If I did a push-up for every product that has “revolutionized” the fitness world in the last several decades, you would see my body and probably assume that I had used those products.
If you have a floor, a wall, and autonomy over what enters into your mouth, then you already have everything you need to gain muscle and lose fat.
Nobody needs a $1400 bike with a $40 monthly subscription to maintain a calorie deficit. It’s absurd. Peloton preys on their customers’ fear of sunk-cost by selling common exercise equipment at exorbitant prices. They want you to fear that if you don’t use the equipment, then you’re wasting your money.
That’s also how I lost most of
my weight. Sure, you could spend 25-45 minutes on the treadmill… or you could just not eat 5 Oreo cookies, and you would achieve the same result (from a caloric perspective).
My best tip for not eating junk food: Don’t buy it. It’s so much easier to eat chicken and rice when you don’t have a bag of Doritos on standby.
I think the most important role of excercise on the weigh loss journey is the sense of accomplishment and effort. Whenever you’re tempted to eat some junk you’ll remember the body pains, the sweat you dropped and think: is it really worth to eat that?
I've lost 60 lbs. so far using GLP-1 agonists. It's quite a bit easier to get around, so I'm easing into cardio and weight lifting once again.
> over-eating is a response to anxiety
It's more complicated than one cause. Overweight people have an absurd appetite and/or lack of satiation either by being overweight (self-reinforcing) / metabolic dysfunctions, from genetics, and/or from side-effects of medications.
> for a lot of us, over-eating is a response to anxiety
100%. We use food as entertainment. To get a dopamine hit from fats and carbs.
For most of human history, food was scarce. We evolved to get huge dopamine hits from food. Our brain sees starving as a danger. It's only post WWII that food became abundant.
My gym costs $60 a month and gives me access to classes and other equipment. At the cost of a Peloton, a Peloton bike by itself would not pay for itself comparatively for 24 months. That doesn't take into consideration tax on the bike purchase or the monthly subscription. Folks really willing to pay that much money just to not leave their house?
If it's freezing-ass cold or boiling-ass hot, sure. If it's a moderate-ass temperature, it doesn't make sense, sure, but not everyone lives where that happens and for some, even that's a bit of a problem.
If you have clinical-ass depression or executive-ass dysfunction, lowering the barrier to exercise can be really important. Sure, $1400 with a $40 subscription is way too expensive, but there's definitely a case to be made for the exercise bike in front of the TV for a lot of people.
> Nobody needs a $1400 bike with a $40 monthly subscription to maintain a calorie deficit. It’s absurd.
Nobody needs a $500 PS5 and $80 video games. Nobody even needs a TV. A lot of people don't need a new cell phone.
Also, do you think owning an exercise bike means you're overweight? Maybe it's a hobby, maybe it's even fun? Let people exercise and spend their money how they want.
Well, you’re not wrong in theory about the wall and floor, but if everyone did what you’re suggesting, public gyms would not exist.
The Peloton subscription does not just include cycling programs - there are many other exercise disciplines. The bike is expensive yes, but is a solid piece of kit and works great with the software (obviously I guess).
I don’t use our sub much these days but my partner still very much loves it. She uses it for the bike itself as well as yoga, stretches and some others.
The instructors are frankly incredible, there are so many of them and all provide different experiences. They are what you’re ultimately paying for.
Exercise is just as important for health is food is, it’s not all about losing weight.
I proposed last year with a lab-made diamond. I did almost no research, went to one jeweler and only twice, shelled out less money than I was spending on rent, and I walked away with one of the prettiest rings she has ever seen. Her friends unanimously love it. They can’t believe I picked it out.
I don’t know or care about the politics of the diamond trade. All I can confirm on is this: Lab-grown diamonds are the real deal. They will even fool a jeweler’s naked eye.
They don't need to fool anyone. Lab grown diamonds are real diamonds. Only a tiny minority of people vested in the industry care about earth made diamonds.
I don't think the aim is to teach that "millions of people are just morally deficient," as you put it. Rather, the aim should be to reinforce that everyone has the capacity to do good or bad, and the direction of your life is influenced partially (if not majorly) by the average value of your decisions.
In some aspects of our culture, shame still exists to great effect. For example, drunk driving is a behavior that never gets a pardon. Words never spoken: "We shouldn't judge Joe for his DUI, for if we were in his shoes, we may have done the same."
The drunk driver may deserve all sorts of considerations: They struggled with alcoholism, their judgment was impaired at the time, they needed to go to work in the morning, they couldn't afford an Uber, their designated driver didn't show, they didn't speak English well enough to coordinate another ride home. In function, no excuses are allowed. As a culture, we believe that no matter your situation, you must always make plans to avoid driving drunk.
What if this same type of intense shame existed towards other behaviors we wished to not see? To name one: What if we intensely shamed parents who let their young children become obese? Instead of blaming food deserts, lack of nutritional knowledge, lack of time to prepare meals, and so on, what if the blame went directly to the parents who are letting their elementary age children graze on a party sized bag of Doritos?
It sounds cool in theory, but in practice, it's just another tool wielded by the powerful. In practice, it's used most heavily for stuff like forcing people to express support for unjust wars, or to be quiet about a powerful person's abuses. Go to any conservative community and you can see the effects of what you're describing.
> Instead of blaming food deserts, lack of nutritional knowledge, lack of time to prepare meals, and so on, what if the blame went directly to the parents who are letting their elementary age children graze on a party sized bag of Doritos?
Most people who would be in any way affected by a society-level shame campaign already feel that way. You're talking about small pockets of communities that aren't fazed by mainstream society's norms. Mostly ones in small-town conservative areas that are heavily shame-based, but just about different things from what you care about.
So it seems it's not more shaming that you want, it's just that you want everyone to be shaming people in line with your personal system of morality.
Edit: also relying on shame for enforcement will ultimately just reward the shameless.
In college, I did my calculus homework on blank printer paper using Sharpie markers. I could only fit one integral per page, maybe two if I was lucky, so I’d turn in these 15-page stapled assignments. It was calculus all the same, and I got great grades. I think the purpose of this comment is to reinforce that the medium doesn’t matter — if you focus on the content itself, you’ll progress.
Perhaps your integrals were artistically drawn and deserved the thick strokes and extra pages, but I find it easier to write with thinner ballpoint pens.
This reminds me of an old tip[1] about bringing your own thin dry-erase markers to onsite interviews, because you would get more whiteboard space that way.
In my estimate, it’s because the crazy views get virtually no pushback from within liberal social circles.
I say this as a socialist who is critical of essentialism and other nonsense popularized by academia last decade. On liberal websites like Reddit, if you make a critique of the performative nature of land acknowledgements, you are sure to be called a conservative. The prevailing assumption is that anyone bothered enough by those cultural issues must not be a true liberal.
Not that I have experienced, no. The 'big steal' is still a hot topic, for example. Anti-vaccine views are still running very strong (especially after the Dept of Energy weighed in). And nobody is shouting down the crazies who post derogatory threads about women, minorities, or young people. The mainline conservative community remains driven mostly by opposing whatever liberals support, rather than pushing an agenda of their own. Though perhaps that makes sense, if one has the view that the purpose of a conservative position is to act as a brake on progressive impulses.
I'd say they do. Look at the number of conservative groups that sprang up against Trump. I haven't heard of any left-leaning groups forming against the extreme end of the "culture war" that leans left, e.g. the one that has imposed rules on ChatGPT that make it give this absurd (and entirely unethical by any reasonable ethics framework) answer. The only thing I've seen get pushback in left-leaning circles is advocating for actual communism in the economic sense.
Haven't you ever heard of the "Dirtbag left"? Their podcasts are extremely popular and they can hardly be accused of being "woke". WSWS is an example of a very hard-socialist site.
Will Shetterly is often credited with inventing the term "Social Justice Warrior". He called it identitarianism, made a decent case that it first appeared in Unitarian-Universalist circles in the 90s, and has been criticizing it ten years before anyone else. He's also a communist and a Civil Rights veteran.
As much as actual communists fight among themselves, it'd be a miracle if the tendency of "identitatian deference" hadn't been identified and criticized by someone long before the right noticed it.
I don't see much pushback on either side. Liberals see themselves as champions of freedom and are quite convinced that conservatives are by and large fascist sympathizers. In this regard, both sides strongly believe themselves to have the moral high road, and all nuance has been tossed aside. Interestingly, I find that both sides are quite capable of making very plausible, reasoned arguments that make them sound like the adults in the room.
I think that to a surprising extent, liberals and conservatives live in different versions of America. I try to keep my news exposure to a minimum, but I do make a point of visiting the major outlets for both ideologies. You can really see how reality itself is curated. I don't even think it's really curated ideologically, either, my feeling is that media outlets know their audience and make sure they are reinforcing the relationship instead of challenging it.
Very important to distinguish between liberal and leftist. Liberal thought is primarily performative because the underlying material(read: systemic) change necessary shall not be implemented, so lip-service like land acknowledgements, while by no means bad, is not nearly enough to mend historial wrongs and serves primarily today to distract from that material change. Reddit is broadly liberal, so the general populace cannot distinguish between "land acknowledgements are bad because [racism]" and "land acknowledgements are a 0th step towards progress" and remain liberal.
Being liberal in the 90’s meant defending controversial or disruptive speech on the premises of the mantra, “I may not agree with what you say, but I’ll defend your right to say it.” This principle operated as a liberal self-preservation tactic. The Church had more influence in society than it does today, and if anyone was going to challenge the status quo, it had to be liberals. Hip hop music, feminist art, raunchy daytime television, and that nasty George Carlin all played a role in challenging the modesty that the Church wanted to preserve.
Decades passed. The church lost most of its mainstream power. Raytheon began marketing itself as a diverse workplace. Goldman Sachs marched in parades with rainbow flags. The question of gay marriage was settled. As society liberalized, liberals found themselves usurping the role of cultural hall monitor. It became disadvantageous for liberals to defend controversial speech, so new rationales had to be created to prevent the spread of anti-liberal ideas.
Maybe there's something to that, but I think the main thing that happened was that we developed incredible new technology that allowed all of humanity to communicate openly in real time on an equal footing without gatekeepers or censorship. Then we looked at it and decided we didn't like it.
I really liked it. I think people have already forgotten how it was without these things. It was also predicted for years that small mindedness will become an enemy to such advancements.
Yes, but HN “works” because it is a small-ish community with principled moderators and generally well-educated people. The community guidelines request that commenters assume the best intentions in others. I’ve been in enough heavily-censored forums, groups, and websites to say that too much moderation can be worse than too little.
Indeed. Every single sacred universalist principle liberals claimed to hold sacred is simply a cudgel to get you to do what they want.
Appeals to democracy, rule of law, freedom of association, freedom of speech, equal rights, human rights, freedom of thought, freedom of religion, bodily autonomy etc. - all of these things vanish like a mist if the left decide that they hate you, and you deserve it.
To my understanding, if one mother birthed 3 children at ages 15, 20, and 25, then her age of conception would be 20. So it could be the case that women did become mothers in their teens if they also continued bearing children into their late 20s.
And if they got more successful at bringing those children to adulthood with each try (a pattern frequently seen in animals), the visible average resulting from that 15, 20, 25 example would even be higher than 20.
When I journal (for my eyes only), I’m able to express my knowledge with personal experiences that are too boring, contextless, or controversial to post online. These thoughts still matter to me, so I keep them to myself.
Yesterday, I wrote about how if I hadn’t discovered weightlifting, I might not have gone to university. I reflected on myself at age 16 when I was mentally immature but interested in bodybuilding. Then I wrote about age 18, when the hard work started paying off, and my self-determination skyrocketed. Finally I wrote about age 20, when I made up my mind to study computer science, specifically because it was supposed to be challenging.
If I post these thoughts on social media, there’s a chance I’ll spark Socratic debates that I don’t particularly care about leading. When I do post the thoughts online, it’s usually because I hope my words land on the right person at the right time.
What a coincidence. I just had an idea like this two days ago because we recently adopted a puppy and we’re trying to establish routines. I think he is struggling with the day/night cycle since our blinds are usually pulled. I wanted to use a screen or a color-changing bulb, so he knows yellow o’clock means daytime and blue o’clock means night. Maybe I can use this. Thanks for open sourcing it.
If you have a floor, a wall, and autonomy over what enters into your mouth, then you already have everything you need to gain muscle and lose fat.
Nobody needs a $1400 bike with a $40 monthly subscription to maintain a calorie deficit. It’s absurd. Peloton preys on their customers’ fear of sunk-cost by selling common exercise equipment at exorbitant prices. They want you to fear that if you don’t use the equipment, then you’re wasting your money.
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