Ask HN: How do you hack fitness ? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you hack fitness ?

2 pointssharadgopal8 comments

How do you manage to stay fit ? I am moderately fit, but more often than not, I lose motivation to go run everyday or workout / eat healthy food, and so it turns into a two step forward, one backward story.

This post [How to Push Past the Pain, as the Champions Do / http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1806944] a couple of weeks ago, re-inspired me to pick up and add some more discipline to my daily habits by changing my thought process a little, and on a similar note, I would love to hear about how do you manage to stay fit, and what thought process, and routine(if any) helps you get there ?

Thanks.

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In three parts: how I exercise, what I eat, my mindset.

1. http://www.sandowplus.co.uk/Competition/Hoffman/hoffmanindex... (the last one is most comprehensive, but also hilariously bloated with statements about the importance of fitness to improve the nation and fight Communism. )

2. Lots of protein, and a bit of supplementation(multivitamin, additional vitamin D, Omega-3). The rest is mostly a matter of "what harms me the least." A difficult subject which my opinion has changed on multiple times, but the one truism that seems to hold is that if you can slow and smooth out digestion and energy levels(mainly via more fat and fiber), you save yourself tons of post-meal discomfort, evening cravings, binges, etc.

3. There is no particular motivation. It's just what I do, hence it's my lifestyle. Occasionally I experiment and shift the boundaries. I'm not particularly disciplined and things like weather will shift my cravings around. I've searched specifically for methods that are incredibly lazy and tried to ignore prestige. Most of the diet/fitness material out there is prestige-based, does not use science properly, and will simply crush your ego without helping you.

Weigh at the same time in the same clothes every day. Count calories consumed and burned each day. Track those on a spreadsheet with charts. Look at it every day and make small adjustments to get the averages where you want them so you lose weight slowly or maintain.

Some psych tricks I use are to have some low calorie/healthy foods that are "free", I don't count them against my calorie total. I go for a sum of calories consumed minus those burned so it encourages me to extra exercise to "earn" extra calories. (I've been known to run up and down some stairs to earn a cookie. :-) Also I figure out a minimum of junk food that satisfies my cravings and allow myself that and adjust calories around that.

For steady fitness, I set a ridiculously low minimum of exercise for every day. Then if I only do the minimums I only take a half step back for each two steps forward.

Also add some weights to any exercise if you can. If you run carry hand weights. If you do situps use weights too. It's free extra exercise.

Be brutally honest about what a meal needs to be. For example, an average sized person can eat a single-patty hamburger and HALF of a SMALL order of fries with NO drink, and be full. This "bad" food has never gotten me in trouble, because I keep the calorie count sane. What gets people in trouble is thinking that they actually need to buy the large fries and a massive drink, add bacon and cheese, and finish with cookies. Then they do it every day, and also stop at Starbucks in the afternoons.

One pound (of body fat) is 3500 calories. This is good to remember when you see a single shake at Baskin Robbins that is 2000.

Exercise is important, but overrated. Remember that humans burn calories even sitting still. So when the treadmill tells you that you burned 140 calories, that is a bit of a lie, because you would have burned maybe 80 if you did nothing at all. It is far more important to just eat and drink fewer calories to begin with.

After making it only part way through Tim Ferriss' new book The 4 Hour Body I am already thinking that I'm going to have to soon start going the "I, API" route. Basically: measure everything.

I bought a Garmin GPS watch a while back just to see what it looked like to walk around for a day. What if I could combine that data with, say, Fitbit (http://www.fitbit.com/) and Zeo (http://www.myzeo.com/)?

I think we're on the cusp of a revolution of new technology that will let us cheaply measure and collect data on all kinds of things in our lives. Just think about what kind of effect visualization of data like this could have on your life!

The fitness imperative is almost implicit in this kind of self-analysis.

I don't accept excuses. Don't even let yourself start, it gets too easy. Apply that to other things in life and you'll be pretty productive.

Good luck!

Get a workout buddy if you can. Take pictures daily after workout (sounds lame, but it works).

Also, buy a scale and weight daily at the same time as the pictures and record it into some form of spreadsheet. Quantitative data meets qualitative data!

Agree, "you can't control what you don't measure".

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