Early Retirement Extreme Forums

Sounds like a terrible culture, especially for women. Extremely high infant mortality, and women are expected to go out in the woods by themselves to give birth.I would prefer to belong to the primitive tribe I once read about where females get to lounge about, be pampered, and eat fruit for a year in order to fatten up for their wedding night.

Humans "in the wild" die mainly of childbirth. Bad numbers here will really drag the average down. If you don't start counting until age 5, average numbers change significantly. Another source of death would be the first complication that requires modern hospital intervention no matter how trivial it is to fix in a surgical environment, e.g. appendicitis, a small infected cut, ... ancient humans lucky enough to avoid getting tagged lived into their 70-80s like modern humans.

Overall, you only have to go back 80 years or so before most humans had a lifespan of 45 years and mostly died of infections. Today that is rare unless you're old/weak.

I don't know if thé romans were already soft, but they considered 40km per day with 35kg load to be normal. I Can still put on fat with this kind of routine. A 12 km range means at least 24km per day. 40 seems more réaliste, because you don't just go straight and back when hunting. Walking is thé best exercise for humans. We just don't take thé time for it to be effective.

Humans "in the wild" die mainly of childbirth.

Right, and this is another reason why I'm not buying the "man the runner" mythology. Species that are meant to run for their living, like horses, generally pop out of the womb pretty much good to go. Humans are obviously meant to think smart about where they might scavenge up some vittles next for a living, otherwise they wouldn't have statistically benefited by the huge mortality childbirth/helpless infancy death rate trade off that large energy burning brain results in. Human children don't gain anything like athletic coordination until about age 5 or 6.

Also, there is some evidence that hominids were more often scavengers than hunters. They could break apart bones to get the marrow, in a manner roughly analogous to using crude tools to eat termites.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting

There is some proof that humans used to be persistence hunters meaning we would be running a whole lot to hunt. So we weren't as fast at running as most, but we're surprisingly good at running longer than most other species(of course when trained to do this rather than current day soft sedentary humans)

Well, even if some members of a primitive tribe did provide some kilo-calories by regularly exercise=ing their repurposed swim bladders through persistence hunting, I still find it highly unlikely that some 54 year old female was out there running and explaining persistence hunting strategy to her 9 year old great-grand-daughter in a manner so helpful that humans evolved to be old runners who have to run to get old. It's gotta be more like why men have nipples.

brute's hypothesis: diet and exercise are overrated as factors in human body composition, which is why there is no "one workout/diet that works (for all human)".

in the end, body composition is mainly regulated by hormones. exercise (in the right intensity and duration, with the right recovery periods) can positively (or negatively, in other cases) influence those hormones. the same is true for diet: sugar has very negative effects beyond the amounts necessary to refuel muscle glycogen. meat (for example) can trigger positive hormones that counteract e.g. insulin.

but brute believes that two other big root causes are stress and sleep. just as humans cannot out-work a shitty diet, they cannot out-train sleep deprivation and the negative effects of stress. just one hour of sleep deprivation per night can have negative influence on hormones and immune system equivalent to basically an immune-deficiency and injecting fructose straight into the liver, diet and exercise be damned.

to humans who have tried a serious diet to control insulin (e.g. low-carb or IF) and have tried an exercise regimen that didn't seem to lead to success/wasn't sustainable (probably lack of recovery due to sleep deprivation/stress), brute highly recommends looking into these two areas.

rule #1: humans that wake up to an alarm/3rd party are not well rested.

stress is unfortunately much harder to measure/find clear-cut rules for.

Humans are just very diverse. Within a tribal group [15-40] there is enough variation that some can hunt, some can gather, some can nurse, and some can craft/teach/story-tell. Like brute said: hormones, sleep, and stress all play an important role. Some humans are predisposed towards endurance and some towards power, some towards carb-heavy diets and some towards fat-heavy diets.

The 'majority rule' and 'popular opinion' probably harm many people now days. People may gain an advantage by doing their own experimentation and ignoring what others do on average.

@daylen:

Agree. There is evidence that the average human male in prehistoric times most closely resembled an African-American athlete who could play college-level basketball or football. In modern times that is still the phenotype most likely to become diabetic in mid-life and suffering from the lowest adult life expectancy.* OTOH, Hispanic-American females, even though they do have high rates of obesity, live the longest. I think Hispanic American men are tied with European-Heritage females for 2nd place.

*I know it doesn't appeal to notions of equality and meritocracy, but the cultural/aesthetic stereotype that would assume the poor female buying cookies at WalMart while wearing cheap yoga pants that emphasize her massive butt cellulite is more likely to suffer from metabolic disorder than the affluent guy wearing tennis clothes who seems to be in pretty damn good shape for his age except for maybe a bit of high hard fat on his abdomen giving him sort of a barrel-chest appearance, is simply false. Elite athletes only earn 2.8 extra years. Females who experience menopause 2 years later than peer group gain 3.8 extra years. Hormones rule human growth and aging.

Ok, I think too, exercise alone is not enough if you are sitting most of the time.

Why not approach it from the other side? I have found out that I need about 9 hours sleep, 3 hours for food shopping/preparing/eating. 2 hours for washing/cleaning/maintenance house and garden, clothing and body. 2 hours for intensive sport. Leaves 8 hours of which 2x2 can be used for sitting (paid or unpaid ) work, study, reading, entertainment etc, and 2 x2 for (paid or unpaid) active work (blue collar) work. (yes, no time allowed for commuting, if you must, do it as an active sport). I live this way.

@J:

That sounds about right. My personal recommendation for frugal, older gentlemen would be to include "chopping your own firewood" as part of the 2 X 2 blue collar work vector.

I've been reading entire books while walking. I think the clearest while walking. I would like to bé able to write while walking.

It's pretty easy to write notes on a cell phone while walking, as is evidenced by young people on every sidewalk everywhere. But on a treadmill there's no risk of running into shit. I take pictures of passages that I want to write down later, though.

7Wannabe5 wrote: ↑

Tue Jan 29, 2019 5:26 am

Elite athletes only earn 2.8 extra years. Females who experience menopause 2 years later than peer group gain 3.8 extra years. Hormones rule human growth and aging.

You are confusing lifespan with healthspan. Length of quality of life years does not (in most cases) equal length of life years.

Corresponding chart from this article https://peterattiamd.com/move-defines-live/ by Peter Attia explaining the topic:

@theanimal:

Good article. I liked how he immediately dismissed evolutionary justifications. However, I would note that there is also correlation between late menopause and later life mobility due to the delay of bone loss. My sister did a ton of research on this topic when she had to have her ovaries removed in her 40s. Estrogen stored in butt fat can still offer some protection after menopause, so there is a trade-off between some increased risks in 50s, 60s, vs. other increased risks in 70s, 80s. That said, I absolutely agree that retaining muscle mass and flexibility are also very important, even if the functions for which you hope to remain fit run more to gardening and seduction of last remaining nonagenarian male peers, rather than triathlon.