• dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    U.S. military

    Being between the ages of 18-25 doesn’t count! At that age, you can practically eat pizza for every meal and outrun the drawbacks with minimal exercise and no sleep.

    • blarghly@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      People commonly lose weight during basic training in the US military, even as they are fed a terrible diet of extremely calorie dense processed foods. This is because basic entails consistent exercise from sun up to sun down, with extra exercise assigned as a form of punishment.

      After having this experience, many servicemembers keep the mindset that diet doesnt matter as long as you exercise enough, so the military has a culture of excessive drinking, eating, and exercise.

      The problem is that, unless your whole job is exercise, it is difficult to burn that many calories in a day - so you start gaining weight as soon as you get a desk job. And also, constantly pushing yourself like this is a good way to get an overuse injury, which many people gain as part of basic itself. And since it is difficult to train hard with an injury, you gain weight.

      Also, I am gonna go out on a limb and say that this sort of culture is probably pretty universal across world militaries.

      • icelimit@lemmy.ml
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        3 days ago

        If my time in the service is anything, the Us military definitely has more fat people per capita tha most functional countries.

      • idiomaddict@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        I went to a community folk dance and fell in love, then started dancing for fourteen hours a week. I went from a BMI of 25.5 to 19 and lost forty pounds within four months, at which point I started to worry and eat to bulk up, but I literally could not eat enough food to gain weight back.

        Then the pandemic hit and I gained a lot of weight the first month, until I adjusted my diet. I don’t dance anymore as a negative side effect of my very positive international move, but I do now get enough exercise to relatively easily adjust my food intake to gain, maintain, or lose weight when I want.