snoyman.com-content/posts/naive-overview-nutrition-exercise.md

Some family and friends have been asking me to write up my thoughts on
the topic of nutrition and exercise. To give proper warning, I want to
say right from the beginning of this that I am _not_ in any way a
qualified expert. I'm a computer programmer who was overweight and
unhealthy for most of my life until my mid-twenties, when I decided to
take control, did a bunch of reading, and have been (mostly) in shape
and far healthier since.

I don't want you to take anything I say as gospel; it's not. Hopefully
this will give you ideas of where to start, topics worth researching,
and short-circuit some of the very self-defeating confusion that I
think most of us have suffered through. I'm not providing sources for
what I'm writing, partly because I want you to read up on topics
yourself, and mostly because I'm too lazy :).

This is something of a continuation on my post on
[why I lift](/blog/2017/06/why-i-lift), though in reality I started on
this post first. Also, I had originally intended to make one massive
post covering nutrition and exercise. Instead, I'm breaking this up
into three parts. This post will set the tone and give some background
information, and the following two posts will dive into each of
nutrition and exercise in more detail (though still as a "naive
overview").

This post series is very off the beaten track for me, and I'm still
unsure if I'll be writing more like it. If you _do_ like it and want
to see more, or have some specific questions, please mention so in the
comments and I'll be more likely to make future posts on these topics.

* [Read part 2 now](/blog/2017/06/naive-overview-nutrition)
* [Read part 3 now](/blog/2017/06/naive-overview-exercise)

## Philosophy

I've come up with the following philosophical points about health and
fitness, which guide my own decisions a lot:

* Overcomplication is a major enemy. Should you follow a vegan diet, a
  paleo diet, go ketogenic, or respect GI values? Should you run, jog,
  sprint, lift weights, do bodyweights? This abundance of seemingly
  contradictory advice is the most demotivating thing out there, and
  prevents so many of us from getting healthy.
* While these complications are real, you can get the vast majority of
  benefits by following many simpler guidelines (I'll talk about those
  later) that almost everyone agrees on. Do the simple stuff first,
  worry about the rocket science later.
* If you read any nutrition study, odds are pretty high there's
  another study that shows the opposite result. Nutrition science is
  greatly lacking in replication studies, so take everything you read
  with a grain of salt (and yes, studies on salt are contradictory
  too).
* You'll be best served by following basic guidelines, getting
  comfortable with those, and then experimenting with different
  approaches from that baseline. If you're motivated to, go ahead and
  spend a week or three on a vegan diet, on a keto diet, and anything
  else you believe has a chance of working. Pay attention to how you
  respond to it.

## Who am I?

I mentioned this a bit in the why I lift post, but I want to give a
little more background here. Odds are pretty good that my baseline
level of health and fitness is lower than you, the reader. As a child
and young adult, I was overweight. I ate junk food constantly. I
hardly exercised. I had a few brief bouts where I lost some weight,
but it always came back within a year, and with a vengeance.

I've been programming since I was 10 years old. I spent hours on end
almost every day since then on a computer or playing video games. I
wasn't quite at the stereotype of sitting in a darkened room eating
Cheetos and Mountain Dew, but I was pretty close.

Around the age of 25 (give or take a few years), I decided I had
enough. I was tired of being overweight. I was scared of developing
diabetes. I could barely sit at my desk for 10 minutes without back
pain. I woke up in the morning and had trouble getting out of bed. I
finally decided that bad health—at least in my case—wasn't
a curse of genetics, but something I'd brought on myself, and only I
would be able to fix it.

So as you read these posts, I don't want you to become discouraged and
think "well, this guy can do this, but _I_ never could, I'm just your
average office worker." It's quite the opposite. If I've been able to
overcome a lifetime of bad habits and genetic predispositions to
negative health conditions, you can too.

## Goals

It's useless to talk about "getting healthy" or "getting fit" without
some definition of what that means. Some people are going to have very
specific goals; for example, a power lifter may want to deadlift as
much weight as possible, even if the process shortens his/her lifespan
by 10 years. If you have such specific goals, odds are this post isn't
for you.

I'm going to guess that most people reading this will probably have
the same three goals, though their priorities among the goals will
differ:

* Lose fat
* Gain muscle
*   Improve general health/increase longevity/feel better. This would
    include improvements in things like:

    *   Cardiovascular function
    *   Cholesterol levels

I was specific in my wording on those first two bullets. You may
_think_ you want to lose weight, but you won't be happy if you lose
weight in the form of muscle mass or (worse) organs. Similarly, you
may not think you want to gain muscle, but I'd argue that you do:

* More muscle = more calories burned, making fat loss easier
* More muscle makes moving around in day to day life easier
* You'll look better (both men and women) with more muscle

Caveat: I'm not talking about bodybuilder levels here.

## Nutrition and Exercise

Nutrition is what food you put into your body. Exercise is what
activities you do with your body. Based on the goals above, we need to
acknowledge that you need to address both nutrition and exercise to
address your goals. This is the first big mistake I'll address in this
post.

* If you eat a bunch of junk food, almost no level of exercise you
  perform will burn off the extra fat you're gaining.
* If you don't do any exercise, your body will get weaker, regardless
  of what you're eating.

So this is important: you need to do both. Period. If you're going to
pick one of them to start off with... I guess I'd say start with
nutrition, but it's really a personal call. I'd recommend starting
with whatever you believe you're more likely to stick with.

## Up next

My next post will dive into details on the nutrition half of the
equation, and the following post will dive into exercise. If there are
enough questions raised in the comments in these three posts, I'll
likely add a fourth Q&A post to this series.

And if you're just desperate to read more now, don't forget about my
[why I lift](/blog/2017/06/why-i-lift) post.

* [Read part 2 now](/blog/2017/06/naive-overview-nutrition)
* [Read part 3 now](/blog/2017/06/naive-overview-exercise)