Posts made by Arkandel

I don't. I don't even. I don't EVEN.

Just one more thing from me on this.

If you do any kind of exercise, particularly one which involves weights, do yourself a big favor and be careful with form.

There are a ton of videos on youtube about just about any exercise so it shouldn't be hard to find something for free. Obviously hiring a trainer works best but that costs more money than nothing at all.

Either way I've seen some really iffy things at various gyms over time. Some are relatively harmless - a classic example is barbell presses with a very limited range of motion where the person barely bends the elbows at all so they can boast 'lifting' more pounds, so essentially the pectoral muscles are getting a fraction of the benefit of what they'd have gotten with a lot less weight. Some are actually dangerous (now and then I see people rounding their lower backs significantly while doing deadlifts and I... man. In one of these reps they won't get back up).

Form > > all.

One of the biggest issues with fitness bar NONE is that you can't always rely on expert advice. So many articles out there by perfectly valid authors are completely contradicting one another, or claim different things, etc. There's a ton of empirical evidence being portrayed as universal fact, which doesn't help either.

Basically it's really hard to separate fitness half-myths from really useful things. For instance the effect where you increase your metabolism by adding muscle is quite true (more muscle = higher passive energy requirements for the body) but the gains are negligible.

To me at this point it looks like this: The best exercise/diet regime is the one you'll actually do. If it's perfect but you won't do it because it won't fit your lifestyle/situation it's useless to you. On top of it the human body is a great machine, it responds to different approaches, so no one way of working out or eating is the 'right' one.

Pick one. Hell, pick many and try them on for size. Follow whatever you can as well as you can. That's about it.

@Ganymede For the record: http://authoritynutrition.com/starvation-mode/ (and other, assorted links)

@Misadventure said:

Exercising actual constraint is a skill, and practice will make you better at it.

You know what they say? Willpower is a muscle. Just any muscle it gets stronger as you exercise it. Just like any muscle, it also gets fatigued if you have to exercise it all the time.

That's why, for instance, you don't buy and leave a bunch of cookies on your kitchen table. Why do that to yourself?

@Ganymede said:

@Arkandel said:

However what it comes down to is that cutting calories is by very far more efficient than increasing exercise if one's goal is fat loss.

This is very, very debatable, and, frankly, I disagree for the reasons presented by @Derp.

I don't see that it's debatable at all. Let's break down the numbers (I like numbers).

A quick snack, let's say a Twix bar, has 250 calories: https://www.twix.com/product/nutrition.

For a 205 lb person, according to the table earlier in this thread, it takes cycling at 10-11.9 mph to burn 558 calories.

Therefore, if you don't mind a little rounding, it takes half an hour at a pretty decent speed to burn that. It's possible (at this point I'm making assumptions) most people who actually need to lose weight the most won't find it easy to maintain that on a daily basis. On the other hand, not eating that Twix takes no effort at all, other than an expenditure of will - without which chances are any working out is terminally sabotaged anyway.

Now on top of that, what do you get from a Twix bar? Carbs - processed sugar, that's about it. It contains 2.2 grams of protein so it's not like it's going to feed anyone's muscles worth a damn, and it's probably not even going to replace a meal since most people will eat it between meals.

I don't see how this is debatable. But I am not saying getting exercise isn't really important, just that regulating one's diet is far more so.

There are a ton of articles and resources out there. I'll just drop one here: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/16/upshot/to-lose-weight-eating-less-is-far-more-important-than-exercising-more.html .

For starters you're of course right - it's literally, inescapably a matter of calories in versus calories out. Anything else would violate the principle of conservation of energy. And I of course agree that a combination of a healthier diet and regular exercise works better than either on its own.

However what it comes down to is that cutting calories is by very far more efficient than increasing exercise if one's goal is fat loss.

Any loss of energy (which is debatable - most people experience an excess of it after they start losing fat) as a detriment is countered by the chance for injuries when one tries to work out at a higher rate while overweight and/or out of shape.

A commonly quoted rule of thumb (it's only that, but it's not a bad average) is that a deficit of 3500 calories per week leads to one pound of fat loss. To burn those 500 calories on a daily basis one would need to go at it pretty hard ( http://www.nutristrategy.com/fitness/cycling.htm has a table on that, obviously it's also not entirely accurate universally but it helps as a quick guide), or to eat fewer carbs. An advantage of the latter is that it's easier to not eat those extra cookies through different life circumstances, weather conditions or through personal health issues than it is to dedicate an hour+ of each day to exercise.

As the old axiom has it, six-packs aren't made in the gym, they're made in the kitchen.

Although that's true, losing excess weight is a matter of diet regulation a whole lot more than adding additional exercise.

Life isn't fair. We can eat calories way easier and faster than we can consume their energy.

@Misadventure What, you expected @HelloRaptor to save you even before receiving this new, strangely fitting update on his background?

@HelloRaptor said:

I don't believe I've ever cuddled with someone who wasn't already a close friend or family, or suffering hypothermia.

Exactly how many people suffering from hypothermia have you cuddled with?

The way I see it @Misadventure is that the argument about XP being a bad idea for MUSHes sounds similar to that W. Churchill quote - 'Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.'.

As an approach to represent character growth or incentivize whatever it is a game wants to see more of XP is, of course, deeply flawed. I won't go into the reasons here. However even so, we've been historically unable to come up with a viable alternative which actually works better - most of the better approaches are hybrid systems which either reward or control how XP is spent differently rather than actually replace them.

Even some of the ones which don't use XP basically are, just under a different name for all intents and purposes.

Having said that, I'd love to be proven wrong. We can have a thread to discuss that.

@Derp I assumed the two threads were for different things. "A guy just kicked my dog" goes to 'anger' while "People who spoil Game of Thrones, ugh!" goes to 'peeves'.

@Derp said:

@Arkandel said:

The only things that don't work are apathy and introversion.

Actually, I tend to manage these two things quite well.

My RP circles are relatively small. This is why I tend to favor things like Pack/Cabal/Coterie/Ring/Whatever RP over 'hey let's get together with ten random strangers and go find a body on the beach'.

Um. No. Why? Because I am generally apathetic as to why there's a body on the beach, or what those ten random strangers are up to. I already found a group that I want to RP with, tell stories with occasionally, etc. If I can't get that, I will surely go fill in RP elsewhere, but neither of those are unworkable concepts.

Being selectively extroverted isn't the same as being introverted. I believe I mentioned this earlier but there's more than one way to spread RP around - your character doesn't need to spill his guts to everyone they meet. As long as they're not a stopgap where RP threads go to die it works just fine.

As for scenes... does my current main PC care about a dead body in the woods? Not really, but it's been getting me semi-regular RP with a curious ghoul who was there also.

Or for a more detailed (and, again, real) example: Did Daniel care about some truck driver who almost ran him over? Not much, but it generated the circumstances where our characters bonded - and got the ball rolling on some Demon weirdness when another PC's player (who was being proactive) sent a friend to recruit my character. That in turn made Dan go talk to one of the participants from the original scene. Original scenes: 1. Follow-up new IC relationships formed: 3-4. Scenes directly generated since? Without counting ones with your PC, close to seven by now for me, with I got one on the back burner almost two months later.

That ain't bad for one ST's initial investment of a couple of hours, is it?

@thebird What I've found works for me quite well is being networked IC. It's not possible (or even desired) to be part of all things, but the cascading effect from that? Yes, please.

So for instance I let some of the madness @Derp's character runs into eventually catch up to me while I'm working on my own stuff. Eventually the PCs get together, talk about it, propose alternatives, go have a couple of adventures together where he gets shot, take off again to do their own things, catch up again, etc. This way there's a degree of synergy there between things I don't necessarily come into direct contact with - maybe my PC is introduced to someone from a different path of life though so his network expands further, etc.

The only things that don't work are apathy and introversion. The first is an actual flaw and the second, sometimes, is simply 'bad' character design - by which I mean it's a perfectly valid character approach but one which ultimately shoots fun in the foot.

@Coin My favorite link ever.

@Cobaltasaurus But it's a peeve, it doesn't make me angry.

This kind of helpful popup:

"An application has crashed on your system (now or in the past)"

Well, now I know exactly what to do! Thanks KDE!

@Coin That's the point of suspending disbelief (I'm not sure if you're arguing for/against it).

For example many people complain about the implausibility of Lois Lane recognizing that Clark Kent, a guy she's working with, is Superman once he takes his glasses off but don't seem to have an issue about an alien invulnerable demigod flying around shooting beams out of his eyes.

Or we're fine with Independence Day's spaceships coming to enslave humanity but many people took issues with a virus made and running on a Mac could infect alien systems when it wouldn't even have been able to infect a PC.

Yes BUT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief .