of the world cares about objective reality, not subjective.  One aspect of my day job is to help peoples' subjective experiences align more closely with objective reality. 

 The primacy of subjectivity is by no means limited to politics. It now permeates the framework through which we have traditionally mediated our competing narratives. Journalism, academia, science, and law are all affected. In short, any institution that exists to accommodate competing perspectives is being undermined by a new paradigm that privileges the subjective ‘lived experience.’ And, in the process, the meta-values which have traditionally enabled us to transcend our differing subjective experiences suffer. Foundational principles such as audi alteram partem (listen to the other side), the presumption of innocence, proportionality, empiricism, and even the rule of law now must bow before the sovereignty of the subjective...

Whether scrawny or pudgy, challenging exercise makes a person more aware of his/her physique by pushing its limits. Yes, a good conditioning class is the best wake-up call for most people, but so is 3-5 minutes of jumping jacks or jump rope. 

The scrawny learn that they need to push themselves to build themselves up for strength and endurance, and the pudgy are forced to realize how much their pudge slows them down. Therefore they are motivated to pay more attention to their nutritional habits so they can keep up.

A physiological factor is that an hour of daily exertion tends to reduce appetite in pudgy adults. Exertion means "hard to do." Scrawny people may have to force-feed themselves somewhat.  Athletic and physically-active people tend to consume what they need, not so much what they want. 

So that is how an hour of daily cardio, calisthenics, and weights helps get people into fighting shape. The exertion itself is a minor factor but it is a motivator. Physical maintenance.

This composition of pieces of talks says it better than I could. He is speaking to youth, but could be speaking to anybody.

Facebook has offered "myPersonality" for a decade.  Since they seem to be in the personal information business, your data might be useful to them.

If interested, you can do that myPersonality test here, away from Facebook. Not very illuminating to see I came out as Traditionalist. In fact, probably only interesting to marketing people although it is used for social science research too.

Not impressed. 

The ballet-trained Tommy Rall branched out into Broadway, movie acting, singing, opera. And painting. Is it fair that talent is unequally-distributed? Many talents in one package, via neo's  The man who could do everything: Tommy Rall

Here is Rall with the great Bob Fosse:

Too often, the functionally-impaired abandon families which might offer shelter and support, reject treatment which might help if only a little, and refuse government assistance either out of pride or misunderstanding.  People often write about "more services" and more "help for addicts," etc., but these things are commonly rejected.

I see no future for help-rejecting mentally-dysfunctional. 

Currently, jails are said to be the largest mental health facilities in the US. Have we have returned to Bedlam?  More likely, family homes are the largest, jails second, and the streets third. Rightly or wrongly, government-coerced "help" was politically and morally abandoned. 

If you are a parent or relative of an impaired person, and have some assets, best thing is to make a trust for them with a good trustee. The low-functioning relative might reject all that, but it's all one can do. Once upon a time, there were permanent "retreats" and "homes" for such people, but when government got in the game they became hellholes.

I have no solution. Functioning at a high level is challenging enough for all of us even without tragic difficulties.

How often do most people wear evening gowns and tuxes nowadays in the US? Less and less often, for certain in New England, as even the upper classes and aristocracy prefer more informal events and dress. 

Where the instructions "Formal attire" used to mean gowns and dinner dress fro men, now it means dresses and suits. Dress has obviously become small-d democratized. There is a loss in that, a loss of elegance at the least.

We're now at the point where even formal black or white-tie weddings (evenings only, please) look like silly costume shows. That ten year-old gown should be fine, and who cares?

I recently realized that I own enough formal wear, footwear, outerwear, sportswear, riding wear, ski gear, boating gear, and athletic gear to last my lifetime, not including new tennis racquets.  I am done accumulating it as long as my size doesn't change, which will not.

We made a good point here recently. The reason people go to the gym or go to classes or to a trainer for an hour 6 or 7 days/week is to try to compress a full-day's worth of physical activity into a manageable amount of time.

Thus we raise the intensity. Instead of lifting light rocks from the field all day, we do 4 sets of heavy deadlifts, and done. Instead of jogging for one or two hours, we do 30-45-second sprints.

Furthermore, a good balanced program can pack that in with minimal or no risk of injury, unlike somebody who shovel-digs ditches all day. The thing is, in the western world very few jobs require day-long heavy lifting any more. That is all mechanized.

Today, even professional tennis players (and all athletes) do their gym programs in addition to their sport training. Playing a sport is more of a use of fitness rather than a cause of fitness. Even many people who do a lot of work with their bodies (eg carpenters) go to the gym to stay fit for their work. 

As readers know from endless repetition, we recommend, for general fitness for life for men and women, a balanced program of resistance training (heavy weights),  calisthenics, and cardio (meaning heart rate elevated well-above comfort). We also recommend nutrition approaches to meet your fitness goals.

An isolated chronic schizophrenic connects with people through her creativity. Interesting that her speech is similar to Milton in Office Space.

Thanks to Ann Althouse for finding this:

People looking for magic for fat loss and people looking for magic in muscle weight gain are often suckers for magic diets and magic elixirs. Steroids work for the latter, but it's a bad idea.

I have had enough success with patients who want fat loss over the past 12 months with Contrave to feel that it is worth a mention. It's a magic elixir of Wellbutrin and Naltrexone.  Both seem to have a measurable effect of reducing cravings of all sorts. No, it's not quite magic but it can reduce greed and take some of the burden from self-restraint.

I have posted in the past about how subjective hunger (aka "false hunger") is common in the overweight who have no caloric needs at all but who tend to desire more intake and to eat more avidly, more rapidly, than normal-weight people. It may have something to do with the loss of satiety signals, or ignoring them. Insulin sensitivity plays a role, for sure, and that is produced by poor or excessive eating habits. Psychological factors too. All we really know is that, if you are overweight and hungry, something is out of whack because you do not really need any food at all.

(As I have asserted in the past, exercise does nothing meaningful for fat loss. I'll make one exception to that: compulsive exercisers who work out for hours daily, but they usually are living on organic lettuce from Whole Foods too.  One other factor: for most people, heavy-duty cardio and weights do tend to reduce appetite. People in rigorous daily fitness programs therefore need to follow nutritional programs to make sure their intake is sufficient to support their efforts or they can risk losing muscle while their bodies are undergoing renovation. This only applies to body renovation projects, not maintenance)

A book (h/t Dr. Helen at Instapundit): Younger Next Year for Women: Live Strong, Fit, and Sexy - Until You're 80 and Beyond

An excellent calisthenic. Switch legs quickly in air during the jump, use the rear leg only for balance, swing your arms in natural running motions, and keep the front knee over your ankle or toes.

Start with 30-60 second sets.