If youβre an adult who is getting chunky go get a bike. I ride all the time now and i lost like 20 kilos doing it. You wonβt regret it, i promise.
this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2025
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Eh, it's not that simple:
A systematic review of studies with a minimum of 1-year follow-up (4) suggested that subjects who used exercise alone for weight reduction experienced minimal weight loss.
It also mentions that you have to exercise for more than an hour every day, expending over 600 kcals, for any significant loss.
But you're still advocating for exercise, right?
Well, generally yes on exercise, but not for weight control, not in this amount for people that would want to use it for weight control (7 hours a week means this is now your hobby and if you're not acclimated to that amount of wear and tear, especially with a heavier body, it's a recipe for injury, and if you don't enjoy it you're going to be miserable and stop anyway), and not for people who can't or shouldn't. Basically, for most people, find something safe for you and enjoyable for you and do it in amounts that are enjoyable. There's no moral imperative to exercise or be healthy generally, though.
There's no moral imperative to exercise or be healthy generally
I respectfully disagree. I think we all have a moral imperative to try for health. Understanding that some factors can be out of our hands, we ahould still work with what we've got to be the healthiest version of ourselves possible. I think good nutrition, regular exercise, annual bloodwork, etc are basic parts of being a responsible adult.
So single mothers that prioritize work and family are sinful in your eyes? We can look down on people with depression if they're not trying to be healthy enough? Is assisted suicide also a sin? These aren't meant to be a counterargument, but an invitation into nuance and empathy.
Health is temporary and usually accidental at best.
Wall of text incoming.
I'm empathetic, and I don't believe in the concept of sin.
I think it's about harm reduction. In your example, a single mother who deprioritizes health in favor of work is probably trading long-term harm reduction (aging healthily) for short-term harm reduction (putting food on the table and a roof over her kids' heads). But she's also causing both short- and long-term harm by teaching her kids by example not to take care of their health. Part of her responsibility is teaching her kids to take good care of themselves. It's much easier to grow up with a mindset of health than to develop one in adulthood!
Of course we can't look down on people with depression, but we can at least acknowledge that if they're not looking after their mental or physical health, they're falling down on the job and probably making things worse for themselves. I get it. I went through some awful shit in my early twenties, and was deeply depressed and skyrocketed from 105 lbs to 177 in a pretty short time. I was obese and in poor physical health, and this was worsening my depression. I had a moral responsibility to fix myself, and it took years, but I did.
I am a million percent in favor of suicide, assisted or not, because nobody who desperately wants to die should be forced to live.
Health is temporary and usually accidental at best.
Respectfully, I think this is a sad, defeatist mindset. Sure, you can still wind up unhealthy even if you do all the healthy behaviors (e.g., breast cancer), but there are still obvious benefits to healthy behaviors. If health is truly temporary, then I'd like to do everything I can to prolong my "temporary" good health. And honestly the idea that health is "usually accidental at best" flies in the face of loads of medical research. Our lifestyles and our choices do impact our health. We can help lower our cholesterol by reducing saturated fat intake. We can help prevent Type II diabetes by limiting our sugar intake. We can stave off joint deterioration by maintaining a healthy weight. We can protect our mobility as we age through stretching and exercise. There are definitely things that are out of our control (e.g., chronic illness or severe disease like cancer), but there's also a whole lot that we can control, and I think we all have an obligation to try.
There's some contradictions in your points that you might take a look at. Imagine the mother in the first example be suicidal like in the third.
As for the accidental and temporary health, I have immediate family that has Parkinson's, another that has MS, a friend that had brain surgery to remove cancer. No amount of effort would prevent any of these. As Captain Picard says: "It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness, that is life."
You mention reducing sugar intake to prevent type II diabetes. From https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5133084/
We conclude based on high quality evidence from randomized controlled trials (RCT), systematic reviews and meta-analyses of cohort studies that singling out added sugars as unique culprits for metabolically based diseases such as obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease appears inconsistent with modern, high quality evidence and is very unlikely to yield health benefits.
Weight reduction as imperative has also given us things like Fen-phen.
The article cites several sources indicating non-responders to 'exercise only' was likely due to increased kcal intake. People tend to drastically under-self-report intake as well.
Just a reminder that by these standards nearly every person that lifts weights regularly is morbidly obese.
BMI is only useful at a population-level, and certainly not for athletes.
Most people are not particularly athletic, though.
It's not actually useful on a population level because it's at best a very inaccurate measurement of a serious oversimplification of a very complex system. It also actively causes harm on the individual level through healthcare providers and insurance.
Weight stigma causes worse health outcomes: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4381543/
It's an oversimplification, yes. It's a deliberate one, designed to be easy to collect at a population-level.
It's a bit like turning down the resolution a whole lot on an image - you lose details to the point where there's a whole lot you can no longer tell from the image, but some parts of the whole picture can still be interpreted.
In the case of BMI, this is stuff at a statistical level, the one where you need thousands of people and multiple percentage points to actually be able to tell stuff.
It also actively causes harm on the individual level through healthcare providers and insurance.
I don't disagree. It's not made for this purpose and should not be used for it either. A larger solution of getting rid of private health insurance as a system is what I would recommend, of course.
Weight stigma causes worse health outcomes
It's horrible that this has to be added as a caveat, but I'll add it anyway:
It's not ok to be mean to people on account of what they weigh
"Easy to collect" and "useful" aren't necessarily correlated. Waist size, for example, deals with a few of the problems with BMI like athletic builds (but not the general issue of correlating weight with health) and should be easier to collect as a tape measure is more portable than a scale. Still stuck with BMI though for some reason.
They don't need to be athletes to be healthy but overweight. They just need to not be a starving peasant in the 1800s to be overweight by BMI calculations.
Something tells me the problem isn't too many weightlifters.
We don't genuinely know since bmi is a useless stat made by a rando that knew as much about medicine as the average dropout. It's great for roughly pegging a human to a 150 year old average of peasant weights, and it's great for sensationalist headlines, but it's pretty pointless otherwise. The Rock, for instance, has the same BMI as Gabriel Iglesias.
People are larger than they were in the 1800s, in every dimension, thanks to better nutrition and fewer famines. Of course BMI is going to go up when we never update the standards for what is or isn't overweight.
Not if the world keeps slipping into fascism
I thought we were all doing the health craze stuff. Wtf boyz! Eat some salad kits!