Ftrain, by Paul Ford

"Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin," John Cloud, Time:

"In general, for weight loss, exercise is pretty useless," says Eric Ravussin, chair in diabetes and metabolism at Louisiana State University and a prominent exercise researcher. Many recent studies have found that exercise isn't as important in helping people lose weight as you hear so regularly in gym advertisements or on shows like The Biggest Loser— or, for that matter, from magazines like this one.

The basic problem is that while it's true that exercise burns calories and that you must burn calories to lose weight, exercise has another effect: it can stimulate hunger. That causes us to eat more, which in turn can negate the weight-loss benefits we just accrued. Exercise, in other words, isn't necessarily helping us lose weight. It may even be making it harder.

With insane nerd followup from Hacker News.

I lost another pound. It feels like I'm betraying some larger ideology when it happens, as I am not eating like a caveman, or a sailor, or a Frenchman, or a Belgian waffle chef, or a hamster, and I eat meat, and carbohydrates. One thing that's clear. Diet and exercise don't work. I am a fool for eating less and exercising. I know as a result I am going to die, or lose my mind, or explode, or become so ravenous I eat my own arm, or gain even more weight, or go into insulin shock. Also I should eat only meat, ever. I should have a cat stuffed into my mouth right now. I should have oxtails in my ears and a flank steak under each arm, and I should hump pemmican. Also my doctor is wrong; after 30 years of doctoring to tens of thousands of people in Brooklyn he just has his head up his ass when it comes to weight loss, an issue that doctors are incapable of understanding, even though he himself is a diabetic. Much better I should listen to some blog-commenter, or family member, or friend, who read the first 30 pages of a book and lost eight pounds. We are a stupid race and deserve to be fat.

Eventually, I know, I will relapse and once again shove my muzzle into the Pepperidge Farm feedbag. Eventually, I know, exercise will make me fat. Eventually, I know, if I stay on the rails I will plateau and living in a healthy manner will not yield the expected dividend of vanity. Eventually, I know, the heat death of the universe will end it all, all life iced down to muteness, and the eye of God will be frozen open and unblinking, surveying the perfect emptiness that is his domain.

It's not about food or hunger or exercise but rather it's about time. Do people speak so obsessively about food and exercise because they are scared of time, of moments slipping by? The celebrity of youth exhausted by our pitiful creaking hips? To become thin is to be reborn, which is why pop culture gives us the pounds-shedding story again and again: some star has gone down to the Jordan and come up slender; once again she is favored in the eyes of the Lord.

Taken another way, perhaps I do not have a sick relationship with food; maybe instead I have a terrible relationship with chronology, with cause-and-effect. We are advised to live in the moment, but the moment is where all my troubles started. Better to live in the long. And to contemplate the passage of the single grain of oatmeal from the earth, to the threshers, to the tin, to the table, and through my body.

People like to make me hold small things because it's funny. Airplane liquor bottles; tiny kittens. To see the difference in scales makes them laugh.

People hate the grind, but the grind has its own music.

Weight: 338 lbs