Transcription
active, I find it much easier to maintain my weight. It’s almost like a feedback loop; when I’m exercising regularly, I’m more mindful of my food choices, and when I’m eating well, I feel more motivated to stay active.
So, it seems that the key takeaway is that while exercise alone may not lead to significant weight loss, it plays a crucial role in maintaining weight and preventing weight regain after dieting. It’s about creating a sustainable lifestyle that incorporates both healthy eating and regular physical activity.
In conclusion, the relationship between exercise, diet, and weight management is complex, but it’s clear that both elements are essential for long-term health and well-being. By understanding how our bodies evolved and the importance of staying active, we can make better choices that support our health goals.
Committed to exercise, I'm also most committed to my diet. Yeah, because if I go to the gym, I will not then leave the gym and have a donut or a pizza. Absolutely not! It seems like wasting the effort. So, if you look at the sort of correlation between the moments in my life where I eat healthiest, they're also the moments in my life where I'm most focused on the gym. I noticed a couple of months ago, I had a bit of a motivation slump. I managed to stay in our little WhatsApp group but coasted down the bottom of the leaderboard for a couple of months, just like surviving every month by one. Through those moments, my motivation in the gym had gone down, and my diet had gone down. The minute I managed to get into the gym and do a big workout, the same day, my diet came back.
Yeah, of course, right? And they correlate, right? That's one of the reasons why when people do big studies of what people die of—right?—what's on the death certificate, you know, cancer, heart disease, whatever, heart attack—and then you look at what caused the cancer, what caused the heart disease, when people try to do that, it's almost impossible to separate diet and exercise. Because people who tend to eat better also tend to exercise more. They're both, in our modern upside-down, topsy-turvy world, markers of privilege. People who have money to go to the gym also have money to buy healthy foods. And people who care about their physical activity also tend to care about their diet. So, at that level, they're very hard to separate.
However, if you're studying a particular component of a system in a randomized controlled trial in a lab, you can separate them out. We know that they have independent and also interactive effects. What is the most important thing we haven't talked about, Daniel? I think the most important thing is that we need to be compassionate towards each other. I mean, there's so much shaming and blaming and prescriptions. The reason I entitled the book "Exercised" is that we make people feel exercised about exercise. We make them feel uncomfortable and unconfident and shamed. Here you and I are having this conversation, but I can tell that you care about your health, and you care about diet, you care about exercise. People may look at you and think, "Gosh, I wish I was like him," but it's just not me. You know, I can't—I’m not there, right? They may feel put off by our conversation.
I think that so often these discussions make people feel bad about what they're doing. What we need to emphasize is that if you put a chocolate cake and an apple in front of me, I would want to eat the chocolate cake. I might eat the apple only because you're there, but if you weren't there, I would eat the chocolate cake. When I'm in my building at Harvard, my office is on the fifth floor of this old Victorian building. Every single day, I want to take the elevator, and the only reason I take the stairs is that if anybody catches me in the elevator, I'll be a hypocrite. It's not that I don't want to take the elevator; I do want to take the elevator.
We make people feel bad for taking the elevator, right? They shouldn't feel bad; it's an instinct. We have to figure out ways to help people without shaming them and without blaming them and without bragging. Talking about the marathon they ran or this, that, or the other makes them feel less uncomfortable about the topic. They need to realize that you don't have to swim the English Channel or run a marathon or join your WhatsApp group and do crazy HIIT workouts every day. By the way, you don't need to do HIIT workouts every day to get the benefit. Instead, just taking the stairs in your building every day—anything is better than nothing, and you'll get benefits from that. I hope that that's the message that needs to get out: anything is better than nothing. If you can get started on that pathway, then it'll eventually become self-rewarding.
That leads me to the other topic that we didn't talk about, which is the reward system of physical activity. You and I, if we go—like, I'm really looking forward to my run tomorrow morning in the park. I love running in Central Park; it's one of the best places in the world to run. A fantastic view from the top, and it's just gorgeous. When I run in Central Park tomorrow, I'm going to get a big dopamine hit. My body is going to produce all this dopamine, which is the molecule that says, "Do that again." It's a reward. Gamblers get dopamine hits, right? People eat chocolate cake and get a dopamine hit. But if I were unfit and overweight, I wouldn't get that dopamine hit.
When people start exercising, they don't get the reward that people who are fit and accustomed to doing it get, and then they're made to feel bad, like, "You didn't enjoy your run around Central Park." Well, it takes months, if not years, before you actually get that reward. Really? Because just like being overweight causes you to become insensitive to insulin, you become insensitive to all kinds of other hormones and neurotransmitters, and dopamine is one of them. So, it's not an instant benefit; it's hard. We need to be compassionate again towards people who are struggling to become fit and struggling to get the reward.
Also, if you're overweight and you run around Central Park, it's like if I were carrying weights while running around Central Park, it'd be much harder. It's challenging. Once you get into that state, it's hard to get back to the state of activity. We need, as a society, to help those folks rather than judge them—those folks that are struggling. I was one of those folks that struggled for many, many years. I would say to myself every year, pretty much all of my adult life, that this was going to be the year that I'd get fit. I'd try all of these various different fad exercise things, buy all this stuff. I announced in 2017 that I was going to work out every single day, and that lasted for six months. Then I yo-yoed back out of that. It never stuck with me until 2020, and I've been exercising six days a week since 2020—82% of days.
I reflect and try to diagnose how I went from someone who—what was it that changed? If I can figure out what it was that changed at the most fundamental level in my mindset or my attitude or my life or whatever it was, then I can help other people figure that out too or at least give them more sound advice or at least be more empathetic—whatever is required to help them. I have a platform here where I speak about exercise a lot and these things. So, what's your suspicion? What do you think makes people go from having a negative opinion towards exercise or their ability to be disciplined with it to becoming an exerciser?
You know, this is a question that obsesses me. In fact, we have a big project right now, a big grant to actually study this. The more I study it, the more I think it's social. Again, I think people are physically active—in our modern world, exercise—for two reasons: when it's necessary or rewarding. What makes it rewarding for most people is the social aspect. That social aspect can take many dimensions. It can be running with a group of friends, and you might want to go only a mile, but your friends convince you to run another mile, and you end up running two miles. Or you're feeling bad and crappy, and your friends help you do it, or you have a running buddy.
I often meet friends for early morning runs, and I can tell you that the evening before, it seems like a great idea to meet Aaron at 6 a.m. on the corner of Mass Ave and Lenox. The next morning at 6 a.m., I want to stay in bed with my wife. I don't want to meet this nasty, smelly guy at 6:00 a.m. in the cold and dark, but I agreed to meet him, and out I go. I'm usually glad I did it afterward. We can go on; there are other social ways in which this works. Dancing, for example—nobody thinks of dancing as exercise, but it's exercise.
So, that's one important social dimension. The other one, though, is accountability. I describe in the book a friend of mine in San Francisco who was struggling to exercise, so she signed up for a program at a company called Stick.com. I don't know if you've run across it, where it's a commitment contract. You send like $1,000 to them, and they keep it in a bank account. They probably invest it and make a lot of money on it too, of course. But you set up a referee, and you agree that you're going to not smoke or this or that or the other, or in this case, exercise. If you don't do it, and your referee is keeping track of what you do, you get to choose something negative.
In her case, her husband is her referee, and she has to walk a certain number of miles every day. If she doesn't, her husband will tell her, and it'll send $50 to the NRA that week. Oh my God! She hates the NRA with a burning passion. What is the NRA? The National Rifle Association. They're the people who are trying to prevent gun control legislation in the United States and have effectively prevented gun control legislation in the United States, which now kills more children than cars in the United States. So, if she doesn't exercise, then money goes to this organization that she hates. This is a stick if there ever was one, as opposed to a carrot.
I don't think she's—every time I see her, I ask her, "Have you kept up the walk?" She says, "Oh no, I haven't gotten a penny." For her, it's been very effective. She's made a commitment contract that stings, right? That really hurts. Now, I think that might be a little on the extreme side, and I wouldn't necessarily recommend that to everybody, but she's accountable. She's made herself accountable in some ways. I think people can find ways to make themselves accountable to a friend, a loved one, a parent, a priest—who knows, right? You might hire a trainer. That's kind of what a trainer does: makes you accountable.
So, those are, again, social ways to help people be more physically active. I think there are multiple ways of doing that, and I suspect that is going to be the most effective sort of set of tools that will help people. One thing I actually do is on the screensaver of my phone. It has something that really inspires me, so I see it every day, and it's that reminder for me, which reinforces my "why" across my life. My home screen on my iPhone is actually a bit of a mood board for me.
We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're going to leave it for, and I don't get to see it until I open the book. The question is: What is one aspect or feature of your life that causes you the most friction or discomfort, and how can you change or fix it?
I would say it's my tendency to compare myself to others. Life is short; life is precious. We're all experiments of one. When I engage in that, "Oh, so-and-so has such and such," that's a really bad habit. That's a really bad trait, and it never leads anywhere good. It only leads to either I think about how I have more of something than somebody else, which leads to unhealthy feelings of pride or feelings of jealousy. You know, so-and-so has this award or such and such, and that's kind of precious. I think that's a bad habit that I work hard to overcome because it changes your expectations of yourself, and that change steals happiness.
It steals happiness. Thank you for the work you do, Daniel. Very important, very, very important, and increasingly important, I think, when we look at the health outcomes, especially here in the United States. I mean, you actually share a number of them in the book, which we didn't really go into, but they're just horrifying. That's scary out there, especially as it relates to exercise. There was one in particular that I wrote down because it horrified me. I can't remember it, but it was just all the stats around the current healthcare: only 50% of Americans ever exercise—ever! And only 20% meet those very minimal World Health Organization standards.
We're a nation of couch potatoes, and the rest of the world is headed our way. But not if they get this book, because I think it is a real perspective changer, and it's a real eye-opener, and it's a necessary one. So, thank you so much for your work. You're fantastic at what you do, and I'm now a huge fan of your work after delving deeper and deeper. I can't wait to see what you do next.
Well, thank you, and I recommend everyone to go get this book, "Exercised," because I thought I knew a lot about exercise, but from reading that and having that window into our hunter-gatherer ancestors and tribes and other cultures, it really—that whole idea of a mismatch life—how mismatched my life is in so many fundamental ways, from diet to exercise to socializing. These kinds of books help to realign.
Well, thank you, although it seems that you're doing a pretty good job. I'm trying! You know, I think we're so far from being human, though, that there's still a long way to go for all of us.
Thank you, Daniel. Quick one: as you know, Airbnb is a sponsor of this podcast, and I was actually in an Airbnb last weekend when my friends and I had a reunion in New York. It's from staying in Airbnbs over the years that led me to start hosting my own place. I know friends of mine who actually Airbnb their own place in order to pay for the Airbnb they use when they're away on holiday, which is pretty smart. Maybe you've stayed in an Airbnb before and thought, "This is actually pretty doable; maybe my place could be an Airbnb."
It could be as simple as starting with a spare room or your entire place. You could be sitting on an Airbnb and not even know it. Whether you could use some extra money to cover your bills or something a little bit more fun, your home might be worth more than you think. You can find out how much it's worth at airbnb.co/host. Check it out, find out how much your home is worth, and let me know what you think. [Music]