It can be. Not usually terrible unless you need to get across the city. You learn ways around the usual trouble (usually using brain and avoid where the satnav sends everyone).
Losing weight is a bastard. Easier to not put it on! You basically have to breath out 84% of it as CO2 which puts it into perspective. Walking up hills is good. Hurts like hell for the first year.
Losing weight is easy. Pure thermodynamics. The hard part is dealing with your bastard self and being honest to it. We're cheap lying weasels and will come up with any lame excuse to justify stuffing that energy rich treat into our faces or avoiding anything physical. Most people just prefer to lie to themselves.
Not EASY; SIMPLE. Big. Effing. Difference. Same as the prerequisite "honest self-appraisal". Most people would rather stand in a busy intersection and drill screws through their feet.
And like any addiction, the addiction to sugar is exactly as smart, cunning and deceitful as you are. Each and every one of us has the devil inside, and we most often unleash him on ourselves rather than those around us.
mnem
The Three Laws of Thermodynamics:
1. You can't win.
2. You can't break even.
3. You can't even get out of the game.
[/begin rant]
I've stayed out of this discussion so far but this morning my resolve has weakened, as evidenced by the fact that I just bought (another) oscilloscope and six crates of data books from the 80s and 90s. So here goes... and yes, TL;DR.
It is actually much worse than that, mnen. Most of our habitual eating patterns are established before we have any control over decisions such as,
I am going to eat this, I am not going to eat that. While there is substantial evidence that we can work around those patterns, there is a fair amount of evidence that undoing them completely is impossible. These patterns are coupled with metabolic changes that appear to predispose us to certain substances if we consume them abundantly in childhood. There is also substantial evidence that, no matter what, our metabolism and hunger/satiation mechanisms adjust to maintain our current body weight and composition.
Which is all a long way of saying, making lasting changes to our eating habits has to take into account the real obstacles posed by deeply routinized patterns and a metabolic/regulatory systems that are designed to maintain stasis. Most admonitions to
eat healthy!, low calorie diets, food restricted diets, and so on fail because they don't take this into account. That doesn't mean weight loss or maintenance is a lost cause. It does mean that both are, over the long term, more difficult than described by diet and exercise gurus of whatever stripe and never simply a matter of being lazy or not-lazy.
Though it does not make me an expert, I say this as a fat guy who first visited a gym in 1982, subsequently lost 55 lbs, and has been quite physically active since then. I have also struggled with weight maintenance issues for roughly forty years in spite of working out regularly, making substantial changes in my eating habits, absorbing a lot of peer-reviewed research on diet and exercise, and being a therapist specializing in addiction and other habitual pattern change.
[/end rant]
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