Everything You Know About Fitness is a Lie
If you really want to get fit, there's one easy thing you can do that actually works:<p>Take up a sport that gets you fit as a side effect.<p>I have two obsessions in life: Rock Climbing and Surfing.  I'm pretty good at the first, and borderline hopeless at the other, but I'm committed to the point where I've arranged my life so that I can travel for months at a time to pursue one or the other each year.<p>When I'm working a contract to save up for the next trip, I'll find myself slowly fattening up on fish tacos and 12 hour days coding in a felt cube with only the occasional after work or weekend fix of rock or salt water.  After a few months I'm decidedly soft, and quite a bit heavier.  But put me on the beach in Thailand for 5 months and holy crap, what a difference.<p>It's like Fat Camp out there.  There's <i>so much</i> fun climbing to be had right on the beach.  Overhanging routes that work you into the sort of shape that lets you literally hand-over-hand your way out a horizontal roof by your fingertips as your feet dangle out in space.  Without anybody forcing you, you spend your entire day working yourself silly, then you come back and eat <i>rice</i>.  You can imagine what that does for your physique.  It's like a convention of Men's Health cover models out there.<p>I come back to the world, and watch people going to the gym and clearly hating every minute of it.  I can't understand why they would do that to themselves, when there's a climbing gym just a few miles away.