CityCyclingEdinburgh was launched on the 27th of October 2009 as "an experiment".
IT’S TRUE!
CCE is 15years old!
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RULES No personal insults. No swearing.
Man on radio talking about obesity -
"activity is important, not just 'exercise' "
Would be good if that basic message got across - ie people don't need 'exercise' classes/gym or equipment/outfits etc.
So more walking/cycling AND Governments that make it easier to 'just do it'.
Also said people need to eat less too.
UPDATE BBC News just said that Government (England) wants LAs to do more through Transport and Planning.
That'll be the Government that abolished Cycling England...
I don't suppose he also clarified the question of the religious affiliation of the pontiff by any chance?
Did he mention where this non-exercise activity is going to come from in a society where jobs are increasingly sedentary and almost all travel is passive? What are people going to be doing that'll solve the problem of obesity? To lose weight, people need to make a big effort and expend a significant amount of energy. I mean, compared with walking about a bit, it takes a significant amount of additional energy expenditure to shift one pound of body fat - 3,000 calories, about 5-6 hours of cycling at a reasonable pace. For me to use 3000 calories, it takes cycling 7 miles to and from work every day and then another couple of hours at the weekend. I'm not saying people can't do that (because obviously I can) but it's no use pretending it's going to be easy - that a wee stroll at lunchtime or getting off a stop early is going to shift it.
But nobody* needs to shed a pound of weight every week - that's 52lbs a year. I'd be clinically malnourished in less than a year, and I'm not so dainty!
In fact, this is the whole point of the "active lifestyle" message. If you burn only 50 extra calories a day, that's still 6lbs of fat each year.
Look at your average overweight office worker and subtract 6lbs for each decade and they'd be (say) 18-24lbs lighter. There's most of your obesity problem in middle age dealt with, at not a penny of cost.
50 calories is not much activity - about 10 minutes, I guess.
* some clinical exceptions no doubt exist
Well known person walks, shock -
"
Just walked in to work. Took about an hour and was lovely. #sunnylondon
"
https://www.twitter.com/Fearnecotton/status/124766191049904128
She does have more than 2M Twitter followers so might have more influence than a Government campaign!
I would like a campaign around using stairs instead of lifts, especially if you're only going one floor and/or going downstairs. I use the lift when I get in with heavy panniers, and (sometimes) from our showers in the basement back up to office. And have been given grief 'you cycle in and then take the lift'. But no one ever gives any grief to the perfectly healthy people who take it up one floor!
"have been given grief 'you cycle in and then take the lift' "
They are bullying you with their guilt.
Not clever.
The calories thing is pretty misleading anyway, firstly the number is derived from burning the material and measuring the energy given off, this of course takes no account of the digestive process and how well the body can absorb the energy from different types of foodstuffs, never mind the differing insulin responses created by different foods.
Also general fitness increases you base metabolic rate, so you continue to burn more calories for many hours after exercise... This whole recent debate just highlights for me how much junk science (and dieting is the ultimate pervayor of junk science) has entered the public consciousness as fact.
"'you cycle in and then take the lift'"
Daft isn't it, how much exercise have they done to get to work?!? Here people get in the lift to go down one or two floors.
@ Dave
Nobody? If there were only exceptions there wouldn't be so much concern about an obesity epidemic. In 2009, about 27% of men and 26% of women in Scotland were obese (and one third of children were overweight).
You only get to be called obese when your BMI goes over 30. A thirty year old man, 5' 8" and 15 stones is obese (only just). He's not huge - not one of those cartoon roly poly fat people used to give a convenient illustration of obesity on TV, he wouldn't get a programme on Channel 5, but he's obese nonetheless.
He needs to lose a pound of fat a week (although his body will fight him over it and conventional dieting will take as much lean tissue as fat). He only needs to lose 30lbs to bring his BMI under 25 to not be overweight but he needs to do it in a sustainable way before Type 2 diabetes kicks in.
I think it's worth getting a grasp of the numbers and the effort involved because when you reach the stage that two-thirds of the population is overweight and one-third is obese you need to stop thinking in terms of individual problems of excessive pie consumption and individual solutions of marginal increases in activity and start looking at system-wide, societal problems and solutions. See below.
@ ruggtomcat
There's plenty of junk science around but the calorie is a pretty reliable measure of the energy content of foods. The body would only be limited in its ability to extract energy if it were unable to break down the food and that is taken into account in current methods and has always formed part of the assessment, right back to some of the original accounts published in the late 1800s.
But there was an interesting review of the issue in The Lancet recently that was more good science. One part of the series was a model that builds in changes to metabolic rates and, of course, the lower number of calories needed to sustain a person as they lose weight, which, paradoxically, suggests that the problem of weight loss is greater than commonly understood.
"Nobody? 52lbs is less than 4 stones. You think there's only clinical exceptions who are four stones or more overweight? If there were only exceptions there wouldn't be so much concern about an obesity epidemic."
Most obese people are more than a year old, of course. If they were just five years old, your pound a week suddenly totals 250lb, or the best part of 18 stone.
If they lost a pound a week every week between 20 and 40, they're getting on for losing a hundred stone - that's quite a lot of weight. These people are surely clinical exceptions.
In reality, Joe average is carrying a relatively modest amount of fat (a few stone) and as they don't put on that weight instantly we don't need to worry about getting them to lose it instantly either - not if we're thinking medium to long term anyway. (Older people now who've got a serious obesity problem are beyond small lifestyle changes - that much is easy to see.)
To lose 5 stone in just a decade means cutting 67 calories a day, and realistically most people are more than a decade away from obesity-related carnage, so rather than telling them to try to maintain a huge calorie deficit for a year, let's just get them to use the stairs, or walk a bit, and make that part of their routine. Job done.
(If only it were so easy...)
@Dave
I'm not sure what your first two paragraphs are about. People who are overweight, and particularly people who are obese, need to lose enough weight to bring themselves within a healthy weight range. The standard (although by no means perfect) way of assessing healthy weight is to have a BMI of between 19 and 24. Once people are within that range they can stop losing weight. I'm not suggesting that people lose a pound a week for the rest of their lives regardless of their weight.
It's OK. I'm talking about solving the obesity epidemic, whereas you are talking about what people who are currently obese need to do to get down to a healthy weight as rapidly as possible. These aren't the same at all (and for both your way would be better, if it was even vaguely realistic).
@insto But BMI is such a blunt tool, mine just came out as 26.1 - overweight !
I am 6 feet and 14 stone 2, fit (dodgy hip aside) and not a tubster (honest).
I totally get the fact that too many are overweight, but using bmi is not enough on its own, to do that means all tall people are, unless beanpoles, close to the fat line !
I was at a BMI of 32 and a waist size of 38" in my powerlifting days.
The statiticians have taken account of muscle mass' effect on muddying the BMI waters, though; they now factor in waist size, although they rather generously consider anything under 37" to be low.
(This is a 1.7Mb PDF file, for all those viewing on mobile devices)
http://www.ic.nhs.uk/cmsincludes/_process_document.asp?sPublicationID=1198756376405&sDocID=4890
'you cycle in and then take the lift'.
I cycle in and take the stairs. So I get to be smug for the next 5 minutes...
I know BMI's a blunt tool. Any single indicator of anything is a blunt tool and in any field is no replacement for an expert assessment taking account of a broad range of indicators. If I thought for a second we were a nation of powerlifters and that was the cause of two-thirds of adults and one third of children appearing to be overweight I'd be ready to throw BMI out of the window. But we all know it's not that. On that basis and despite its limitations I think it's a good simple indicator of the state of the nation. It's one that can be tracked easily using simple equipment by non-specialists through large-scale surveys like the Scottish Health Survey. The trend tells us where we're headed and it's not to the gym. I don't think that's in the least controversial and, going back to the original post, I can't really understand why anyone who understands the data would suggest that moderate increases in activity, not exercise, is going to substantially help.
The aim shouldn't be to lose weight as quickly as possible. One pound a week is not rapid weight loss. People who are over-eating can easily find 500 calories through food and exercise. It's easy to lose weight quickly. It's much more important to lose it sustainably but that means some significant changes in lifestyle and diet, incorporating exercise. To be honest, that should be music to cycling campaigners' ears because cycle commuting is one of the cheap and effective ways that many people could incorporate exercise into their day, without having to put aside time or money for exercise. It's one of the ways in which cycling organisations could tap into the pools of public health money sloshing around trying to prevent the costs of obesity spiralling out of control.
If that's not realistic then we can look forward to a greater proportion of the population becoming obese, including children. It is now estimated that on current trends by 2050 about 60% of adults will be clinically obese costing the health service about £45 billion.
It is now estimated that on current trends by 2050 about 60% of adults will be clinically obese costing the health service about £45 billion.
Which makes it even stranger that the SNP are cutting active travel funding. They'll fund the NHS to mop up the damage obesity causes, but not fund (sufficiently) transport modes that can help prevent obesity from taking hold in the first place.
Mind you they want renewables and oil/coal/gas too. They want to reduce CO2 emissions but build new roads...
"I don't think that's in the least controversial and, going back to the original post, I can't really understand why anyone who understands the data would suggest that moderate increases in activity, not exercise, is going to substantially help."
I'm glad you wrote this, as it allows me to give a simple answer that illustrates the point I've been trying to make.
A moderate increase in activity (say, of 50 calories per day) will - by the year 2050 - result in the loss of 516,000 calories for every individual, equivalent to the loss of nearly 150lbs of body fat each.
50 calories is just taking the stairs instead of the lift and parking your car 5 minutes walk away instead of at the door. Nothing more.
In fact, I can't really understand why anyone who understands the data would suggest that anything other than moderate increases in activity, not exercise, is sufficient to battle the obesity epidemic ;-)
I'm glad you wrote that. Not that there's anything wrong with the logic or arithmetic but that's all it is: logic and arithmetic. If weight gain and weight loss were only functions of logic and arithmetic there wouldn't be a problem but there is a problem.
I don't want to be impolite or spend too long summarising the literature on the relative success of weight loss programmes so I'll leave it with the link the Lancet series above and let anyone who's interested in more than Pythonesque gainsaying work out where walking up stairs instead of taking the lift fits into the policy prescriptions. Or, indeed, where intensive dietary and exercise regimes fit into it. Clue: they don't much.
In the context of their broad overview, this argument is essentially moot, pointless, a silly forum game. Both approaches - mine and the man's from the original post, your's Dave - are individualised solutions to a problem that is global and systemic and while individuals might find their own way out of it by giant steps or baby steps, it's not addressing the core problem. One of the sets of authors note that:
The interventions to motivate behavioural changes could be regarded as counteractions (ie, they counteract drivers of increasingly obesogenic environments by acting on some of their mediators) and they might have important obesity prevention effects, especially in children, if applied to a whole community. However, sustainability and affordability are the two major continuing challenges, even for programmes with proven effectiveness. Furthermore, such programmes do not address the underlying drivers of the epidemic.
We can debate this til the too fat dairy cows come home.
My take is that its up to each of us as individuals.
I get up of a morning, look at the gut, think "too much" and hit the salad / extra bike miles that week.
Problem in scotland is people saying "sod it, i cant be bothered might as well hit the pizza".
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