That's a Lot of Wood

Is it just me, or does the recommendation of 60 to 90 minutes a day of "moderate- to vigorous-intensity physical activity" in the government's new Dietary Guidelines for Americans seem even more implausible than the nine servings of fruits and vegetables the pamphlet says we should be eating every day? Mind you, this exercise is above and beyond normal activities like climbing the stairs to change a diaper or running after a toddler who has swiped the scissors from your desk. "Moderate physical activity" includes hiking, dancing, and bicycling below 10 miles per hour. "Vigorous physical activity" includes running, faster biking, and chopping wood. Aside from the sheer effort, it's just hard for me to imagine fitting an hour and a half of such activities into my daily schedule. Even managing a half-hour a day on the NordicTrack elliptical machine was a challenge. Maybe if every seat in the house was a stationary bike…

Comments

[Chiznibitz]

What motivation could they have for making patently unrealistic recommendations like this? And why is it "Dietary Guidelines for Americans?" Are we different from the other people?

[joe]

But Jacob, you still have the choice, however difficult it might be, to undertake these activities. It isn't actually the government coercing you out of doing them, it's just the way society is set up.

And as we've leared in a few dozen exercise and food threads, you are therefore completely free to undetake them, and that's the only statement related to this topic any freedom-loving American can possibly make.

[joe]

See Tim's post directly below, in which mocks a certain Marion Nestle for making a similar observation.

[clarityiniowa]

These "recommendations" are clearly not meant to be normative, but to be a remedy for the supposed epidemic of obesity in the U.S. Perhaps they're even meant to be punitive. Hard to tell, or even to see past my Hardee's Thickburger...

[Matt]

I thought the same thing. Of course, I then realized that I had thought this while sitting at home watching TV so I went for a bike ride.

[chthus]

I'm guessing that they set the standards quite high (relative to what I'm guessing is the likely average daily exercise folks are getting now), hoping that the discrepancy would be more likely to bring about a change in behavior. Something like, "well, used to be I only needed 15min of low to mod activity to stay fit, so I figured 5 min of looking for the remote was enough. Now I'm supposed to get 60 to 90? of mod to vig? Shit better walk down to McDonald's tonight."

It's a bit silly, but that's usually close enough for govt work. As for managing to fit this amount of exercise into your schedule, try not having a car and living about 45min from the train station at a quick pace. Works for me. Oh wait, it's raining out today? I think I'm going to work from home. Heart attack here I come. Why couldn't I just listen to what the health people told me?

[Warren]

Ha! You nailed it Jake. Nine servings per day indeed. The exercise requirements are equally ludicrous. But why should we be surprised, they've been telling us if we salt our popcorn our hearts will explode in our chests for years. Not to mention the whole fat vs. carbs fracas.

Oh and
"...that's the only statement related to this topic any freedom-loving American can possibly make.
Not quite. As a freedom loving American I can also state that not only does my government has it's many hydra like heads up it's collective ass, I also claim that funding this balderdash with my tax dollars is theft.

[joe]

"As for managing to fit this amount of exercise into your schedule, try not having a car and living about 45min from the train station at a quick pace."

This is the key - in places that aren't America, people's normal daily activities produce a level of physical exertion that people here have to go out of their way to achieve.

[Dietary Guidelines for Cambodi]

Well you'll work harder
With a gun in your back
For a bowl of rice a day
Slave for soldiers
Till you starve
Then your head is skewered on a stake

[Evan Williams]

Please. This is a load of crap. I hit the gym 5 days a week. I never spend 90 minutes a day doing exercise. Typically, I'm in and out of the gym in 60 minutes; that includes dressing, undressing, shower, etc. So I'd say, maybe 45 minutes of exercise, 5 days a week. And 9 servings of fruits/veg? Doubtful. A fuckload of protein and complex carbs, yes. And I'm in bodybuildiing condition.

90 minutes every day. ha ha fucking ha.

[Twba]

That's a Lot of Wood

Thanks for noticing, but I'm heterosexual.

[Josh]

The motivation here is obvious -- the USDA's been bought by the Bowflex Corporation.

[Eryk Boston]

Do bear in mind that we elvolved as creatures who walked 9-10 miles a day and hunted mastadons. Even the govt's guidelines are pretty lightweight.

[Twba]

How many servings of mastadon can I have per day?

[tijjer]

I'm sure with the recommended diets and recommended exercise we'd all be shredded up like the temptation on an island based wreck-your-relationships reality show.

It's just an ideal, but even hitting 50% of those intake and workout goals would produce a much fitter population.

[blem]

Agreed Evan. Both the Dietary and Exercise Guidelines are comically out of touch with current training practices of the fit.

[s.m. koppelman]

You'll find the time in another twenty years when your cardiologist tells you the same thing, Mr. Sullum.

It's also got to be tough when one chooses to live in a suburb a fifteen minute drive from a gym. Biking or jogging around the same cul-de-sacs of samey tract homes can be extremely monotonous too. Too bad so many people choose to live in sprawl suburbs where you're hemmed into your bucolic subdivision by six-lane roads incompatible with pedestrian or bicycle use. Otherwise they'd be able to get some of that exercise in while they do their shopping, run errands, or go to and from restaurants or their kids' play-dates.

Simply making a choice to live in a row house in an older city or town where you can eschew daily use of a car would take care of at least half that exercise because you'd be walking so much more, not to mention carrying bags of groceries five or six blocks on a regular basis. A half hour or so of biking or some other kind of exercise (a family walk? shooting some baskets at the park down the street?) would take care of the rest. If so inclined, you'd have a better chance of actually going to the gym, too, since odds are you'd be able to join one along your regular walking route between home and work.

[Shawn Smith]

What, is the government now paying for that Ultimate Fitness Program dry-humping-the-carpet add over to the right?

[Gilbert Martin]

"You'll find the time in another twenty years when your cardiologist tells you the same thing, Mr. Sullum."

In twenty years he might have nano-bots continously patrolling his arteries cleaning up all the plaque and/or otherwise keeping his system in good shape.

[Tym]

If you are obese, you have chosen to over eat and/or under exercise, rare medical conditions excepted (hypothyroidism, etc.).

You have the option to get into shape, or suffer the well documented health risks. I was overweight and am losing weight, millions of people have done it.

I find it truly insulting that I am some sort of brainless automaton that can be controled by advertising. Advertisers only wish they could be that effective.

[chthus]

Yeah, but those 9-10 mil/day walkers had a life expectancy of about half what we have now. While much of this can be explained away by advances in health care, some can't. Walking 9-10 miles a day greatly increased the likelihood of lower limb/joint injury or damage over time. This often lead to immobility which can kill you quicker than cancer, especially in a nomadic culture. Also, that much movement significantly increases the likelihood of coming in contact with conflict on unknown terrain (with predators, competing tribes). This is also true today, although the conflict may now come from cars or mischevious youngsters in bad neighborhoods.

Evolution does wonderful things for long term genetic refinement of a population, but for short term adjustment to rapidly changing environments and more importantly, the health and extended survival of each and every individual in a population in a single generation; it's lessons are less relavent.

[Captain Blammo]

Hey Koppelman

I live in Brooklyn and let me tell you, people there who live in row houses in that old town are REALLY fit. Fit to take up 3 seats on the subway with their gigantic asses.

Typical new urban scrawling ... maybe in your upper-middle class college town such things are true. Are you getting a masters in Urban Planning?

[Twba]

But will Major League Baseball allow nanoparticle performance enhancers?

[Dave Straub]

Twba: Two servings of Leviathan, and one of Remission.

(Confused? Click my name...)

[clarityiniowa]

mr. koppelman - Looking past your sneering at suburbia for a moment, and your stumping for the urban sardining of the human race, I have to say we are all guilty of a more sedentary lifestyle than our elders were able to enjoy.

My great-grandmother was a young Iowa farm wife a century ago. She cooked with lard. She fried in lard, baked with lard, put lard on her and her husband's cornflakes. They also had to work half a section of land with a team of horses, a steam thresher and a few hired hands, whom she fed like Cox's Army, so after their lard-laden meals they all went to work and worked off all those calories.

Point is, some lifestyle choices are made, some are forced upon us. Pointing fingers is no better exercise than punching buttons on a remote.

[Twba]

Thanks Dave. Give me a minute to digest Iron Tusk.

[Gilbert Martin]

"I live in Brooklyn and let me tell you, people there who live in row houses in that old town are REALLY fit. Fit to take up 3 seats on the subway with their gigantic asses."

Perhaps they're merely swelled up with contentedness to be living in a style of neighborhood that "naturally evolved" into the very epitome of human existence.

LOL

[jc]

I'm beginning to see the light.

I'm a lard ass because I'm lazy and don't work and don't walk and it's all my choice so I just have to lump it and deserve a heart condition. Because I'm lazy and don't work and don't walk I won't have any money for my old age but if I manage to survive past 70 I'm just unfortunate.

[PintofStout]

What if my goal in life is quality not quantity. I would rather have a wonderfully decadent life for a few years than a drab, hellish life for what would seem like an eternity. The middle ground is somewhere in-between, of course.

I bet the Fed Gov is researching a fountain-of-youth somewhere, too. Which doesn't make sense since we can't pay for the old folks we have now. They should be recommending a regular diet of Monster Fatburgers.

[PintofStout]

Thickburgers...sorry

[Gilbert Martin]

"But will Major League Baseball allow nanoparticle performance enhancers?"

In the players, yes.

In the bats and gloves, no.

Of these rules are subject to change depending on whether the particular game is being played at a stadium surrounded by an urban utopia or a suburban hellhole.

[joe]

PoS (Sorry),

Do you really think you'd have a high quality of life subsisting on Monster Thickburgers and not working off the calories? Because the people I've seen who live like that, their lives don't seem to have much quality, what with the knee problems, chest pains, and labored breathing.

[Gilbert Martin]

"I'm beginning to see the light."

"I'm a lard ass because I'm lazy and don't work and don't walk and it's all my choice so I just have to lump it and deserve a heart condition. Because I'm lazy and don't work and don't walk I won't have any money for my old age but if I manage to survive past 70 I'm just unfortunate."

Ah I see you've been listening to Gassius Maximus on another thread.

[TWC]

Pint, FatBurger works. Musically and for snaffling. Have to say though, Fat Burger doesn't make the very best burgers but they are good.

Most of the food fascists and government standard bearers don't know their butt from breakfast anyway. Speaking of breakfast, look how long eggs were in jail and it turns out there is nothing wrong with eating eggs at all. But for thirty years the government and their minions in the health industry pounded the gavel and railed against the evil of consuming eggs because they contained cholesterol.

[Mike]

I love it. The USDA *finally* gives accurate guidlines -- some might even say *reason*able guidelines, based on the current *science* of nutrition -- and people start bitching!

Come on now. You may not *like* the idea of nine servings of fruits and vegetables and an hour of exercise a day, but would you rather they *lie* to you? Christ. The lengths people go to defend their shitty habits.

[PintofStout]

joe,
I wasn't implying that a regular intake of Monster burgers would yield a high quality of life. I was jokong that the government should encourage it to reduce our life span so we didn't have to spend so much on SS.

Maybe decadent was the wrong word. I could have said I'd rather live a shorter life enjoying some things (moderately) the food police deem as evil than living on bland sprouts and not enjoynig it for even longer.

Disclaimer: I don't think sprouts are bland, necessarily. In fact, having such little scope in a diet of burgers or sprouts is unappealing, that whole variety is the spice of life thing. I was also just using burgers and sprouts to symbolize good and bad.

[Douglas Fletcher]

I see the Department of Health and Human Services has a hand in this. Well.

Let me tell you, if you want to see a bunch of people who've never even heard the word exercise, spend a little time in the plaza of the HHS installation at Twinbrook Drive in Rockville, Maryland. My god, you'd think they're doing a science-fiction experiment, what with all the asymetrical bodies you can see there.

It's odd they should be so heavy into extended periods of 'vigorous physical activity' because the one thing you'll be hard put to find in that place is someone breaking a sweat.

[Douglas Fletcher]

Though you can hear a fair amount of bitching in the elevators about how low their salaries are...

[PintofStout]

They should mandate a reduction in government interference in our lives to see how much less we'd have to work; thus leaving us more time and energy to put into our health habits. If I didn't have to work 20% more every year to make ends meet, I'm sure I'd be much more healthy.

[clarityiniowa]

Thing is, if health care weren't a communal expense, we wouldn't have to worry about how other people eat, exercise, or fail to do either. As long as we're all in each other's pockets courtesy of the "social safety net," I guess we have to put up with a certain amount of finger wagging and lifestyle "recommendations" from people comfortably ensconced behind government desks.

[Twba]

To stay in shape and read my favorite blog, I power my computer with this.

[Ruthless]

When the internet scrolls on the back of eyeglasses, and the device costs under a hundred bucks, then we can chop wood four hours straight.

[sally]

Just to clarify, you guys did see that the 60 to 90 minute figure was given for those who are trying to lose weight, right? The report gave the following recommendations for adults:

30 mins/day to reduce risk of chronic diseases

60 mins/day to maintain body weight and prevent unhealthy weight gain

60-90 mins/day to sustain weight loss

This doesn't seem so outrageous to me.

[Phil]

I love it. The USDA *finally* gives accurate guidlines -- some might even say *reason*able guidelines, based on the current *science* of nutrition -- and people start bitching!

Oh, horseshit. HHS issues these things every five years. You really think that the average American has gotten so fat and unhealthy, on average, in five years, that the guidelines have to recommend 300% more exercise and 50% more fruits and vegetables? I sure don't. I suspect that produce growers and athletic equipment manufacturers probably "lobbied" the right people to insure that the new guidelines reflected what would be good for their business practices.

[Jose Ortega y Gasset]

Actually, Mike, I prefer the government not spend money providing information that is readily available through other channels. Plenty of exercise and healthy food is good for you... what a NEWS FLASH!

The key phrase in your post is "your shitty habits." The emphasis is properly placed on the word "your." What, if any of my legal habits, are any of your business?

There are people in wonderful physical condition who are barely smarter than a potato. I would not presume to tell someone to read more Dante or Cervantes... but I have had more than one fitness afficiando lecture me about the benefits of 5 a.m. windsprints and Omega-3 fatty oils. To me, it feels much the same as being cornered by an evangelical Christian.

[The Lonewacko Blog]

If simple hiking or biking makes your eyes pop, read this. Since I hope to do some real climbs, but far short of Denali, I spend several hours each week carrying a heavy pack up hills. I hiked up 7000' in a week a few weeks ago, and even that's pretty light.

I'd like to go to a gym to do weight training but a) I don't like gyms, b) I don't need some yahoo gym rat trying to hard sell me on a 3 year membership, and c) I don't like long-term contracts.

I walk up escalators. When waiting in line I stand on one leg, mantle up tables, try to increase my grip strength by holding on to something and falling backwards, etc.

Despite all that I've still got a bunch of fat I need to lose.

[Lonewacko 2]

Notice how obesity rates have risen as the number of Mexican immigrants has risen? Coincidence?

[Pro Libertate]

Jacob, I've got one of those Nordic Track elliptical machines. As long as it's parked in front of a TV (or near something I can play an audio book on), I'll use it 6-7 days a week. But I never go more than 30 minutes on it, and I only do additional strength training every other day. I want to say that's all plenty, but there is a part of me that's thinking that our ancestors were a heck of a lot more active and that we're really not designed to sit on our hinder parts all day long. As I mentioned in the hamburger discussion, I think that an active lifestyle is incredibly more important than worrying about fat or carbs.

Now that I think about it, one solution is the exercise desk from Woody Allen's Bananas.

[Stevo Darkly]

Isn't sex pretty decent exercise? Well, I guess it depends on how you do it. The main deterrent to gym-type exercising is that it's boring and has a delayed payoff. If only they'd legalize prostitution, I could see a chain of specialized fitness-oriented brothels opening up. I could see a lot of guys going three times a week to a clean, well-lighted place for sessions with clean, capable, extremely personal trainers. Guys could progress up through various levels. As they progress, maybe they could even be awarded various "belts" like in martial arts.

This could make significant inroads on the obestity epidemic, especially among guys. I kinda doubt women would be as likely to use this service, but I could be wrong. Regardless, women would benefit from having partners who are more energetic and technically adept than the "roll on/roll off" lovers that many are currently stuck with.

Remember, if it saves one life, it's worth it. Legalize prostitution now.

[Rick Barton]

For exercise, sometimes I take a walk to the park in proximity to my house. I used to listen to old Sherlock Holmes radio show tapes while I walked, and when someone would say "hi", I would say something like "Good afternoon Madam". Now I listen to philosophy tapes when I walk and when someone says "hi", I wonder to myself; what does that really mean?

[s.m. koppelman]

The existence of obese Brooklynites invalidates (1) the value of regular exercise and (2) the notion that the typical urbanite walks more than her suburban peer?

Well, no.

You can live in Brooklyn, Chicago, Manhattan, whatever and choose to eat unhealthy food all day. You can choose to wait ten minutes for a bus to take you the seven blocks to the subway station and avoid virtually all meaningful walking altogether, and you'll be plenty overweight and unhealthy.

But urban living -- and thanks, I moved here to South Florida from Noo Yawk so I know both lifestyles well -- offers far more passive opportunity to get exercise. In the suburbs, simply walking is a purely recreational act initiated consciously. In a traditional city or town center, it's what you're doing the moment you step out the door to get a head of lettuce.

I now live in one of those early, prewar suburbs where I can walk to a few stores, but not to all the basic needs, and my work has me in a car a good two hours a day. Here I've sometimes gone a week or two without deliberate exercise and felt a burn after a brisk two-mile walk. I never experienced anything remotely like that even in my most sedentary stretches living in the city, where spending a day walking for hours on end is routine. Those ten-minute walks to and from the el station may not seem like much when you're living there, but move somewhere car-oriented and you'll realize those twenty minutes count, as do the five, ten and twenty minutes walking to and from all those other places you go.

In sprawl suburbs, walking is a conscious decision and only done for its own sake. In a city, *not* walking is a conscious decision. 90 minutes of daily physical activity is a lot less daunting when you get in 45 minutes of it going to and from work and stopping at the drycleaners and the grocery store.

When did I say government should require that everyone give up their houses and live in a New York tenement? All I'm saying is that if an hour or 90 minutes of daily physical activity seems absurd and unattaianable to Mr. Sullum, maybe it's because of some unwise lifestyle choices on his part.

[Stevo Darkly]

Rick Barton, LOL. (Actually, listening to a book-on-CD is a great idea. Hmm. If Neal Stephenson books are on CD, I can catch up on his last 5 or so novels.)

[Ron Hardin]

As a bicycle commuter with well over a quarter million miles of commuting, I dread the appearance of more bicylists. The fewer there are, the better. Motorists are friendly if you're the first bicycle they've seen that day, but not otherwise. Take up chopping wood, is my advice. Leave bicycing to people who actually like it.

[ha]

so all I need is the 700-900k to buy an apartment or townhouse for my family of 5 to live in DC and I'll get fit through walking. Super!! I still say 90% of all weight problems are genetic. I eat like semi-crap and don't exercise and am still a rail, and have no health problems.

[joe]

ha, spend $40k on a shell near New York Ave and $120k fixing it up.

[Pro Libertate]

What we need are good virtual exercise options. You know, an exercise bike tied into some sort of cool game, that sort of thing. I've used rowing machines that have some sort of crappy kayaking competion, but I'm thinking about something a wee bit more entertaining. For instance, why can't the soon-to-be-mine Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II (the first was the greatest game ever) incorporate some exercise? You know, like making me actually run/bike/whatever to kill some Dark Jedi?

[Gilbert Martin]

"You know, like making me actually run/bike/whatever to kill some Dark Jedi?"

Just close your eyes and take a run on a major street during rush hour traffic.

May the force be with you.

[outSide@@N]

Some of the threads here can be absolutely enjoyable...

It's simply refreshing to enter a thread for mandatory exercise periods and to my pleasant surprise contain a viable reason for legalizing prostitution.

thanks Stevo Darkly!!!

btw: I fully support this ideas and the obvious health benefits it can provide, how do we get started.

[Stevo Darkly]

It's called "thinking outside the box," outSide@@n. And dude, I practically live outside the effing box. Especially on Fridays.

How to make the fitness brothels happen, in 2 easy steps:

1) Achieve a libertarian nation.

2) Let some keen entrepreneur jump on the idea.

[Stevo Darkly]

I really like Pro Lib's idea of virtual exercise that links real exercise with some kind of virtual-reality video game. For a while now, I thought it would be really cool to have a game with flying machines that you power by pedaling like a bicycle, and you have dogfights with other fliers. Or you could hunt flying dragons or giant birds or gryphons or pterodactyles or something. This would be hooked up to an exercise bicycyle with a combination handlebars/joystick console, and you have to pedal harder when you take off, climb or want to fly faster. It could be set in some kind of fantasy Victorian or Renaissance-type technological milieu where such machines might be (sort of) plausible.

Main drawback is that it would take up a lot more space in the home than an Xbox.

[Stevo Darkly]

I eat like semi-crap and don't exercise and am still a rail, and have no health problems.

You ... fucking ... bastard.

(OK, I didn't really mean that. Entirely.)

[Pro Libertate]

Ah, but Stevo, it'd be good for you--health is more important than mere space 🙂 Anyway, I have another idea. The use of the exercise machine could be indirect. Your "health" points in the game would be affected by whether you maintain whatever level of reps you set. If you stop, you die. Not only good entertainment, it's also good behavioral conditioning (no exercise equals death).

As for you, Gilbert, I tried your street training with the blast mask lowered. I could actually see the cars in my mind as I was dodging them. Ah, Jediercise.

[Ruthless]

"If only they'd legalize prostitution, I could see a chain of specialized fitness-oriented brothels opening up. I could see a lot of guys going three times a week to a clean, well-lighted place for sessions with clean, capable, extremely personal trainers. Guys could progress up through various levels. As they progress, maybe they could even be awarded various "belts" like in martial arts."

Stevo Darkly, you have taken the horn by the horn.

Now I'm pondering all the synonyms of "belts."
"For erections lasting more than four hours, call your doctor."

[McClain]

I dunno, man...
When my distant African caveman ancestors weren't hunting wooly mammoths over the frozen tundra, they were eating 100% organic nuts'n'berries.
And chopping wood with, like, stone axes'n'shit....
I just slack around on the internet, pausing occasionally to waddle across the street and stuff my fat face full of chili dog nachos, and I've already exceeded their life expectancy.
And I'm not even morbidly obese! (Beefy, yes.)
Go figure....

[dhex]

many of the machines mentioned on this thread have been created in one form or another. i've seen a few in gyms over the past few years. mostly skiing or flying type things with a handlebar type controller. there's also a company that's trying to sell more gamey games hooked into exercise machines, that was recently posted on kotaku.

and a full body controller, which i shall endeavor to find the URL for. sort of like a DDR pad taken to the next level.

speaking of which...um...the DDR pads - you can play other games with them.

[dhex]

"I still say 90% of all weight problems are genetic."

you know, i hear this a lot. is it possible that many of the traits we list as "genetic" are learned from mimicing some behaviors (like cooking heavy on sugars, fats, etc etc etc) and not others (chopping wood 12 hours a week, various threshings of grains, etc)

[Allen]

I'm glad to see others pointed out that the guidelines were for losing weight. And at that, this is Reason. Could it be that the human body really does need that type of exercise? Wouldn't that be a shocker.

As for comments about weight being an indication of health, well, enjoy it while you can. There are many long term studies out there showing that health isn't that simple. It's a roll of the dice either way, but your chances are better if you get off your butt and do it.