This is not rocket science. You need only to take a glace around the office to notice that our industry is not exactly the healthiest. We are sitting all day, eat pizza, and guzzling energy drinks (mind eye: google "cartman gamer"), obviously this is an exaggeration, but in some cases, it isn't! Adding exercise can go a long way, you do not have to think of this as wasted time, you can listen to audio books, podcasts, etc while you are doing your thing.
My main gripe is that as engineers and measurement freaks, I want to research exercise before actually doing anything, and then want to measure my results. There is no clear action path down this road. Diet and exercise are two side of the same coin. Maybe I'll produce some content on this topic since I have spent the last couple years getting my house in order.
For example, say, starting tomorrow, you wanted to "eat healthy" and "workout". What would you do? There is nothing that will give you a grocery list + meal plan, along with a workout routine. You need to do all this research first!
I would urge you to very much think of it as 'wasted time'. There's an obsession here from some people with filling every moment with information (such as audio books, podcasts, etc.).
While exercising it's a perfect time to have no other stimuli and let your mind wander. Just let it wander. It's really useful to do that because rather than listening to other people's thoughts you'll have thoughts of your own. Unexpected thoughts at that.
That is you rationalizing your procrastination. I'm guilty of it more than anyone.
You read and read because you want to do it right. But if I were to put a table of various foods in front of you and asked you to point out the healthiest, you'd succeed. You know what's healthy to eat. You know what simple exercises there are to get started with.
You researching so that you can optimize every second is likely a bigger waste of time and energy than eating healthy meals that may not have perfectly optimal macronutrient ratios, or doing exercises that aren't fully isolating a specific muscle group.
Come up with a minimum viable plan, then iterate, obviously!
But seriously, you can start doing simple exercises and improving your diet while you're researching the next step of the plan. Take the stairs instead of the elevator; get off one stop earlier on the bus/train, and walk a little further. Park in the far corner of the parking lot. Do push-ups at home. Eat at least one salad a day. Cut your soda consumption in half, then to nothing.
Is there a term for the paralysis you work yourself into because you don't want to start something until you've perfectly researched it?
If you want measurable results, try CrossFit. It is built around measurable results. Every workout is done in comparison to the last time you did that particular workout. By tracking your results over time, you can quickly measure the progress you have made.
The best advice I can give for exercising is to turn off your brain (or part of it) for a while. Concentrate on visceral things like breathing and posture, not performance metrics or meal strategies. Let your subconscious chew on technical stuff and focus your attention on being a physical machine that pulls in oxygen and burns fuel to produce energy. Also, try not to get hit by cars! (I ride a bike)
This isn't something that needs to be researched, it just needs to get done. Put something together and push it out, gain domain knowledge, refactor, repeat. Experience will be your guide and most of what you read during 'research' won't relate anyway, but you won't realize this until you have the experience. That's assuming the research phase doesn't paralyze you with options and statistics and metrics. You don't need a comprehensive prospectus, just change one thing. Then change another when you feel like it or it makes sense to do so.
I could expand on this if anyone is interested. I actually wrote a lot more here but decided it was probably irritating and chopped a bunch off.
My advice would be to wear a polar heart monitor to the gym and just shoot for X calories per visit. I AM NOT advocating "calories in calories out" but just that it's a constant metric regardless of how you exercise.
I'd also say google "starting strength" and do that. It's the first lifting program that's actually been really transformative to my body comp.
If you wanna log strength progress try fitocracy or something.
As others of said, start by just doing something. In a way, it is similar to coding in that you don't have to know every detail of a language before starting to program.
But with respect to your questions:
You can figure out how many calories you can eat based on your gender, age, and weight by calculating your TDEE (various calculators can be found online. Advice I've heard is to tell it that your activity level is sedentary since those calories can often be overestimated.)
I have spent a lot of time researching improving my health over the past year (and have done so) and found the reddit fitness FAQ (http://www.reddit.com/r/Fitness/wiki/faq) to be very educational and reasonably short. Highly recommended that people read it.
You may also want to check out the myfitnesspal (or similar) mobile app which helps you track your calories. I personally just google foods and use a text file but many people like the app.
There are a lot of tools, from fitocracy to more specialized sites, which allow you to measure all the aspects of the exercise you'd like. Prerequisite for it would be, of course, actually exercising :)
>>> There is nothing that will give you a grocery list + meal plan, along with a workout routine.
Why not? There are a lot of gyms and online resources offering workout programs. Same with meal plans - there are tons of diets, from Atkins to Paleo to hundreds in between - each with meticulous meal plans. If anything, for me they're too planned (what if I have to work late? What if I can't eat specific meal at specific time because I need to do something else?) but if it's your cup of tea, there's tons of stuff out there.
And there are a lot of exercise plans or organized exercise gyms. You can just come there, do whatever the trainer says and turn you brain off completely, if you'd like.
Shameless plug: I'm actually almost done writing an ebook that tackles this very problem. It is going to be a practical, no-bullshit guide that will give a beginner all the essentials without overwhelming them with useless detail.
As an example, one of the things I talk about in the ebook is the value of simplifying your diet as much as possible. I eat the same small group of foods over and over[1], which not only completely eliminates the risk of overeating, but also makes it possible for me to cook an entire week's worth of meals on a Sunday night so that I don't need to worry about it during the week. The latter is particularly useful because I never come back from work and get into the self-destructive "gosh, I'm too tired to cook, I guess I'll just order take-out" mindset.
[1]I've learned different ways of cooking them so it never gets boring, at least for me.
My big issue with exercise (other than that it sucks) is that it is so 'ungeeky' - it is mostly brainless and you do the same thing over and over again, while you learn very little new and you solve no interesting problems.
Curious, pizza seems really healthy to me: Cheese, tomatoes, veggies, maybe a tiny bit of meat, the dough isn't really worse than normal bread (get whole wheat dough!)
In my view, exercise is mandatory if you don't want serious health problems at a young age.
I could go on all day about which specific types of exercise are best, but it really depends on the person. The key is to find an exercise that YOU enjoy doing, and make the time to do it regularly.
Personally, I enjoy powerlifting and grappling. There are literally zero days where I drag my feet and have force myself to go to the weight room, or to jiu-jitsu class. I look forward to these activities all day while I'm at work. To me, they are fun and rewarding.
Find a sport or form of exercise that is fun to you, and just do it, a lot. Enter amateur competitions if you can. Doesn't really matter what it is, as long as it makes you sweat. It will help keep you fit, relieve stress, and even help you meet people and make friends, making you a happier person all around.
I completely agree that doing something enjoyable is absolutely the best approach, and if you want to optimise for various things, that's great - but don't knock the millions of folk who are getting off their arses and actually moving about. (It also makes me happier to think of people out there enjoying exercise, than "putting in their time" on the treadmill like hamsters.)
Sadly, finding a form of exercise that fits is easier said than done, as with so many things.
If you are unfit, there are many barriers - both physical and mental - to just trying out new sports until you find the right one. Even less unfit people can be paralysed with fear of the unknown, over-abundance of choice, etc.
College and workplace activity offerings are great, as are good gyms, because you can just try out a bunch of classes once and see what works for you. But it took me many years to get to the point where I was brave enough to walk in the door of a Crossfit gym, which I now thoroughly enjoy.
Maybe the point here is that if you have friends or acquaintances that "don't like exercise", bring them along to something you love or have always wanted to try (ideally the latter - doing someone's favourite sport with them is way intimidating if you're new to exercise, failing together is much more enjoyable).
Exercise is a source of confidence, motivation, and resilience -- a free and unlimited source. So not only will it benefit you, but keeping yourself physically and mentally healthy will likely increase the chances of your startup succeeding. I say that because people often feel, including me, that exercise comes at the cost of productivity, when in fact it multiplies it.
I realized the limiting factor in my performance is not time, it's mental energy. Since I started running almost every day, the time it takes to run more than makes up for itself in added mental energy.
And if you bring someone you need to talk with with you to run (or at least walk) outdoors in the sunshine, it sometimes turns into a more focused discussion than you might have had indoors at your usual places surrounded by your laptops and phones.
The fable here is that neglecting facets of your lifestyle has consequences. Exercise tends to correlate heavily with consciously managing diet and mental health.
I am thankful that someone as PG is a proponent of this sort of thing because the state of workplace culture (in many places) is already unhealthy enough (e.g. bagel Monday, pizza Friday, donut Wednesday, coupled with excessive sitting and high caffeine consumption). We all could benefit from employers who felt it a responsibility to keep their employees healthy (though the onus is ultimately on individuals, of course).
A long time ago my very athletic college girlfriend dumped me for a very athletic version of me. In the final weeks of that doomed relationship, I desperately hit the gym to try to stop the inevitable end of that first love. I failed.
But what I succeeded at was vowing to never again get dumped for someone that was pretty much me but in better shape. So the rest of the failed experiments on the way to meeting my wife found new and innovative ways to reject me.
These days, when I'm in a technical interview, and I get asked how I solve problems, I answer with something like "On a treadmill, running at 7-9 mph, until the answer becomes clear to me." About 2/3 of the time, the person asking the question is taken aback and I've just saved myself from working at a company full of couch potatoes half my age and heading twice as fast into effective old age. Really, we won't get along, let's just move along.
And about 1/3 of the time, the person seems to get that I'm using exercise to get away from the information deluge of the workplace to give my brain a chance to do its thing. These are the only jobs to which I give any consideration.
The day you stop moving is the day you start dying IMO.
I am not quite sure how that would work if you worked on a project alone and need to review a large stack of code or you work with somebody else, you can't exactly take 3 minutes on a threadmill.
With the 7 minute workout, you have no excuse not to exercise daily. All you need is a wall, a chair, a mat if the floor doesn't have carpet, and about 8 minutes. You get a full body endurance workout with all its long term and short term benefits - makes you feel more awake right away and helps you sleep better at the end of the day - and just 8 minutes later you can be back on your keyboard.
You can exercise more if you want to, but unless you have an impeding health problem, you have no excuse not to do this much.
I used this iOS app to learn the exercises (I started by learning 6 exercises and then evolved from there, in less than two weeks I was doing the full workout), and I use it every day to guide me: http://www.uovo.dk/apps/7minute.html (There's plenty of others similar apps out there which I haven't tried but this one works for me)
A few months ago I traded in bourbon and podcasts after work for yoga. I keep it simple and fairly easy. While I would probably be even better off doing intense cycling and/or lifting, basic yoga is doable for me after a hard day of work. Not only do I feel much more in shape, but I feel drastically more relaxed as well.
Working exercise into you're day is a good way to ensure you stick to it. I've always cycled to work and not only does this mean I do hundreds of hours of exercise that I wouldn't otherwise do it saves money and is probably quicker than commuting by car. I also feel more alert when I get to my desk.
Why are there so many articles posted on HN about this? Want to live long and be productive exercise and eat mostly healthy must be common sense at this point right?
I'm not knocking on the OP for posting this but am interested in hearing comments on why this keeps getting repeated. I sure know that everyone around me on a day to day basis knows this independent of whether they follow it or not.
I think the health results of daily excersize are a fringe benefit to the perseverance and dedication required to do so. Once you have perseverance and determination, you can DO anything.
I'd met Seth rock climbing at Dogpatch Boulders in SF. There are a lot of startup founders and people working at startups that go rock climbing -- make sure to check it out.
With all due respect to Paul Graham and on behalf of my fat ass and all my fellow (especially telecommuting) fat asses out there, /screw that guy/!. :D
Anything that you'll actually do every week and gets your heart rate up. Bonus points if it gets you outside. Walking. Running. Bicycling.
Personally, I like biking to work. Integrates the exercise right into my routine and doesn't really take that much more time than my other commute options. I also do longer weekend rides (40-70 miles).
[+] [-] WestCoastJustin|12 years ago|reply
My main gripe is that as engineers and measurement freaks, I want to research exercise before actually doing anything, and then want to measure my results. There is no clear action path down this road. Diet and exercise are two side of the same coin. Maybe I'll produce some content on this topic since I have spent the last couple years getting my house in order.
For example, say, starting tomorrow, you wanted to "eat healthy" and "workout". What would you do? There is nothing that will give you a grocery list + meal plan, along with a workout routine. You need to do all this research first!
[+] [-] jgrahamc|12 years ago|reply
While exercising it's a perfect time to have no other stimuli and let your mind wander. Just let it wander. It's really useful to do that because rather than listening to other people's thoughts you'll have thoughts of your own. Unexpected thoughts at that.
[+] [-] kyro|12 years ago|reply
You read and read because you want to do it right. But if I were to put a table of various foods in front of you and asked you to point out the healthiest, you'd succeed. You know what's healthy to eat. You know what simple exercises there are to get started with.
You researching so that you can optimize every second is likely a bigger waste of time and energy than eating healthy meals that may not have perfectly optimal macronutrient ratios, or doing exercises that aren't fully isolating a specific muscle group.
Just get started.
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|12 years ago|reply
Come up with a minimum viable plan, then iterate, obviously!
But seriously, you can start doing simple exercises and improving your diet while you're researching the next step of the plan. Take the stairs instead of the elevator; get off one stop earlier on the bus/train, and walk a little further. Park in the far corner of the parking lot. Do push-ups at home. Eat at least one salad a day. Cut your soda consumption in half, then to nothing.
Is there a term for the paralysis you work yourself into because you don't want to start something until you've perfectly researched it?
[+] [-] scotch_drinker|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drcode|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tankbot|12 years ago|reply
This isn't something that needs to be researched, it just needs to get done. Put something together and push it out, gain domain knowledge, refactor, repeat. Experience will be your guide and most of what you read during 'research' won't relate anyway, but you won't realize this until you have the experience. That's assuming the research phase doesn't paralyze you with options and statistics and metrics. You don't need a comprehensive prospectus, just change one thing. Then change another when you feel like it or it makes sense to do so.
I could expand on this if anyone is interested. I actually wrote a lot more here but decided it was probably irritating and chopped a bunch off.
[+] [-] bdunbar|12 years ago|reply
I do this.
I have a pair of jeans shorts, size X. When the waistband is tight, I'm not exercising enough. When I need a belt, I'm doing 'enough'.
It's rough but it works.
[+] [-] PhrosTT|12 years ago|reply
I'd also say google "starting strength" and do that. It's the first lifting program that's actually been really transformative to my body comp.
If you wanna log strength progress try fitocracy or something.
[+] [-] jaredsohn|12 years ago|reply
But with respect to your questions:
You can figure out how many calories you can eat based on your gender, age, and weight by calculating your TDEE (various calculators can be found online. Advice I've heard is to tell it that your activity level is sedentary since those calories can often be overestimated.)
http://www.eatthismuch.com is a website that will plan out meals for you based on calories.
I have spent a lot of time researching improving my health over the past year (and have done so) and found the reddit fitness FAQ (http://www.reddit.com/r/Fitness/wiki/faq) to be very educational and reasonably short. Highly recommended that people read it.
You may also want to check out the myfitnesspal (or similar) mobile app which helps you track your calories. I personally just google foods and use a text file but many people like the app.
[+] [-] smsm42|12 years ago|reply
>>> There is nothing that will give you a grocery list + meal plan, along with a workout routine.
Why not? There are a lot of gyms and online resources offering workout programs. Same with meal plans - there are tons of diets, from Atkins to Paleo to hundreds in between - each with meticulous meal plans. If anything, for me they're too planned (what if I have to work late? What if I can't eat specific meal at specific time because I need to do something else?) but if it's your cup of tea, there's tons of stuff out there. And there are a lot of exercise plans or organized exercise gyms. You can just come there, do whatever the trainer says and turn you brain off completely, if you'd like.
[+] [-] enraged_camel|12 years ago|reply
As an example, one of the things I talk about in the ebook is the value of simplifying your diet as much as possible. I eat the same small group of foods over and over[1], which not only completely eliminates the risk of overeating, but also makes it possible for me to cook an entire week's worth of meals on a Sunday night so that I don't need to worry about it during the week. The latter is particularly useful because I never come back from work and get into the self-destructive "gosh, I'm too tired to cook, I guess I'll just order take-out" mindset.
[1]I've learned different ways of cooking them so it never gets boring, at least for me.
[+] [-] tomjen3|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acchow|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kyllo|12 years ago|reply
I could go on all day about which specific types of exercise are best, but it really depends on the person. The key is to find an exercise that YOU enjoy doing, and make the time to do it regularly.
Personally, I enjoy powerlifting and grappling. There are literally zero days where I drag my feet and have force myself to go to the weight room, or to jiu-jitsu class. I look forward to these activities all day while I'm at work. To me, they are fun and rewarding.
Find a sport or form of exercise that is fun to you, and just do it, a lot. Enter amateur competitions if you can. Doesn't really matter what it is, as long as it makes you sweat. It will help keep you fit, relieve stress, and even help you meet people and make friends, making you a happier person all around.
[+] [-] jlees|12 years ago|reply
Sadly, finding a form of exercise that fits is easier said than done, as with so many things.
If you are unfit, there are many barriers - both physical and mental - to just trying out new sports until you find the right one. Even less unfit people can be paralysed with fear of the unknown, over-abundance of choice, etc.
College and workplace activity offerings are great, as are good gyms, because you can just try out a bunch of classes once and see what works for you. But it took me many years to get to the point where I was brave enough to walk in the door of a Crossfit gym, which I now thoroughly enjoy.
Maybe the point here is that if you have friends or acquaintances that "don't like exercise", bring them along to something you love or have always wanted to try (ideally the latter - doing someone's favourite sport with them is way intimidating if you're new to exercise, failing together is much more enjoyable).
[+] [-] kyro|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bfe|12 years ago|reply
And if you bring someone you need to talk with with you to run (or at least walk) outdoors in the sunshine, it sometimes turns into a more focused discussion than you might have had indoors at your usual places surrounded by your laptops and phones.
[+] [-] yawgmoth|12 years ago|reply
I am thankful that someone as PG is a proponent of this sort of thing because the state of workplace culture (in many places) is already unhealthy enough (e.g. bagel Monday, pizza Friday, donut Wednesday, coupled with excessive sitting and high caffeine consumption). We all could benefit from employers who felt it a responsibility to keep their employees healthy (though the onus is ultimately on individuals, of course).
[+] [-] dnautics|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HudsonMauer|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] varelse|12 years ago|reply
But what I succeeded at was vowing to never again get dumped for someone that was pretty much me but in better shape. So the rest of the failed experiments on the way to meeting my wife found new and innovative ways to reject me.
These days, when I'm in a technical interview, and I get asked how I solve problems, I answer with something like "On a treadmill, running at 7-9 mph, until the answer becomes clear to me." About 2/3 of the time, the person asking the question is taken aback and I've just saved myself from working at a company full of couch potatoes half my age and heading twice as fast into effective old age. Really, we won't get along, let's just move along.
And about 1/3 of the time, the person seems to get that I'm using exercise to get away from the information deluge of the workplace to give my brain a chance to do its thing. These are the only jobs to which I give any consideration.
The day you stop moving is the day you start dying IMO.
[+] [-] tomjen3|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stephth|12 years ago|reply
You can exercise more if you want to, but unless you have an impeding health problem, you have no excuse not to do this much.
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/09/the-scientific-7-mi...
I used this iOS app to learn the exercises (I started by learning 6 exercises and then evolved from there, in less than two weeks I was doing the full workout), and I use it every day to guide me: http://www.uovo.dk/apps/7minute.html (There's plenty of others similar apps out there which I haven't tried but this one works for me)
[+] [-] tomjen3|12 years ago|reply
Really all those exercises you can do anywhere - yeah you can do them anywhere if you live in the 'burbs.
[+] [-] hackula1|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Toenex|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gmonaco|12 years ago|reply
FWIW, I agree with the article. Also, exercising seemed like a chore at first, but now it's fun and I look forward to it.
[+] [-] smtddr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amattn|12 years ago|reply
A good workout (7-30 mins), a 15-30 min bike ride or a 10-20 min run will more than pay off with improved productivity and energy throughout the day.
[+] [-] Hansi|12 years ago|reply
I'm not knocking on the OP for posting this but am interested in hearing comments on why this keeps getting repeated. I sure know that everyone around me on a day to day basis knows this independent of whether they follow it or not.
[+] [-] Mankhool|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diziet|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pstack|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dionidium|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darkstar999|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phogster|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freiheit|12 years ago|reply
Personally, I like biking to work. Integrates the exercise right into my routine and doesn't really take that much more time than my other commute options. I also do longer weekend rides (40-70 miles).
[+] [-] 1qaz2wsx3edc|12 years ago|reply