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Wellness Wednesday for April 10, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Anecdotal observation - sport and hard physical work are not the same. I don't know why but even people doing properly backbreaking labor - they can get really strong, insane endurance, but not really lose extra fat - at least not to the point where a person would expect them to be with their energy expenditure.

Does anyone has observations/explanations?

Agree with other replies but will offer one counterexample; to the extent they still exist, actual cowboys tend to have almost comically good physiques. The buff-but-not-puffy bodies to maybe "just" extremely wire-y (I.e. very trim or cut with ropey muscles).

My theory is that the specific nature of range work means that cowboys can't afford to tote around extra weight all day, so they naturally develop a leaner body composition, yet, the power / strength activities of handling livestock also mean they don't fall into marathon runner levels of non-muscle.