We have pretty successfully engineered almost all physical activity out of the normal daily life of a middle-aged suburban American, who move from bed to car seat to desk chair to car seat to couch to bed with as little walking as possible in between.

Most other societies make walking (including to and from public transit) and bicycling much bigger parts of their transportation landscape, rather than designing new communities to make driving as easy as possible and other means of transportation impossible, either intentionally or implicitly.

I work from home, so it's doubly bad for me - I don't even have to walk to a car, just the couple steps from bed to my office.

I went to Boston for Red Hat Summit last week and it amazed me just how exhausted I was after all the walking to/from the train stations and around the convention. I used to bike every day to/from work when I was just a couple years younger and never felt as sore and tired as I did every day during the event. I really need to start getting out more, even just walking to the coffee shop 1/4 mile away on occasion and working from there.

I live in the desert where going outside in the summer is intolerable. What's helping me immensely while working from home is playing some VR games throughout the day. If I want something light I play a few rounds of archery in Holopoint. If I want to max my heart rate very quickly I'll do boxing in Thrill of the Fight.

When I visited Houston I felt like I was being held hostage. I love living in a city because it makes it really easy to be active. Time spent in Houston feels like it's being spent in the most hostile suburb on the planet.

Honestly, I think Houston might actually be hell.

I highly recommend doing a basic weightlifting program. I find lifting weights, and the goal setting/tracking involved, to be much more engaging than cardio exercises.

If you don't have access to weights, get a pull-up bar and some pushup handles.

I saw a huge improvement to my overall health and physique doing a basic pull-up and pushup program.

I have a membership to the local YMCA, but only have an opportunity to go once a week since I live in your typical unwalkable/no-public-transit suburban area and don't have a drivers license. Used to go a couple nights a week when my daughter still napped and stayed up until 9PM since we could go as a family and have dinner afterward, but now she's in bed by 7:30/8:00 and there isn't enough time.

Another year or two and things will be looking different again, for the moment getting some exercise on a daily basis is still a better spot than where I'm at.

Invest in a $20 pullup bar. Every time you pass it try to bang out a few reps.

I went from doing 10 pushups, no pullups to being able to bang out 100+ pushpus and 50+ pullups over the course of a day.

I can now do prob 50+ pushups and 10+ pullups in one set. Took me less than a year to get here.

I was the kid in MS/HS that coudn't even do one pullup!

If it's practical for you, consider getting a dog. Dogs need to be exercised every day so it forces you to get out and walk or run at least a couple miles every day. And by "dog" I mean a real dog, not some fragile inbred abomination that can't handle a run around the block.

And don't have a yard, or if you do, don't allow letting the dog into the yard be a stand in for taking the dog for a walk. Obviously that defeats the point for you, but it also doesn't do the dog any favours either.

My large inbred abomination (Bernese Mountain Dog, cute, cuddly, overbred) has never lived anywhere with a yard, so gets real walks.

My wife and daughter would love a dog, but we rent and already have a couple cats so it's not really in the cards right now (the cats alone aren't an issue, but trying to get the OK from the landlady for another animal isn't in the cards).

its really amazing how much a difference 20 minutes of walking a day makes.

so instead, spend that time in a car, and that time again at a gym. what wealth!

How much energy do you burn with 20 minutes of walking? A couple hundred kilocalories at most? That's not going to solve anyone's weight problem.

If you work from home and otherwise spend 20 seconds walking for your "commute", a factor of 60 improvement is a big change.

I'm afraid that's meaningless feel-good talk. It doesn't matter how large the relative change is if the absolute value is still too small to help.

There are benefits to light exercise beyond calorie expenditure.

I can tell you that amount of walking makes zero difference to me. Certainly not in terms of weight. Maybe it has some health benefit that statisticians could eek out by studying 1,000 of me over a lifetime, but not anything cosmetic.

And cosmetics are what really matters in these discussions, because that is how you are ultimately judged and categorized.

Maintaining 1lb of fat is ~2-4calories per day though this increases with activity levels. So, assuming all else is the same over 30 years you would end up around 20-30 pounds heaver.

In the real world exercise is important for regulating appetite which has a much larger impact. Remember, evolution was not optimizing for people to sit around all day long. So, feedback systems are dependent on activity.

Exercise won't cause you to lose weight. It has other important benefits though.

It's not a lot, but 20 minutes daily walking at a good pace would be sufficient for most people to lose about 1lb / month, assuming no change in diet.

Like a hundred. Pretty much a large Apple.

A decent paced 5k burns like 400 at most

Most people aren't overeating by thousands of calories a day, increasing activity by 20 minutes without increased intake would probably diminish the vast majority of weight gain for a large percentage of the populous.

> Most other societies make walking

Unfortunately, obesity is a global epidemic, and it is not showing signs of slowing in, as far as I can tell, in any developed nation.

It's worse for me because I move from bed, to shower, then down to the office downstairs.

You'd be surprised how many steps you get from just walking around the office. Luckily, I don't have a problem exercising on a daily basis, whether it's just walking outside or hitting the gym.

Losing weight is an entirely separate issue for me though. After hard-core lifting sessions, I'm eating way too many calories.

> Americans don't seem to have unique physical traits that cause them to gain weight, we just don't have healthy habits

A diet of hyper-palatable, nutritionally void processed food will do that.

Eat real food. Meat, fish, nuts, fruits, veggies, maybe some carb-dense grains (I like rice) here and there when your body can take advantage of the extra glucose, and you'd be surprised how easy it is to both manage your hunger and your weight.

Frankly, this is bunk. If it's calories in and calories out, then there is an exact number of daily potato chips one can calculate for each person to achieve and maintain an ideal weight. You'll get just as fat on "real food".

If you eat 200 calories of sugar, your body will turn it into fat, and you'll be hungry in 20 minutes, suffer mood swings, migraines and eventually diabetes. If you eat 200 calories of protein, fats and slow carbs, you'll be full, and you'll be able to function until the next meal.

The quality of your calories absolutely matters.

It might matter to mood, but it doesn't matter in terms of weight gain/loss.

You could eat nothing but 1000 calories of pure sugar a day and still lose weight

> You could eat nothing but 1000 calories of pure sugar a day and still lose weight

Yes, if you were locked in a room and passed exactly 1000 calories of sugar cubes and water every single day. Most of us live in the real world with food all around us, easily available, and responsibilities to stay on top of. It's really easy to say "this diet is making me feel terrible, I'm just going to eat what I want so I won't be so cranky to my kids".

And likewise you could take a knife and cut out belly fat. It is possible. However it has significant negatives that make it unlikely that people will follow through with the idea. I totally agree that if a person is successful at eating only 1000 calories of sugar per day then they will lose weight. But they wont be successful.

You know that's a completely irrelevant comparison. There is nothing causing a person to gain back weight after losing it outside of willpower.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/

Now if only you could put willpower in a bottle.

Calorie restriction diets feel like holding your breath for 6 months straight. Then as soon as you can't take it anymore, you exhale and instantly gain it all back. It's horrible. Nobody's will can hold out for that long.

Some people are happy eating whatever diet keeps them at an ideal weight. Some people never will be, and it's a form of torture.

And yet it works. I know because I've done it and lost a TON of weight simply by not eating.

If the goal is to "solve the obesity epidemic", it doesn't matter if it works for a small number of people. The reality we must wake up to is that calls for people to eat less will never, ever be successful at solving the problem.

Willpower, hunger, and habit.

This is like saying that all that matters to your bank account balance is dollars in and dollars out. It's obviously true in the most trivial sense, but it's not useful advice. There are countless other factors that affect the amount in and amount out.

If someone is trying to increase their bank balance which advice is more likely to help them: "Just increase your dollars in or decrease your dollars out" or "Get a roommate, move to a less expensive neighborhood, cook your own food instead of eating out"?

Of course it's about calories. But hormonal responses and insulin resistance affect how your body handles nutrition and regulates hunger.

One tends to regulate itself, while the other requires strict (and rarely followed) calorie counting.

If you eat hyper palatable food that makes you hungrier, you'll eat more. Pure and simple.

That's technically true, though anecdotally, my body def responds differently to whole vs processed foods. Even if the cals and macro nutrients (Protein/Fat/Carbs) remain the same.

Yes, there's a systemic issue here. Just as we don't say "Users just need to be smarter!" when a substantial segment of the population is having difficulty accessing our programs, we shouldn't say "Eaters just need to eat fewer calories!" when OVER HALF of the population is getting sick on the food supply.

Try to buy something healthy at your conventional grocer. It's generally tucked away at the far extremities of the aisle if it's there at all, and you normally have to bypass several fake "healthy" options that are really just slightly different formulations of the primary recipe. You have to really hunt just to find something as simple as a loaf of bread that isn't infused with extra sugar. Some loaves that bill themselves as "wheat" are still mostly white bread, etc. There is a large array of deceptive tactics used to get people to buy the more addictive formulations when they think they're buying healthier ones.

IMO this is a technology problem. We have sufficient technology to bring a steady supply of maximally-desirable foods, which, unfortunately, tend to have the least nutritional value. This creates perverse incentives across the marketplace because grocers, suppliers, distributors, and farmers all want to sell more, which means they will always favor the higher-calorie options, because human biology always favors it. It's a really bad place to stall at a technological stasis.

Instead of fighting chemistry and biology and berating those who fall victim not only to their own strong physical inclinations but also to a barrage of marketing tactics designed to trick them into continuing to buy addictive-but-unhealthy foods when they're explicitly trying not to do so, we need to develop technology that makes broccoli maximally-desirable without changing its basic nutritional and caloric properties, or technology that infuses maximally-desirable foods with nutritional and caloric properties akin to maximally-nutritious foods.

I don't think most people are compulsive overeaters. There's a myth among some naive people that every overweight person has a stash of 40 SNICKERS bars constantly at hand and that they eat 10 of these per day. This is not true except in the most extreme cases. The truth is that most people eat reasonably normal amounts and types of foods.

I would actually take it one step further than technology as the root of the problem. That technology was developed because market competition made each of the producers have to differentiate their products, which has manifested itself in a bar-raising game. The easy optimizations have all been done already, and now these companies optimize for flavor, since nutritional value won't make customers return to your products. The companies are playing a psychological and physiological game with us, they know it, and they spend millions doing so.

A good article on this: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary...

I agree, but I don't blame them. Survival depends on market performance. If customers aren't buying what they're selling, they have to make something customers will buy.

I don't think the solution is to constrain the food companies. That's a hardcoded workaround at best, and the potential ramifications do not seem pleasant. We can't turn back the hands of time; the fact is that the demand is there, and while minor attempts to curb demand like a junk food tax may help a little bit, the core issue is that our bodies crave those foods at a fundamental level. Our bodies punish us for wasting what it interprets as a valuable food store by making us extremely uncomfortable. Creating a black market for Doritos is unlikely to provide real social benefit.

We need to find a way to fix the technological state of having the ability to create unnaturally hyper-caloric foods, which our bodies love, but not the ability to properly dispose of the excess calories. We need to a) make our bodies love low-or-no calorie foods (and Splenda et al are great innovations in this space, though obviously not complete); b) make our bodies dispose of excess calories in a healthy manner, instead of putting them into excessive fat stores (this may be something like a medical device or drug that 'consumes' the calories on behalf of the digestive system); c) make high-calorie foods filling and nutritious, so that one Milky Way provides satiation and nutritional benefits that align with its calorie count.

And it doesn't help that the industry specifically designs foods to not fill you up, so you continue to eat more.

Check out Salt Sugar Fat if you haven't read it yet. Good stuff: https://www.amazon.com/Salt-Sugar-Fat-Giants-Hooked/dp/08129...

I've lost 20 lbs that way, eating real food.