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Lessons from the Amish
Easy ways to add fitness to your day
Posted by Danielle Bean in Health on Friday, September 12, 2008 12:30 PM
Have you ever eaten an Amish meal? Have you ever wondered why people who regularly indulge in butter, cream, sugar, and carbs of all kinds are not obese?
Turns out it’s because they work so darn hard.
Four years ago we discovered that the Amish maintained super-low obesity levels despite eating a diet high in fat, calories and refined sugar. They key was their level of physical activity — men averaged 18,000 steps a day, women 14,000. That’s monumental compared to the paltry couple of thousand or so most of us eke out in a day.
I think of it as the Farmer Boy
The good news from all of this is the discovery that exercise doesn’t only “work” if you do it for 30 minutes a day, 6 days a week. It can work in little ways that you add more physical activity to your daily routines. Some suggestions:
1. Take a break. If you watch TV or sit a computer for great lengths of time, get up and move at regular intervals. Once per hour, stand and stretch, jump, do some squats, jumping jacks, or leg lunges. Bonus: You’ll feel alert and refreshed.
2. Get to work. Take your cue from the Amish and add some manual labor to your day. Scrub the bathtub, change the sheets, do some yard work, de-clutter your car, or clean out a closet. Bonus: The housework gets done.
3. Play with your kids. Give your kids piggy back rides, teach them to do cartwheels, jump rope, take a walk, throw a ball, or just turn on some music and dance around the house for 10 minutes. Bonus: Your kids will think you’re the best.
4. Take the stairs. Don’t set up your days to avoid as much physical activity as possible. Take a few extra trips up and down the stairs or into other rooms to get things or put things away during the day instead of having a child do it for you. Bonus: Your household stays in order.
5. Plow a field. Okay, just kidding about that one. But I do have a chicken coop over here that you are welcome to come by and clean out anytime next week. Bonus: I’ll be your best friend.
Comments
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Posted by Regina on Friday, Sep 12, 2008 3:04 PM (EDT):
My midwife pointed out something interesting to me, and I think it applies to the Amish, and maybe to Caroline Ingalls and such. She said that urban people (and that includes suburban America) are shallow breathers. Agrarian people, who work outdoors all day, regularly engage in the kind of “belly breathing” that the mall walkers (like me) have to learn in a special 12 week class. Good for birthing, and for keeping fit too.
With all due respect to Danielle (who has the best of intentions), I would caution against putting much stock in the various studies you hear about in the media. Much of it is overblown and oversimplified. Reporters typically don’t have the training to identify good science vs. mediocre or bad science. Nor do they typically understand when it’s appropriate to talk about cause-and-effect.
You simply can’t get at cause-and-effect without experimental studies. And the surprising thing is that experimental studies have never provided much evidence for the widely held belief (these days) that exercise helps you lose weight. There are plenty of examples of people groups who do a lot of manual labor, yet are fat. In Western cultures, the poor have the highest rates of obesity—not because they’re the most sedentary, but because they tend to eat the cheapest foods, which have a lot of refined carbs.
I’m not very familiar with the two Amish studies mentioned in the link, but from what I’ve read it appears that in neither of them was the diet of the participants actually part of the study. And both studies were correlational, not experimental. Big difference.
Although physical activity may indeed have benefits, helping you lose weight is not necessarily one of them. The much bigger issue is the type of food we eat, the quality (not so much the quantity) of the calories. More than any other factor, consumption of refined carbs seems to be what makes us fat. And I think that’s important for people to know—especially all those who have felt like failures because exercising doesn’t really help them maintain a healthy weight.
Posted by Hoo on Saturday, Sep 13, 2008 4:56 PM (EDT):
My family just took a mini-vacation in Lancaster County, PA. I suspect that in addition to expending more calories thru physical activity and not having tons of refined carbs in their diet, the Amish cooking also doesn’t have all of the other chemical junk in convenience foods we “English” eat. (Well, except for one family we saw in Arby’s - I still can’t figure that out!) In addition to generally appearing lean, those folks had lovely complexions. I envy their dedication to living simpler and eating “clean” (and especially if that could occasionally include shoo-fly pie!)
Posted by Joshua of the Catholic Tech Tips blog on Sunday, Sep 14, 2008 5:22 PM (EDT):
I live in Amish Country (Ohio) and love eating Amish food!
Our neighbors are Amish and they do a lot of walking! Recently they all got new bicycles.
I agree that we can learn a lot from the Amish. We live such fast-paced lives. Think of all the reflection we could do if we had to take a three hour buggy ride to get somewhere. Think of the beauty we could see along the way.
My grandparents used to drive the Amish on long trips. When my grandparents passed away this year, there were so many from the Amish community who came to pay their respects. It was really awesome.
Well, I could go on-and-on about how the Amish way of life could improve our lives in (some) ways.
Posted by Sport Serena on Saturday, Sep 27, 2008 9:37 AM (EDT):
I love your first suggestion “Take a break”. I’m gonna print it our and stick it to my monitor.
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