I think most people associate "physical exercise" with having to spend an hour at the gym or something similar.

What they should be thinking is: going for a walk around the block, not getting the car for close by errands, not taking the elevator, going for a bike ride, etc

This is such an important distinction to actually effect change. The vast majority of folks who go from 0 to Gym Rat will quickly peter out, reverting to sedentariness. Small lifestyle changes are far more effective.

Likewise for diets. Those who spend their New Years resolution momentum eating baked chicken and broccoli for a week or completely cutting out carbs will shortly find themselves failing completely and binging ice cream or whatever. Rarely do you see sensible advice like "keep your same diet habits, but cut out soft drinks", or "if you engage in late night boredom-eating, try binging vegetables instead."

Unfortunately, humble and incremental changes in habit seem antithetical to our society's affection for (unrealistic) sweeping, dramatic transformations.

I have to agree. I’ve been able to keep my gym attendance regular by starting pretty slow and gradually building up to more intense workouts.

I honestly have done this for the endorphine boost, but overall I’ve lost just under 11kg in about 10 months and I’ve really started to notice my belly go down, and I can actually see muscle building now... which I’ll be honest and say surprised me (why I have no idea). This is great, but I did exercise to deal with some pretty appalling trauma I experienced - everything else is nice but for me, not essential.

> I’ve been able to keep my gym attendance regular by starting pretty slow and gradually building up to more intense workouts.

People start way too intense, spending hours in the gym, and burn out all their enthusiasm in the first weeks or two before they realize that their efforts are unsustainable. Really, start with a plan on what do to, go in and do it. If it's a half hour that's perfectly fine. My sessions, depending on the day, last anywhere from half an hour to 3 based upon my mood and the workload for that particular session - but you gotta keep the mandatory work to a reasonable amount - everything else should be treated as icing on the fitness cake.

I'm sure to go with the 11 kg there has been significant body composition changes to make it count for more as well.

I've enjoyed cleaning chores a lot more after mentally declaring them to be exercise.

See, this is some of my own problem. I personally despise going for a walk for the sake of going for a walk. The same for a bike ride. The only times I've enjoyed such things is when part of my unhappiness was at home and it was one of the few escapes available. I don't find these fun at all. Doing actual exercise sounds dreadful and embarrassing. Not to mention that finding basic gear is expensive and hard to find (I'm just talking about a sports bra here - unfortunately, if you are thin with breasts, these get incredibly hard to find and expensive and often must be mail-ordered, which makes them risky).

Yet I'll walk to anywhere within a half an hour's walk. I'll do that daily. Grocery store? walk. I'll go longer at times. I'll take the stairs. I'll go out hiking and walking to see something or do something.

Unfortunately, if I have nothing to see or do - no work or lack the means to do something - I rarely do these things. These have generally been the times when my mental health is worst as well (though that trend has changed the last few years). It makes me despise these sorts of reports.

I like walking to town though the park and listening to a good podcast (through the phone's speaker, I don't bother with headphones.)

Also sometimes when I've spent time indoors on the PC/internet I realize that sitting outside with a book would have been better.

I s'pose that access to nearby walking routes and some sort of garden can be a big help here and I'm lucky in that respect.

I totally agree with you. I go to gym and weight train 3 days a week and I spend one day running as far as I possibly can (8-10 mile range). If someone asked me to go for a walk, I would just slouch down in my sofa and ignore them. I hate walking without purpose and as an exercise it does pretty much nothing.

Personally, I hate exercising but I do about 90 minutes of high intensity cardio every day (with no end goal like grocery shopping; just for the sake of exercise). It's masochistic and I wish I were the type of person who actually enjoyed it.

For me, it just took having the self-control to commit to an exercise regime. Eventually it became easier because I track my exercise and having a break in it (even if I am traveling or on vacation) feels really bad.

I doubt it would work for everyone, but I think it was necessary for me because I live in a city and even if I walked everywhere (which I do), I would never get enough exercise to offset 8-hour days of sitting at a computer desk writing software.

Yes, even just the "10K steps a day" idea is vastly better than nothing...

Well, it could mean that mental health professionals push exercise significantly more as a treatment. A lot of people see psychologists and doctors about mental health.

They already do .. badly. There was an excellent thread on twitter the other day along the lines of "I went to my doctor saying I was suicidal and got sent away with this worksheet" - a whole collection of completely inadequate responses to acute mental health issues.

That would be the "fuck if I can help you" non-response. Around here it happens a lot because it takes so long to get into a psychiatrist that unless you admit to suicidal ideation, intent and a plan, you're not going to get help fast. A lot of family docs have their hands tied.

In practice, it probably just adds a bit more motivation or reinforcement to the existing body of knowledge. There is a lot of conflicting info out there about how much is needed, what kind, etc., so the fact that this is saying a broad range of activities and so on were shown helpful is a plus. Helps take the "should I run or bike or weight lift or... screw it, I'm sitting on the couch" out of it.

> I think it's already in the "everybody knows" category,

No, it isn't. It's in the folk remedy, but there's not much evidence to support exercise as a treatment for depression.

> I think it's already in the "everybody knows" category

I’m sure most people have a pretty good idea exercise can help with mental health. I think the next thing that needs to happen is a broader awareness of just how effective exercise can be, and that it should be one of the very first thing tried to improve mental health. I think this should happen along with a general increase in mental health awareness (you can’t use exercise to help with your depression if you don’t recognize you’re depressed).

> I’m sure most people have a pretty good idea exercise can help with mental health. I think the next thing that needs to happen is a broader awareness of just how effective exercise can be,

First step would be "get some evidence it does anything at all". We're not even at that point yet.

Almost everyone in this thread talking about exercise as a treatment for depression is failing to correct for cuasality, or for sponteneous remission.

> (you can’t use exercise to help with your depression if you don’t recognize you’re depressed)

More like you can't use exercise to treat depression because it doesn't work. There's no clear difference between treating depression with nothing or treating it with exercise.

And so we end up with a group of people being given bad advice, trying to follow it, and then when it doesn't work (because it won't work for most of them) being blamed for doing the wrong type of exercise or not doing enough.

Agreed for most people with mild-moderate mental illness. It's an intervention that can reduce intensity for quite a number of people, though not everyone. (I wish more people would also get checked early on for easily fixed metabolic stuff like low iron, wonky thyroid etc.)

My completely anecdotal example... it kept me from starting crazy meds for at least an extra year or two (by the time I was up to 1-2 hours, 7d/week, it was time to bite the bullet.. though at lower doses than I likely would have otherwise needed.

I think the next step is to try and examine causation vs correlation via known already bad patients. If say psychiatric inpatients within hospitals start adding in more exercise programs would they have improved patient results? The setting is also important for ethics - if it may worsen patient outcomes one should be ready to prevent further harm.

Or it could theoretically be like trying to treat muscular dystrophy via 100 lb bench presses - the system is too far gone for it to help.

> 100 lb bench presses

C'mon, no shaming the 100 lbs bench press - I absolutely encourage someone whose benching 100 lbs to bench, because if they work hard pretty quickly it won't be 100 lbs any more.

And you raise an excellent point - is exercising the thing boosting the mood, or is the exercising the result of a mood boost.

Ironically I think the parent poster intended 100lb as "completely unachievable for someone with muscular dystrophy", while you've read it as "so light as to be completely ineffective"!

Yes, I realize this now. Whoops.