I always thought I would write this blog forever.

I know I haven’t written anything of real substance here in years. The past few years I’ve been writing less and reading more. To me, that’s a healthy part of the cycle: nobody wants to read someone who is writing for the sake of writing. If you want to have something new to say, something valuable to contribute, you have to spend time (years, really) reading and thinking and learning and thinking again. So as my interests shifted from epistemology and philosophy of religion (which I now regard as essentially solved problems) and politics (which has grown repetitive to me) to health,  I used this website as my research journal. But ultimately I assumed that I’d have something new to say in time, and that I’d write here (with varying frequency) essentially forever.

What I didn’t anticipate was developing crippling carpal tunnel. Because my profession requires me to type, I am suddenly unable to touch a keyboard or mouse for non-work reasons. I am in very real danger of becoming permanently disabled, and I that means I can’t use the computer unless it’s really necessary. For someone who has built his life around computers for decades, this comes as something of a blow.

It’s not all bad. I see it as just another way that my body is telling me to put down the keyboard, stop being sedentary, and spend more time outside or in the kitchen. So I’m adjusting. I don’t mind as much as I thought I would.

The prognosis for this website, however, is less positive. If I can’t type, then I can’t write, and it’s unlikely that I’ll be able to update this site with any frequency at all. I might still update very, very occasionally. If you’re interested in that, I suggest subscribing to the RSS feed.

If any of my old regular readers happen to still be reading, thanks for the stimulating conversation. I learned a lot from all of you.

Otherwise: so long, and thanks for all the fish.

At some point, I decided that I was smart but unathletic, and fed on a diet of cyberpunk and the hacker ethos, I leaned into that and began to treat my body as a vestigal platform that simply served to carry my head from place to place. As it turns out, that was the stupidest thing I could do: our minds are our bodies, and a fit body creates a smart mind:

“Like synaptic plasticity, ‘neurogenesis is clearly involved in our interactions with the environment, both emotionally and cognitively,’ says neuroscientist Fred Gage of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California… Neurons are born as blank-slate stem cells, and they go through a development process in which they need to find something to do in order to survive. Most of them don’t. It takes about twenty-eight days for a fledgling cell to plug into a network, and, as with existing neurons, Hebb’s concept of activity-dependent learning would apply: if we don’t use the newborn neurons, we lose them… ‘When we first did our experiments, we had all sorts of things going on,’ Gage explains. ‘We needed to tease that out, and to our surprise, just putting a running wheel in a cage had a profound effect on the number of cells that were born. Ironically, with running, the same percentage of cells die as in the control group – it’s just that you have a bigger starting pool. But in order for a cell to survive and integrate, it has to fire its axon.’ Exercise spawns neurons, and the stimulation of environmental enrichment helps those cells survive.

The first solid link between neurogenesis and learning came from one of Gage’s colleagues, Henrietta van Praag. They used a rodent-size pool filled with opaque water to hide a platform just beneath he surface in one quadrant. Mice don’t like water, so the equipment was designed to test how well they remember, from an earlier dip, the location of the platform – their escape route. When comparing inactive mice with others that hit the running wheel four to five kilometers a night, the results showed that the runners remembered where to find safety more quickly. Both groups swam at the same rate, but the exercised animals made a beeline for the platform, while the sedentary ones floundered about before figuring it out. When the mice were dissected, the active mice had twice as many new stem cells in the hippocampus as the inactive ones. Speaking generally about what they found, Gage says: ‘There is a significant correlation between the total number of cells and [a mouse's] ability to perform a complex task. And if you block neurogenesis, mice can’t recall information.

Although all this research is in rodents, you can see how it might relate back to the kids in Naperville: Gym class provides the brain with the right tools to learn, and the stimulation in the kids’ classes encourages those newly developing cells to plug into the network, where they become valuable members of the signaling community…

What I find interesting, though, is that relatively few scientists are studying exercise because they’re interested in exercise. Rather, they make the mice run because it ‘massively increases neurogenesis,’ as the title of a 2006 study in Hippocampus proclaimed, and thus allows researchers to deconstruct the chain of signals behind the process. That’s what the pharmaceutical companies need to create drugs. They dream of an anti-Alzheimer’s pill that regenerates neurons to keep memory intact… Just imagine if they could put exercise in a bottle.”

– John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, pg. 48-50.

On how (and why) to design an exercise program:

“So if someone wants to start exercising… I would ask: What are you trying to accomplish? And why? There seem to be three principal reasons for exercising, and what is needed for one goal is not necessarily what is needed for another.

If your goal is to improve your health, studies in recent years have consistently indicated that you get the most benefit when you go from no exercise at all to exercising moderately. Starting with Steve Blair’s classic study ‘Physical Fitness and All-Cause Mortality’ (1989), a convincing body of research has emerged in support of the observation that most of the health benefit probably occurs from just mild exercise, not necessarily from the most arduous workouts… Most health benefits seem to accrue if you simply walk briskly for about 20 to 30 minutes a day, covering a mile in 15 to 20 minutes, or ride a bike at a modest pace. You can take three 10-minute walks a day, or you can ride a bike for 20 minutes and walk for 10. Or you can swim at a comfortable pace for all or a part of your exercise program. Almost any physical activity will suffice, and there is no need to push yourself till you’re out of breath, gasping for air. You don’t have to return from your session soaked in sweat. Yes, you do get a slight extra benefit from exercising a little harder or a little longer, but that extra benefit is small compared to the benefit you apparently get from just doing moderate exercise.

When it comes to the benefits of strength training, the extensive body of evidence in the position paper written by the American College of Sports Medicine documents that it can improve muscle strength, make everyday life easier, and prevent falls. Decades of research by exercise physiologists show that resistance exercise can change the muscle cells in positive ways. As Claude Bouchard, for example, confirmed in his large study of inherited differences in the ability to train, muscle that is developed with exercise is more efficient, has more mitochondria, and is better at using fat for fuel and at allowing cells to use insulin to utilize blood sugar, thus making diabetes less likely…

The second reason to exercise is to improve your appearance and your performance. You may want to be thinner or stronger. In this case, moderate exercise is unlikely to be enough. Whether you lose weight may depend on how hard you exercise, how long, what you eat, and what your genetics are… Whether you grow stronger or reshape your body depends on a lot of factors, including your genes, but also including how often you lift weights, whether the weights are heavy enough to stress your muscles, and whether you stay within your program. The exercise that will make you… more muscular, the sort that will allow you to run faster or swim for longer distances, requires not just consistency but effort. Or, as exercise physiologist Donald Kirkendall says: ‘If you want to push performance, you’ve got to push intensity. The biggest way to gain fitness is to push intensity.’

The third reason for exercise is almost never the impetus for starting. Instead, it is one that tends to creep up on people, taking them by surprise. Yet it is the one that often accounts for them staying with an exercise program. Time and again, when I ask people why they keep exercising, year in and year out, they tell me that they started exercising to lose weight, or to help their hearts, or to firm up their bodies, and kept at it because they discovered that they loved physical exertion…

One day, I get an email from Richard Friedman, the avid swimmer and psychopharmacologist at the Cornell medical school. He knows I’m writing this book and he has a question: ‘Are you planning to tell the truth about exercise?’ he asks me.

I write back. What, I ask, is the truth?

‘Ah, the truth about exercise?’ he replies. ‘Well, I suspect that exercise is more often a marker of health than it’s cause — healthy people like to exercise more than unhealthy people to start with.’”

– Gina Kolata, Ultimate Fitness: The Quest for Truth About Exercise and Health, pg. 262-67.

My guess is that it’s best to focus on the third reason for exercise, and let the first two fall into place naturally over time. Become the sort of person who enjoys exercise (if you can), lean into that transformation, let it wash over every aspect of your personality and change how you think. If you do that, you’re both more likely to stick with exercise for life and you’re also more likely to accrue the ancillary health benefits that come, not from exercising, but from being the sort of person who exercises regularly.

The QOTD, on structuring a weight lifting program:

“Scientists, though repeated studies, have discovered… that people must stress muscles with weights that are challenging in order to elicit increases in strength or size. The order of the exercises is important: they should work large muscles, like those of the quadriceps, before small muscles, like those of the inner thigh. That is because working a small muscle first fatigues the adjacent larger one. The main variables in a weight-lifting program, he said, are intensity, resistance, order, and choice of the number of sets. The lifting exercises also should vary, so a person does not do exactly the same thing week after week, month after month. By manipulating those variables, people can achieve their goals.

The accumulated knowledge to date is published in a position statement that Kraemer and a committee he headed wrote for the American College of Sports Medicine. The paper, which appeared in 2002, is impressive. If it has one theme it is that a variety of programs are effective but you have to keep stressing your muscles if you want to see any change. On specific questions, though, it often equivocates, noting that the details of a program depend on one’s goals and that some questions still cannot be answered.

Should you do one set or several? Studies have not answered that question, it says. Should you use free weights, like dumbbells and barbells, or machines? Beginners and intermediates should use both, and advanced athletes should spend most of their time with free weights but also should use some machines. What about the speed with which you perform your weight-lifting exercises? It is important to train at fast, moderate, and slow speeds, the paper says. But the most effective speed seems to be about one second to one to two seconds for a contraction and about the same for a muscle lengthening.

The paper says you should train every major muscle group of your body two to three days a week but that if you are at a stage where you work on one body area (say, the upper body) in each session, you should work that body area just one to two days a week.

Kraemer tells me that if there is one overarching message for weight lifters it is that they must vary their training, changing their routine to do different exercises with fewer or more repetitions, lighter and heavier weights, to see results and also to stay motivated. ‘A beginner may do one set of eight to twelve repetitions, but you can’t do this for the rest of your life. You’d be bored out of your mind.’

Yet many who lift weights actually resist learning what science has to say, Kraemer observes. ‘Weight training is mythology for some people. They don’t like science and they deal with beliefs that have nothing to do with facts… When I do peptide research, no one is going to tell me, ‘I don’t believe that happened’ whereas with weight training, people will tell me that. It’s got its own culture. And people are very visceral about what they believe.’”

– Gina Kolata, Ultimate Fitness: The Quest for Truth About Exercise and Health, pg. 234-36.

Here are two hard truths from Stephen Guyenet, a researcher at the University of Washington.

First, there may be no perfect solution for the obese:

“Obesity is not always going to be 100 percent reversible. I know no one wants to hear that, but I’m not in the business of selling snake oil. Some people can reverse it completely; others won’t lose any fat at all; the majority can probably lose a substantial amount of fat but not all of it. Highly controlled diet studies in rodents show that obesity due to eating highly rewarding/palatable refined food is mostly reversible when they are placed back on low-palatability whole food, but they don’t usually lose all of the excess fat, and the longer they’ve been obese, the less fat they lose (1, 2, 3). The capacity for the fat mass “setpoint” to re-establish at a lower level may diminish over time, varies between individuals, and probably also depends on other factors that no one currently understands. I think it’s important to be kind to yourself, and not set unreasonable expectations.”

– Stephen Guyenet, Food Reward: a Dominant Factor in Obesity, Part VII.

Next, if there is a solution, prepackaged foods are not it:

“If you think you will be able to find a way to lose fat and remain in long-term health while eating mostly commercially processed food (including restaurant food), you are fooling yourself. Processed food is the main problem, and if there is a solution, it is to avoid it. If you aren’t willing or able to eat mostly home cooked food made from basic ingredients, as every healthy culture does, you will have to accept a higher likelihood of fat gain and disease. That is the cold, hard truth.”

– Stephen Guyenet, Simple Food: Thoughts on Practicality.

• Exercise protects your brain as you age.

• More proof that your body actively regulates your level of fat mass: liposuction doesn’t work over the long term.

• The 6 most horrifying lies the food industry is feeding you.

• As a pseudonymous blogger, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point you towards this argument that pseudonyms increase honesty.

• Stress is killing you.

• “The web is a barn we raised together. ” Alexis Allen was a pioneer on the web and one of the inspirations for this blog. As she rightly points out, today’s technology industry (including Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook) are providing valuable products. But as they grow, we might also be losing something.

• A diet high in fruits and vegetables can help protect against cardiovascular disease. Note the recurring connection to inflammation.

• It’s important to remember that confidence is a feeling that can easily mislead us. The perception that we are skilled at something can easily be an illusion that can lead us astray, especially in fields (like law) where feedback is subjective, irregular, unreliable, or distanced in time from the original decision. So it’s important to always look for evidence of our own incompetence, and to only trust thinkers (or professionals) that routinely receive rigorous, prompt feedback and admit to uncertainty about their conclusions.

• Stanford Sapolsky (previously) on the physiology of depression.

• A parable on good intentions.

The QOTD, on whether weight lifting will help you lose weight:

“I ask a simple question about an article of faith among exercisers. Muscle burns more calories than fat, we’re always told. So, I want to know, if you do resistance training the way most of us — not the professional weight lifters — do it, will you noticeably increase your body’s metabolism?

Sorry, says Claude Bouchard, the researcher studying the genetic inheritance of the ability to train. Weight lifting has virtually no effect on resting metabolism. The reason is that any added muscle is minuscule compared with the total amount of skeletal muscle in the body. And muscle actually has a very low metabolic rate when it is at rest, which is most of the time. Skeletal muscle burns about 13 calories per kilogram of body weight over twenty-four hours when a person is at rest. A typical man who weights 70 kilograms (or 154 pounds) has about 28 kilograms of skeletal muscle, Bouchard says… If the man lifts weights and gains 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds) of muscle, his metabolic rate would increase by 24 calories a day. According to Jack Wilmore, the exercise physiologist at Texas A&M, the average amount of muscle that men gained after a serious weightlifting program that lasted twelve weeks was 2 kilograms… [I]t would take a lot of muscle to substantially increase the body’s metabolic rate — much more than most of us will ever build in our workouts at the gym. To burn more calories, it seems, requires more intense exercise, like running, and not just putting on some muscle and hoping it will burn calories and make you thinner as you rest…

Bouchard doesn’t want to discourage people from building muscle. The muscle you develop, he emphasizes, is more efficient, with more mitochondria and it is better at using fat for fuel. The cells are also more permeable to glucose, which, in turn, reduces the need for excess insulin in the blood. The result is a reduced susceptibility to diabetes. But it would be unreasonable to expect that you can eat more because, after all, your metabolism has gone up with more muscle mass and that even if your weight goes up, that’s okay because you really are thinner.”

– Gina Kolata, Ultimate Fitness: The Quest for Truth About Exercise and Health, pg. 230-32.

There are good reasons to exercise beyond physical fitness.

“Richard Friedman believes in exercise as part of the treatment for depression. His patients often have the worst prognoses; by the time they get to his clinic at Cornell, most have already tried the general-practitioner, take-some-Prozac route.

‘I see people who are very, very severely depressed, people who are treatment resistant,’ Friedman says. ‘I make them exercise. First, I find out what they like to do – hopefully, there’s something. If they don’t have anything they like to do, I make them joing a gym, or I tell them they have to go out walking in the morning and increase their walk each day by a couple of minutes.’ Patiens often are taken aback, he admits. ‘They look at me like I’m crazy – I’m a psychopharmacologist,’ he explains.

Of course, he prescribes antidepressent drugs. ‘I’ve never treated anyone with exercise alone,’ Friedman says. But he always adds an exercise prescription to a drug prescription. ‘I would say that they all report that within ten minutes after stopping exercise they definitely have an improved mood and it lasts for several hours, which is much faster than antidepressants.’”

– Gina Kolata, Ultimate Fitness: The Quest for Truth About Exercise and Health, pg. 126-31.

Unfortunately, regarding both weight loss and physical fitness, it seems that sometimes genetics is destiny:

“The truth about training gradually emerged when a scientist, Claude Bouchard, who had spent his career studying fat people, decided to put the training hypothesis to a test. What would happen, he asked, if he had people train in an exercise laboratory, where he could watch them and see for himself whether they really were working?..

The first study begain in 1982, with a call for men and women aged 18 to 30 who were totally inactive, with a lifetime history of being almost completely sedentary, but who were not particularly fat. The scientists did not want to confuse inactivity due to obesity with inactivity due to a possible genetic tendency to being averse to any physical exercise… For twenty weeks, these volunteers came to the lab for physical training. ‘It was a very standardized program, everyone did the same things in the lab so we could not say that some were not compliant… They began at 30 minutes a day, four days a week. Then they moved up to five days a week, up to 50 minutes a day, up to an intensity of 85 percent of their maximum heart rate. These guys discovered that they could exercise.’ But their physiological responses were very different. ‘We had large differences in respiration, in maximum oxygen update, in the results of muscle and adipose tissue biopsies,’ says Bouchard, referring to changes in endurance and the ability to exercise at a high intensity as well as changes in body fat and the size of different types of muscle fibers. ‘Some did not gain in fitness. Others improved by 50 percent, 60 percent. But they were all compliant.’

That, he says, suggested that genetic differences in responses to training do exist…

To see if these differences were caused by genetic variations, he did the studies again with pairs of identical twins. ‘We found the same thing – high responders and low responders,’ he noted. But, predictably, however one twin of a pair responded, the other twin did, too. ‘Some were high responders, some were low responders, and some were late responders,’ Bouchard reports… Children tend to respond the way their parents do. Siblings tend to respond like each other. The heritability of responsiveness to exercise training was at least as great as it is for body weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol, Bouchard tells me…

[S]ome people, about 10 percent of the population, really will never get any better with exercise, their endurance will never improve, they will never get faster, and they will never get stronger…

What if you want to train but are a nonresponder? ‘If you can monitor things beyond your performance, you may find good reasons to exercise,’ Bouchard says. ‘If not, you have to be convinced that exercise does something good for you, even though you will be the last one to finish each race.’”

– Gina Kolata, Ultimate Fitness: The Quest for Truth About Exercise and Health, pg. 126-31.

The QOTD, on the myth of willpower:

“When we ask successful changers, ‘How did you do it?’ the universal answer is, ‘Willpower…’ When we examine what ‘willpower’ means to people, however, two different definitions are given. The first is technical: a belief in our abilities to change behavior, and the decision to act on that belief.

The second, sweeping definition is that willpower represents every single technique, every effort under the sun, one can use in order to change. If this is so, then it is inevitable that it takes willpower to change. This is a classic case of circular reasoning.

Self-changers do indeed use willpower in the first, true sense of the word, but it is only one of nine change processes, the one we call commitment. People who rely solely upon willpower set themselves up for failure. If you believe willpower is all it takes, then you try to change and fail, it seems reasonable to conclude that you don’t have enough willpower. This may lead you to give up. But failure to change when relying only on willpower just means that willpower alone is not enough.”

– James Prochaska, John Norcross, and Carlo DiClemente, Changing for Good, pg. 61

The QOTD:

“The thing is, if you go to AA or Narcotics Anonymous, it’s exotic and dark and it has that kind of Jack Kerouac or William Burroughs feel, but with Overeaters Anonymous you don’t feel like you’re going to be in a room with drawn, haunted-looking poets, you’re going to be in a room with people going: ‘Sometimes I’m sad, and then doughnuts make me not sad.’ And then you realize that’s you talking.”

– Patton Oswalt (paraphrased), speaking to Marc Maron, 1/27/2011.

Who, and what, is Tom Bombadil?

Nearly sixty years after the publication of the Lord of the Rings, active discussions about this enigmatic figure have suddenly reappeared on MetaFilter and on Reddit. For my money, the answer is relatively clear, provided that it is given at three levels:

1. At a literal level, Tom Bombadil is a Dutch doll belonging to one of Tolkien’s children that Tolkien wanted to work into his story. Perhaps he was originally put into the story because Tolkien intended to have a story to have a lighter tone, in which Bombadil would be less of a discordant note, but as the story went on it changed. (Similar to how Sam became a hero, even though that wasn’t Tolkien’s intention at the beginning). Perhaps he was left in because he made a point that Tolkien wanted to retain, or because Tolkien was notoriously famous for not wanting to go back and revise what he’d written.

“I don’t think Tom needs philosophizing about, and is not improved by it. But many have found him an odd or indeed discordant ingredient. In historical fact I put him in because I had already ‘invented’ him independently (he first appeared in the Oxford Magazine) and wanted an ‘adventure’ on the way. But I kept him in, and as he was, because he represents certain things otherwise left out. I do not mean him to be an allegory – or I should not have given him so particular, individual, and ridiculous a name – but ‘allegory’ is the only mode of exhibiting certain functions: he is then an ‘allegory’, or an examplar, a particular embodying of pure (real) natural science: the spirit that desires knowledge of other things, their history and nature, because they are ‘other’ and wholly independent of the enquiring mind, a spirit coeval with the rational mind, and entirely unconcerned with ‘doing’ anything with the knowledge: Zoology and Botany not Cattle-breeding or Argiculture.”

- Tolkien, Letter 153.

2. At a thematic level, Bombadil represents pacifism (and, now editorializing something Tolkien almost certainly didn’t intend, the zen, or perhaps taoist, outlook on life). He represents both its attractions (it frees you from certain types of temptation and makes you stronger) and it’s weaknesses (it ultimately relies for its survival upon others who renounce pacifism and fight for what they see as right):

“And even in a mythical Age there must be some enigmas, as there always are. Tom Bombadil is one (intentionally)…. Tom Bombadil is not an important person – to the narrative. I suppose he has some importance as a ‘comment’. I mean, I do not really write like that: he is just an invention (who first appeared in the Oxford Magazine about 1933), and he represents something that I feel important, though I would not be prepared to analyze the feeling precisely. I would not, however, have left him in, if he did not have some kind of function. I might put it this way. The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kingship, moderated freedom with consent against compulsion that has long lost any object save mere power, and so on; but both sides in some degree, conservative or destructive, want a measure of control. but if you have, as it were taken ‘a vow of poverty’, renounced control, and take your delight in things for themselves without reference to yourself, watching, observing, and to some extent knowing, then the question of the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless. It is a natural pacifist view, which always arises in the mind when there is a war. But the view of Rivendell seems to be that this it is an excellent thing to have represented, but that there are in fact things with which it cannot cope; and upon which its existence nonetheless depends. Ultimately only the victory of the West will allow Bombadil to continue, or even survive. Nothing would be left for him in the world of Sauron.”

– Tolkien, Letter 144.

3. Finally, at an in-story level, Bombadil is the embodiment of the world, or nature, or something along those lines.

“Do you think Tom Bombadil, the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside, could be made into the hero of a story?”

– Tolkien, Letter 19.

We can’t get more specific than that because he is deliberately left as an enigma.

The QOTD:

“From contemplation right through the maintenance stage, monitoring your problem is critical. Most self-changers rely only on informal monitoring, such as estimating their intake of drinks or calories each day. It pays to be precise and constantly hone your awareness about your behavior. Informal monitoring can easily be misleading, especially with overeating, drinking, and smoking, since even well-intentioned people underestimate how much they consume…

Monitoring yourself for a week or more not only gives you a baseline to assess your progress once you take action, it can also make you more aware of exactly what needs changing.

Different problems should be measured with different yardsticks. Consumption problems – overeating, drinking, smoking, or spending money – are usually best measured by the amount consumed or spent. Recording your daily food intake and counting calories, for example, is a more sensitive measure of change than a daily weigh-in. Although decreasing your calorie intake from 2,000 calories to 1,500 calories per day is a 25 percent improvement, it is unlikely to lead to a loss of more than 1 percent of your body weight during your first week or two of action. Despite a highly significant cut in intake, weigh-ins may not initially show you any improvement!.. What we choose to monitor, then, can make a major difference in our feeling of progress.”

– James Prochaska, John Norcross, and Carlo DiClemente, Changing for Good, pg. 122-24

The QOTD:

“There is a certain level of awareness of both problem and solution that must precede action. Without it – and the accompanying commitment that takes place during the preparation stage – maintenance of change proves very difficult indeed… This helps explain not only the high rate of failures associated with premature action, but the problems inherent in those action-oriented programs that ignore awareness. It also explains why so many self-help books fail to assist people to develop an awareness of their problem before encouraging them to take action. Techniques without awareness behind them don’t have a chance to make any real impact on our inner selves, and so have little lasting effect.”

– James Prochaska, John Norcross, and Carlo DiClemente, Changing for Good, pg. 114-15

The QOTD:

“Undesirable behaviors, it seems, travel in packs and nourish each other. The single most frequent reason cited for relapse to alcohol, food, or tobacco abuse is emotional distress; former smokers whoo drink double their chances of renewing their habit; and weight gain is one of the most frequently cited results of quitting smoking (and one of the primary reasons women give for returning to smoking). Many successful change efforts focus on a group of behaviors rather than isolating one at a time – which bodes well for anyone who wants to stop smoking but fears gaining weight, for those who want to stop drinking but do not want to increase their dependence on tobacco, and so forth.”

– James Prochaska, John Norcross, and Carlo DiClemente, Changing for Good, pg. 49-50

This is simply another way of saying that it’s no use trying to stop doing something you like: you have to become the sort of person who doesn’t even like that stuff.

I basically hate exercise, but maybe I’ll get here some day:

I’ve never been an athlete. Anyone who’s known me for any length of time is well aware of this. Growing up, I never participated in sports of any kind. Somehow I got branded as unathletic, and I leaned into it. I pretty much gave up on my body’s abilities to do anything beyond the basic functions needed to get through the day…

I work from home, three blocks from the gym; I have zero excuse not to go every day. So, a couple of months ago, that’s what I started doing.

Well, almost every day. Six days out of the week, I’m there. I run, or I lift weights. I enjoy it, kind of a lot, which shocks me more than I can say. But here’s what I want to tell you, finally: every time I go, every time, my body makes a little more sense to me. It’s like exercise is reorganizing the image I have of myself, shuffling things around into a more accurate picture.

• Although not everything in the best diet plan is completely accurate, it’s a good place to begin.

• Regular aerobic exercise may protect against aging.

• Poor sleep (or not enough sleep) may encourage fat to accumulate in your liver.

• Poor sleep (or not enough sleep) may encourage you to take greater risks.

• Poor sleep (or not enough sleep), when combined with stress, may encourage weight gain or undermine weight loss.

• Sleep is important to weight loss and health probably in part because of its effect on your circadian clock. But it’s important to remember that when you eat food also helps to set your circadian clock. Thus may have implications beyond general health for diseases like hypothyroidism.

• How losing 70 pounds can change your life.

Here are two crucial questions: first, can most people sustain weight loss by cutting calories and exercising? Second, if they can, how much exercise do they need to do?

These seem like fairly straightforward questions, but in practice the facts tend to get distorted by ideology before they’re presented to the public or, to a lesser extent, to the scientific community.

For example, consider this 2008 study from the Archives of Internal Medicine, ably analyzed by Junkfood Science:

“Research from the University of Pittsburg was reported as showing that it takes an hour a day of exercise for overweight women to get in shape and keep the weight off. According to the media, a new study published in Archives of Internal Medicine found ‘it only takes one hour of exercise a day to maintain a steady weight loss and keep those unwanted extra pounds off.’

Did reporters read the same study I did? Or, did they take their lead from a press release and fill in the rest with what’s popularly believed fat women should do?

The objective of this study, led by John M. Jakicic, Ph.D., associate professor and Director of the Physical Activity and Weight Management Research Center at the University of Pittsburgh, was to answer the debate about ‘the amount of physical activity that will facilitate weight loss maintenance.’

It found that no amount or intensity of exercise worked to maintain weight loss. Instead, it demonstrated that exercise was mostly unrelated to weight loss and that cutting calories will result in a temporary weight loss for about 6 months and then, even with continued caloric restrictions and exercise, the inevitable and expected weight gain trajectory ensues.

The study’s actual findings are considerably different from what we’ve been hearing in the news, but won’t be at all surprising to JFS readers or obesity experts, as they’re nearly identical to nearly every other weight loss study published over the past half century.

For the study, 201 women agreed to undergo a regime of increased exercise and a low fat, very low calorie diet for two years. About 85% completed the study, and the authors did not carry forward the last measurements of the dropouts.

After six months, the group’s weight started rebounding. This trend showed no signs of leveling off after two years, when the study ended. As Junkfood Science puts it:

“Like all weight loss studies, the familiar rebounding wasn’t because the women were pigging out and cheating on their diets. They all continued to restrict their calories to 1,454-1,689 kcal/day through the end of the trial — eating 350 to 642 kcal less per day than they had been eating while weight stable before the start of the trial. While all of the groups slipped in their exercise regimens over the two years, they also continued to exercise considerably more (about 2-5 times) than they had been at the start of the study.

If you believe the calorie theory, just considering the continued calorie restrictions, then there should have been humongous total weight losses and a dramatic difference of 60 pounds of weight lost between the groups at the end of two years.

Instead, after two years of dieting and exercise, not only were all of the women gaining weight (already nearly half of their weight loss back), but the average weight losses differed among the different regimens by less than 1 ounce per week: 6.38 pounds total at the two year mark. This, too, was not statistically significant, nor was the difference in regain trajectory patterns clinically meaningful.

In other words, weight loss was no more successful with more or less exercise. There was no statistical difference…

Once again, as the body of evidence has continued to show, regardless of the contrivance to cut calories, most everyone will lose a degree of weight temporarily, then homeostatic metabolic adjustments kick in to return body weights to their genetically-determined setpoint range… Even the most rigidly-followed diets among the most motivated people in the real world will result in weight loss for about 6 months and then regain. It’s only the rate and trajectory of the regains that vary, not the fact of regain. As the FTC’s expert panel and every expert review of the evidence has concluded, weight regain is the rule and virtually everyone regains all of their weight by 5 years. While it is well acknowledged among obesity researchers that for a diet study to credibly demonstrate effectiveness or evaluate health outcomes, it must follow people for at least five years until weights have stabilized, this is another one that stopped well before that.

How many more decades of these studies will there need to be before people realize that weight loss interventions don’t work? While people can repeatedly lose and gain a small percentage of their weight, most yo-yoing a dozen or so pounds, the natural diversities of our sizes are not determined by calories in and calories out.”

The rest of the article at Junkfood Science goes on to point out that this study is being used as evidence for the efficacy of calorie restriction and exercise in permanent weight loss. This is only possible because no one actually reads the studies, they only use them as ammunition in the battle for their ideological or professional agendas.