1. Getting regular breaks during sedentary activity
2. Getting about 30 minutes of activity a day

Re the first recommendation, LifeHacker unfortunately says all you need to do is stand, but if you dig into this a bit more, it’s clear you need to actually move.

Re the second recommendation, check out this fab video if you haven’t already seen it.

As far as physical activity, it’s clear more is better (unless you’re talking chronic cardio). But if you’ve got a desk job, it sure seems like being intentional about building in activity regularly is well worthwhile.

I’ve been using a 20-minute timer on my computer for months now just as part of my back rehabilitation. Glad to know it may have other benefits!

Take a good hard look at yourself in the mirror. … You’re in a spiral, you’re in a downward spiral. This is an ugly side of you, but you don’t have to be ugly. You don’t. You can take stock. Make yourself better. Okay? This is an opportunity for you to make yourself better, to change, to become better than what you were.

Reminds me a bit of that Cherokee story of the wolves within.

Wow. This is a MUST watch video. Yes, it’s a little geeky (his nickname isn’t Mat the Kraken for nothing), but most of it is pretty accessible.

Mat is a former vegan (2 years) and vegetarian (8 years), who has adopted a paleo-ish diet. But he almost didn’t, because he find some of the paleo “theories” less than satisfactory when held to serious academic rigor:

• Just because our genes are identical to paleolithic man’s does not mean our diet should be identical. How those genes have been expressed (epigenetics) are considerably different today and that makes a difference.
• Lack of grains/dairy and freedom from diseases of civilization is an observation … correlation is not causality.
• Just because a food wasn’t available before the agricultural age doesn’t mean we’re not able to tolerate that food. Rather “there’s been insufficient time and insufficient evolutionary pressure for complete adaptation to seed consumption to arise in homo sapiens and as a result, individuals that tolerate grains and legumes should be considered the minority, not the majority.”

That said, Mat’s not a grain fan (“the proteins are the problem”) and suggests that a diet of meat, vegetables, and tubers is a good baseline diet and from there, people should tweak.

Lots more good stuff there, so be sure to check it out!

Given the following:

* Most people don’t exercise very much
* Exercise burns less calories than most people think

The problem for the overwhelming majority is “how do I dispose of excess sugars, simple or complex,” not “how do I replenish depleted liver glycogen?”

Umm, yeah. To my mind, the value of reducing carbs in your diet (as I do) is not for some magical thing it does to your metabolism or what it does to your insulin levels, it’s what it does to general energy balance (read: I think there’s a pony in there somewhere). This is also why I don’t see the usefulness of eating tons of non-nutritive fats either while I’ve got lots to spare!

As they say, your mileage may vary.

Anybody who says obesity is as simple as, you know, too much fat or too much carbohydrate or something like that is either misinformed or is intentionally misleading you. It’s far more complex than that, but I can boil it down into one simple phrase, which is modern lifestyle + genetic predisposition = obesity.

I encourage folks to listen, but if you don’t have time, there’s a transcript on the podcast page.

Chris mentions that the practical implications are for a future podcast, but this is a great intro to a fairly complicated subject.

Speaking of Chris and weight loss, I’ll be starting his “Advanced Weight Loss” class this Saturday. It’s a special class that was offered to the first 150 folks who purchased his Personal Paleo Code last fall. The workshop will likely be available to others later this spring. I’m really looking forward to his take on this subject!

You need to start thinking about where you want to drive the boat and if you’re not, you’re shitting the bed.

LOL!

Be sure to check out the whole podcast and and particularly Robb’s answer to George (starting at 47:16). It’s relevant for those wondering just how many carbs an ancestral diet should include.

Last week’s FCB had to do with math, today it’s physics!

My BA is in math, so I just cannot pass this up!

So why do people gain [weight] back if it’s so important to them? … To lose their weight they’ve gone on highly restrictive diets, they’re denying themselves the ability to use food for comfort or celebration, they’re regularly white-knuckling through hunger and cravings, they’ve set ridiculous Boston Marathon style goals for their losses, and they’ll often possess highly traumatic all-or-nothing attitudes towards their efforts. In short? They’ve chosen suffering as their weight management modality.

… [So] whatever you choose to do to lose your weight, you need to keep doing to keep it off, and therefore choosing a weight loss modality you don’t enjoy is just a recipe for regain.

~ Yoni Freedhoff

Stephan Guyenet at last fall’s TEDxHarvardLaw, where he associates the rise in obesity with consumption of processed foods.