How far are you running total, both per run and per week?
Running will absolutely help your health, but on its own it's unlikely to get you thin. It's hard to burn enough to make a big difference without it chewing your body up in other ways - especially if you're overweight and out of condition to begin with, and so a bit more susceptible to injury than skinny runner types.
Thinking of it as a calories in/out equation is counterproductive for most people, if it boosts your cardio health, gets you more active and maybe converts a bit of body fat to leg muscle, that on its own is a win.
Certainly no harm in having a swig of Gatorade every couple of km if it helps you go further, anyhow.
It doesn't take much. If an elite burns 1500-2000 kcal running a marathon, even ignoring glycogen and exogenous carb, that's only ~195-260g of body fat (~7.7 kcal/g). Even at an extremely lean 4% body fat, Kejelcha would have 2360g of body fat available. (He's probably in the slightly higher 5-10% range.)
(And obviously, the majority of those 1500-2000 kcal are coming from stored glycogen rather than fat.)
If we're only talking about the marginal difference between 90 and 120 g/hr of exogenous carb, then that's 60g over two hours or 240 kcal -- equating to 31g of stored body fat. That's nothing.
The brain is a dynamic system, and a poorly understood one at that. It relies on active processes in order to not degenerate (likely the main reason why sleep deprivation is eventually fatal). Science is still some way from cataloguing all the processes involved, never mind fully understanding their workings.
Alzheimer's isn't a single-point-of-failure disease, more like a dysregulation of maintenance. So there are lots of things that can tip the odds one way or another, and we may get a lot better at prevention - to the point of reducing incidence maybe five-fold, or delaying its symptomatic onset to beyond the relevant lifespan - but the idea that there might be a single "cure" seems like wishful thinking.
It may also prove to be that, like a spinning-top, once things start to go off-axis it may be very difficult to restore the original stable state, and at most we can just slow it down a bit.
Perhaps more uncomfortable, if most of the effective interventions, risk-reduction-wise, are social/lifestyle related, that has implications for whether people have the agency to access those things.
(Time/energy/facilities/resources for exercise/active lifestyle being an obvious case in point, which is already well known to have a moderate protective effect).
And as with a lot of cancers, it seems to be perturbation of a dynamic system rather than a single, mechanistic cause.
Think of it like brushfire in an ecosystem, or species population imbalances leading to catastrophic breakdown. These are better understood in terms of system state and preconditions, as opposed to a trigger event.
Infectious disease, at least in the classic acute form (whether that's bacterial and fast - cholera - or viral and slow - HIV), is a more mechanistic process which can be halted by blocking a single step in its pathway.
Systems that remain healthy and balanced via dynamic processes are harder to reason about and fix, because the root cause of a disease state can be dozens of little things adding up to the system losing its ability to maintain homeostasis.
That's normalising clean-ness (i.e. the state of being free of all psychoactive chemicals) perhaps too much.
The original humans adapted to a wide range of diets across the world (one reason why we're such a successful species), but most groups seem to consume mild psychoactives a lot (it's hard not to, so many wild plants have some level of activity) and seek out more powerful ones occasionally and for specific situations.
Our civilization does not depend on aviation very much, it's a specialized service. If all planes disappeared tomorrow, we will weather it pretty well. Cars are a completely different animal: they are ubiquitous and don't really have an alternative in many cases.
Yeah we red-queens-raced ourselves into a position where now we have to have private cars, because if we don't we're screwed. Turned cheap 25-minute bike commutes into expensive 25-minute car commutes that can't safely or practically be biked, and shoved everything so far apart on account of giant parking lots and big highways cuttings straight through cities that the nearest bus stop is a half-mile away and that 25-minute car commute would take ninety minutes by bus, so now we have to have cars.
There's no quick fix at this point, it'd be a century-long project to undo the damage now, but a hypothetical world where we'd harnessed only the good parts of cars and not let them completely reshape the places we live down to the neighborhood level would sure be a lot nicer.
I'd argue that's /because/ we regulated aviation (and also some annoying physics limitations), so we never had the option of becoming fully dependent in the way lots of places have on cars.
Less than a century ago, so within living memory (albeit only just), literally nowhere on Earth was car dependent.
It's not fine if that choice denies other people the choice not to.
And there seems to be a lot of the latter.
For example, when shopping facilities or hospitals are built so as to be, de-facto, only accessible by automobile, that locks people out of the choice to say no thanks.
I don't follow, are people then not able to choose to live somewhere that has shopping facilities or hospitals that are built so as not to be only accessible by automobile?
We shouldn't have to completely upend our lives to move to the small handful of major cities that provide the infrastructure to exist comfortably without a car. At least in the US, your options are limited to NYC, Chicago, Boston, and maybe a few others (Seattle/SF). And even then, the hard set default in these major cities is car ownership EXCEPT for NYC.
as someone who lives there, they're not. Nor is that what is being suggested, it's critiquing car-centric cities where not having a car is needlessly difficult. Population 250 isn't going to ban cars, but the city may discourage driving and provide ample facilities for those who don't have a car.
Well I do agree that city living should not require a car, although cars should be an option for those who need them. I just don’t think it’s realistic to expect rural areas to discourage car use. Not everyone in rural communities has a car, but for many they are essential.
> re people then not able to choose to live somewhere
No, because no such somewhere has been built in the country in question (US) in the past ~60 years, because the default is car-centric. So you're left with a few uber dense, old, predating automobiles, places. Which are extremely expensive, because they simply do not have the capacity for everyone who wants to live in them.
There are plenty of city centers that aren't super-expensive but probably don't have a lot of great local employment options and maybe aren't generally considered desirable--and don't have a lot of great transportation options to outlying areas though that's generally true of a lot of major Tier 1 cities as well. You prioritize your choices.
They exist, but usually they are expensive and in-demand areas because... people usually like walkable areas. Its a shame that more suburbs arent designed this way, because it doesnt even cost more money...just more thoughtfulness in how we should design our livable spaces.
Suburbs/car-dependecy is a classic case of "worse is better". Its simpler to build and the worst-case suburban sprawl is tolerable, so it proliferates.
Yes, if such places are plentiful. It's a messy situation where revealed preference (house prices in walkable areas, Amsterdam and Paris increasingly full of rich young Americans) vs immediate consumer choice (more cars! More convenience! Oops, now we need to flatten downtown for an elevated freeway...) tend to give conflicting answers.
Also, socially conservative, multi-generational households (sharing labour and childcare between women relatives), less expectation for mothers of young kids to be away from the home, and a much lower expectation of what "housing" means in terms of both building quality and the amount of living space per person.
Work and wider social participation, and a sprawling suburban geography that has people living far from friends and family.
The alternative - small, crowded population centres where everyone knows everyone and three, even four generations live in the same household can of course be limiting, even suffocating.
But there's a reason why, for all that the 1950s autonomous nuclear family is held up as some kind of ideal by tradwife fetishists, it's also the milieu in which Valium and sleeping pills became popularised.
Worse. Some people even deleet all of there online banking, except, for an account that can recieve funds from online sources, and then deal with everything in person at the bank.
Which then frees up devices to skip the whole closed source misery go round.
I would never use a bank that required a smartphone in order to access your money or do normal banking activities like transfers and payments. Fortunately here in the USA there are thousands of little mom n pop banks and credit unions, so I think we are safe from that madness at least until I’m dead and buried.
I know people doing this in Prince William County, Cheyenne, and Minnesota college towns. It just takes ordinary frugality, no deprivation that I can see.
Double-buggies on public transport and more than two kids on a typical cargo cycle aren't fun either. Granted the age-span that's necessary is a little shorter than car seats.
That said, have 3 kids aged within 5 years of one another and we never had to get a double buggy. The older ones would be OK to walk (3 year olds will walk a pretty long way if you're patient) by the time the youngest got too big to be sling-carried.
It comes down to, dealing with three under-5's single-handed while out and about is pretty hectic full stop. Most places with high birth rates "solve" this by not allowing mums the expectation to be away from the house much, and/or they're multigenerational households where grandma or an aunt can be home with some of the kids.
So to your point, I think it's less the requirement to own a car, more the expectation of a kind of lifestyle which often, though not always, in turn requires one. Childcare for 2 year olds here is often upwards of $2500/month, now that's a contraceptive.
Running will absolutely help your health, but on its own it's unlikely to get you thin. It's hard to burn enough to make a big difference without it chewing your body up in other ways - especially if you're overweight and out of condition to begin with, and so a bit more susceptible to injury than skinny runner types.
Thinking of it as a calories in/out equation is counterproductive for most people, if it boosts your cardio health, gets you more active and maybe converts a bit of body fat to leg muscle, that on its own is a win.
Certainly no harm in having a swig of Gatorade every couple of km if it helps you go further, anyhow.
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