Maggie's Farm

Why You Should Go to Church (Even If You’re Not Sure of Your Beliefs)

The useful article related to aging  is here.

 Aging is characterized by changes in body composition. CT studies demonstrate that as we age, subcutaneous fat (below the skin, SF) decreases and visceral fat (in abdominal cavity, VF) increases. VF is the enemy. Because it causes systemic inflammation, it is an independent risk factor for coronary artery disease, stroke and death. If that’s not enough, VF also provides the Buddha-belly mid-life midriff.

The other most common age-related change in body composition is muscle loss. Because muscle has a high metabolic rate, its loss is associated with a reduction in energy expenditure. This decrease in caloric burn lends itself to weight (fat) gain.

also, re weights:

... exercise volume (repetitions x sets x load) can achieve maximal muscle fiber activation, including the important larger type II fibers. This is also much less likely to cause injury, an important consideration at any age. Bottom line: shoot for less weight, more reps, more sets, and failure.

I disagree with the powerlifts to failure. I do tend to agree with that "repetitions x sets x load" equation for most men and women over 45 or 50. Still, we aren't talking about light weights. We're talking about 25-30% of your one-rep max. Younger folks, or experienced exercisers, can ramp up the load. Generally speaking, at any age, the max number of reps for powerlift sets should be 10-12. For smaller muscle groups (eg arms, calves) it's fine and safe to burn it out with 20 reps. 

Use it (stress it) or lose it. 

Yes, fear can be a liar. Getting outside our comfort zones is what life is all about. Good basic life advice like your Dad taught you, or maybe forgot to.

The universality and popularity of general fitness programs is partly because they have nothing to do with physical talent. 

Your genetics do determine many of your physical capabilities at advanced levels, but rarely at ordinary levels. Short people can be fine basketball players, for example - but not at a college level. Long-limbed people can do good bench presses and deadlifts, although not as readily as compact people. Everybody can run, swim, and do bench presses. Most people are physically effective but not blessed with special talents. That is why general fitness is popular - anybody can engage in it.

Besides your physique/physical structure, genes determine your ratio of fast-twitch to slow-twitch muscle fibers, your neuromuscular connections, your brain-neuromuscular responses, eye-hand coordination, your aggressiveness and energy, lung volume, etc.

Not to mention non-genetic factors like drive, training, and practice.

The point I wish to make is that, as with musical talent or intellectual horsepower, everybody has a level at which they can best perform, and few people ever reach those levels. In fitness, your only competitor needs to be yourself from last month.

Of course, we all have varying degrees of competitiveness, but that should never be any obstacle. Not one of our readers will play in the NFL, the NBA, or in the US Open. Or, for that matter, perform in the NYC Ballet. 

My advice, to be able to engage in the fullness of life, is to get out and move hard every day with weights, calisthenics, cardio, etc - and to do a lousy job of it if need be because there are no grades. Giving it your all is all that is required. 

How often do you feel "bursting with physical energy"? It's a wonderful feeling. We see it in kids all the time. They have to run, have to move, have to dance, have to climb, can't sit still. It's hard to know what it's about, though.

Feeling as energetic as a 7 year-old, with that need for physical activity, is rare in those over 30. A sedentary lifestyle (roughly defined as less than 6-8 hours of exertion/week - not including walking unless elderly) is a mental habit rather than a measure of any sort of true physical "energy." Energy, however, accrues to the energetic even though we will never be 7 again.

I make distinctions between these biological and psychological things:

1. The drive, need, and desire for challenging physical activity that derives from high fitness (Get Up and Go is a result of fitness + attitude), 
2. The ability to recruit the mental energy to complete hard things in a dutiful way or with external demand, but without the need or drive to do them (70/30% mental/physiological), 
3. The state of one's capacity for muscular and cardiac function (100% physiological)
4. "Low energy," aka "laziness", ie lethargic life habits (90% mental, but the physiological obviously deteriorates rapidly with disuse).

OK, so subjective "energy" is not mainly related to actual physical "energy". Same word, different things. #3 is of most interest to me even though it has nothing to do with how much Get Up and Go you feel when you wake up in the morning. I have a strong bias in favor of those with that Go Go attitude regardless of age or physical conditioning.

Energy details below the fold - 

From Megan McArdle on her 45th birthday

Here's the latest. I always use a baby aspirin anyway. Maybe it is magical thinking. I have seen many people with clots after long flights:  Long Distance Travel and Blood Clots

First things first. If you can't manage your own life, you are in no position to give advice to anyone, much less to try to control anybody else.

Peterson's book is a best-seller. It's not self-help. There are many layers in each of these simple chapter headings.

Rule 1 Stand up straight with your shoulders back
Rule 2 Treat yourself like you would someone you are responsible for helping
Rule 3 Make friends with people who want the best for you
Rule 4 Compare yourself with who you were yesterday, not with who someone else is today
Rule 5 Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them
Rule 6 Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world
Rule 7 Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)
Rule 8 Tell the truth – or, at least, don’t lie
Rule 9 Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t
Rule 10 Be precise in your speech
Rule 11 Do not bother children when they are skateboarding.
Rule 12 Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street

I hope nobody gives Prof. Peterson any lithium to slow him down. Topic: Everything. Excellent, inspiring entertainment. Hard truths.

High- fat diets have no correlation with arterial disease. Being overweight definitely does, but dietary fat does not make you fat.

"...  the conclusion of a massive new study published in Lancet that followed 135,335 people in 18 countries on five continents. The study found that consumption of fat was associated with a lower risk of mortality, while consumption of carbohydrates was associated with a higher risk. It found that the kind of fat didn't matter when it came to heart disease, and that saturated fat consumption was inversely related to strokes.

The researchers say, ever so politely, that "dietary guidelines should be reconsidered in light of these findings.""

Even in overweight America there are plenty of under-developed (lacking muscle) or even scrawny (I don't mean anorectic) guys and gals who want to work on their strength, endurance, and overall fitness for life or to improve their athletic performance in some area. Chestless men and bony women.

My trainer tells me it's always an interesting challenge for him to train endomorphs (basically, skinny runner's builds) or, even more difficult, thinner or under-developed people with middle-aged guts. 

People built like this will likely never have big muscles, but big muscles and functional fitness are not the same thing at all. Women, of course, can not build bulging muscles under any ordinary or non-chemical circumstances.

Weights and good nutrition are the keys to a sturdy body, but everything else is needed for balanced fitness too. A typical first-year program would be something like this:

- Weight-lifting 3 hours/wk (under age 45, 3/wk; older, maybe only 2- 2 1/2 hrs/wk with slower progress)
- Calisthenics and lighter weights, 1 hr/wk
- Endurance cardio 1 hr/wk
- HIIT cardio 30-40 min/wk (including rests) 

You can't build muscle without adding a little fat to your bones along with it. The added nutrition to support a program like this, for the skinny or the under-developed,  might be something like this:

- protein and fruit shake after workouts
- 2 mostly dairy snacks daily (eg yoghurt, glass of milk, some fruit or nuts)
- 3 modestly-sized "balanced" (ie protein, fats+oils, moderate carbs, greens, fruit) meals/day. 

This volume of food intake can be a challenge for many, so it is something to work up to gradually. For most people to gain solid (vs fat) weight, the food intake will need to match the exercise intensity.

A program like that ought to be able to build 1 lb/month of solid (not flab) gain. A 10-12 lb gain in 12 months would be a good target. More might be too much because muscle builds very slowly. Let the scale be your guide and nourish yourself accordingly. If there is a gut, it should eliminate it. A gut on an under-developed guy or gal is not useful in life except in times of famine. 

nb: Physically under-developed + overweight is an entirely different topic, as we have posted in the past 

More interesting and more fun. The first hour is Petersonian background. Prof Peterson:

I think Sapolsky is a smart Harvard professor, but by having an ax to grind here he makes countless logical and factual errors. I do not have time to go through them one by one.

Want to be fit and trim, attractive, high-energy, light on your feet, and signaling that you have your act together? 

You know the popular approaches:

- Low-carb Atkins-like plan. This means fats, protein, and non-root vegetables and greens, with nuts and berries to complete the nutrition. This makes physiologic sense because it trains your body to burn your fat for energy instead of the carbs you shovel into it normally.

- Small but ordinary meals. Eg, a hard-boiled egg and coffee for breakfast, half a sandwich for lunch, a couple of slices of cheese for a snack, and a half-portion of supper.  This is a sustainable approach for most people, but it still might not work for you. It works great as a maintenance program for me, but I do not need to lose any fat and I do not have a voracious appetite. By the way, eating "until full" is disgusting and has nothing to do with nutrition. It's just a measure of how much you have stretched your stomach or ignore satiety signals. Normal people eat until satisfied, not until full. "Stuffed" is for the Thanksgiving turkey, or on Thanksgiving.

- Keep a nutrition calendar. Write down everything you put in your mouth. It's even more effective if you include Why you ate that donut. Bored? Tempted by flavor? Anxious? etc. Best idea: When those things happen, do something else as a diversion. If you are overweight, your subjective appetite is a liar because your body is lazy and doesn't want the hassle of burning your fat. 

- Exercise is basically useless for fat-burning in any ordinary time frame unless combined with a nutrition program of caloric or carb restriction. However, this is not an argument for a sedentary life. Furthermore, intense exercisers should have a small dose of carbs/sugar before a session to be most effective at pushing the effort.

I have written about the "False Hunger" of the overweight in the past. Paradoxically, the people who least need food experience hunger more than fit people, and consume food more avidly. I think it's usually an effect of being overweight, not a cause, but everybody is different.

Often forgotten: Fruit and fruit juices do not really belong on any fat-burning program. A glass of OJ or apple juice is the same as a Coke. The Big Fruit industry somehow convinced people that there was something "healthy" about fruit.  There is not. Fruit is dessert, a treat. Neither do cereals or grains, except minimally, belong on a fat-burning plan.

Let's say you are pudgy or fat and want to commit to a 6-7 day per week serious fitness program (something like the programs we recommend on Maggie's - not simply walking, aerobic swimming, or an hour trudging on a treadmill) to both lose fat and to get into fighting shape in general - high-energy, strong, trim, athletic, and fully-functional for life.

You have competing goals, fat loss and strength-building, which makes it complicated.  So what sort of nutritional plan do you need for our programs of weights, calisthenics, HIIT, etc? 

As readers know, fat loss is 90% nutritional under ordinary conditions. For sedentary people (less than 5-8 hrs/wk of strenuous physical activity), we recommend a low carb diet - lots of filler vegetables and greens, meat and fat. But if you are committing to an arduous daily exercise program too, you will need some amount of daily carbs and extra protein to sustain your exercise and to build/repair muscles happily damaged by exertion.

Nobody writes about this, but I have the correct advice.

For overweight serious exercisers only, use the scale as your guide. If you lose 2-4 lbs/month in your program, that's fine.  If you lose much more than that, up your carbs and dietary volume a bit.  If you lose less, lower your carbs and volume.  

The reason is that too-rapid weight loss will interfere with your fitness and strength-building goals. If you want both, you have to balance these goals. You have to consider that, if you are doing weight training (which everybody ought to do), a male can actually gain 1/4 lb/month in muscle in the beginning months while losing fat at the same time.

I'd recommend as a starting point for overweight daily hard-exercisers a carb intake of mostly one fruit and a bowl of oatmeal daily, and allow for one or two light beers too, or a glass of wine, for sanity. No dessert, bread, potato, pasta, rice, etc. Then get on the scale after one month of the program and feed yourself accordingly. Never get on the scale more often than twice a month - preferably once monthly. And always at the same time of day.

nb: For relatively in-shape exercisers, the recommendations would be entirely different.

Nobody really wants to fall in the "sedentary life style" category, do they? It's like flunking Gym Class. Losers, right?

Sedentary is generally defined as less than 5-7 hours of strenuous physical activity per week. That's a low bar, since many or most adults that I know seem to have a sport they play either seasonally or year-round at least once weekly.

What is "strenuous" naturally depends on the level of fitness, so it is easier to define what is not a strenuous hour, like walking. Basketball is strenuous, Baseball and golf are not. Heavy sweat is one measure of "strenuous", as is heart rate or deadlift weight. For example, many "cardio" exercises can be done strenuously or non-strenuously. Swimming, running, biking/spinning, and rowing can be done one of three ways: semi-comfortably, energetically, and full-out anaerobic sprints. The only way to make them "strenuous" is to do them for time x distance so you can compete with yourself.

When it comes to weights and calisthenics, "strenuous" is fairly obvious: if you can't do any more weight reps or pushups or jumping jacks, and your sweat is dripping on the floor, it was strenuous. "Strenuous" implies "strain," ie going beyond comfort to serious mental and physical effort despite discomfort and stress.

The CDC offers two levels of recommendations for adults, one for "Benefit" and one for "More Benefit". Their "More Benefit" recommendations turn out to be very similar to the sorts of programs discussed on our website: combinations of weights, HIIT cardio + endurance cardio, and calisthenics. Many people are rightly distrustful of government advice, but since it happens to roughly correspond to ours it  might give their experts some credibility.

(They have separate recommendations for older than 65-70, but I see no reason for that. There is no necessary or observable correlation between age and fitness in adults).

The condition has long been considered untreatable. Experts can spot it in a child as young as 3 or 4, or so they claim. But a new clinical approach offers hope.

Not much hope, but a little bit. A strong sadistic streak is not equivalent to sociopathy, and there is some evil in everybody. 

From the need to be popular, deliver us, O Lord!

I get the idea of that, but don't most of us wish to be admired, valued, appreciated, loved, or at least wanted? Isolation and loneliness are the saddest things to see. Heart-breaking.

As an ex-nerdy science and sports gal who did not sit at the Cool Kids' Table,  I am happy to be a relatively sought-after and popular figure in adulthood. People enjoy my company! Yay!

Dolphin Capital Theory