An observation of the bleedin’ obvious.
Football participation is a good way to get men to slim down, a Scottish study published in The Lancet shows.
Given that it involves running about chasing a ball and the more we exercise the more fat we burn off, I’d have thought we already knew this.
The Glasgow researchers say it proves male-friendly weight loss plans work.
I am a male and like a lot of males, I don’t find it remotely “male friendly”. I detest football and have done so from a very early age. So we have this huge generalisation, an assumption, that males will readily follow this form of exercise because males like football. Well, I won’t because I don’t. Not that I have a weight problem in the first place.
And they had a study to find this out…
“…I detest football and have done so from a very early age…”
Snap & ditto! I’ve spent (at least) the last 57 years, ever since I was around 7yrs old, being at first irritated and then progressively more annoyed by the gasps of incredulity when I announce this, usually accompanied with pitying looks as if I’m deprived (or depraved) in some way.
FFS, I don’t try and stop anyone who’s interested from watching football:- all I ask is that they leave me out of it. Is that too much to demand?
At least I can now spot a football fan at 100 yards – it’s something to do with the way they drag their knuckles along the ground 😀
Same here. People assume that because I’ve got dangly bits between my legs, I am interested in the mind-numbing tedium of kicking a ball about. They still ask me what “my” team is.
My sons, despite their complete lack of interest in the game, were constantly bombarded through childhood with football-themed birthday cards, presents and school activities because of the general assumption you describe so picturesquely above. From underwear and pyjamas to stationery and lunchboxes, the ubiquitous football-related motifs were virtually impossible to avoid.
Perhaps they should seek some kind of compensation for this mass cultural imposition…
The body by preference burns up muscle tissue keeping fat for later just in case a shortage of game to hunt and roots to dig up, which is why athletes have to have carefully controlled protein and carb rich diets which provides ready available energy (from the carb) without breaking down body tissue, and muscle builder to counter wear and tear on the muscles.
Heavy exercise causes the body to demand food to replace what was lost.
In fact honest researchers will tell you that exercise does not cause the body to lose weight… it may improve muscle tone, because in order to do so you need to burn off more energy than you consume, and the body does not like to let you do that. Exercise more, eat more.
Best weight loss is simply to eat normal balanced diet, smaller portions.
Doctors, as a breed, in my 30 years experience of dealing with them, are thick and it is not wise to assume they know out of which end they are speaking.
Indeed. However, weight, exercise and consumption are linked. Take in more energy than you expend and you will put on weight.
If people want to burn off some of that energy chasing a ball about – then that’s fine by me.
My hatred and loathing of football comes from years of aversion therapy at school. I can’t say that I have ever been looked at with disbelief because I have no interest in it, maybe the people that I know are a bit more accepting.
With regard to losing weight, in the real world being reasonably fit and toned up is probably far more important that what you weigh anyway.
Likewise. I was introduced to it at the age of eight and it was assumed that being a boy, I would take to it and enjoy the compulsory twice a week PE lessons where football was the only option. The knuckle dragging games teachers could not comprehend boys who did not like it – and, frankly, there were a fair few of us. Their solution was to keep forcing us onto the pitch and complain loudly when we didn’t chase after the ball.
At that time, I was a junior green belt in judo, I cycled regularly and was a keen (and not too bad) archer – so I was fit and active, I just didn’t like their idea of sports, but the complete lack of imagination that seems to persist to this day, could not cope with the idea that, actually, some of us don’t like team games and are not excited when the television schedules are awash with twenty-two prima-donnas running about a muddy field after a ball.
I remember similar experiences and, even worse, football’s viler cousin rugby. The PE teachers in the end decided that anybody who didn’t want to roll around in cold muddy fields full of dog excrement would have to do cross-country running instead (this was supposedly universally-detested and seen as a worse option). What they didn’t bargain for was that with only 3 or 4 of us doing it, unsupervised, we could run until out of sight, walk the rest and still get back to the changing room to warm up and have a shower before the filthy hordes finished their game and mobbed the place out.
Likewise. In my latter years, I went to school in North Wales – so rugby was on the menu there. Our cross country course was across the dunes of the local beach, so we ran out of sight, sauntered out to the dunes and hunkered down for an hour before sauntering back and running the last few yards into the school grounds.
I held the county record for NEVER having partaken in a P.E “lesson.”
On my final school report, the P.E imbicile wrote “Who?”
SERIOUS!
Another one!
I escaped school football @ age 14 – I’m now 68 & I still get the cold horrors at the thought of it.
Re exercise – gradual is the way to do it, not violent.
As said school idiots found out 3 years later – trip to Lake District (Several people couldn’t work out why I wanted to go, because I “didn’t like sport” – my answer was – “This isn’t sport”) … I walked the lot of them into the ground – literally.
Hint cycling to-&-from-school every day, including lunchtimes, totally 5 miles a day, keeps you very fit, without any need for spurts.
Morons
Football! Dreadful waste of time and effort, a totally pointless and stupid activity (except for the handful of players who have become millionaires of course). I hate it and everything in the media devoted to it. Yes, always have.
I was packed off to boarding school where Rugby was the winter term sport and Cross country running ( a brilliant skive once I had worked out how ) and hockey were the spring term sports on offer, no football although there were always those who kicked a ball about whenever they could. I was never good at football, but Rugby was something that did not require ballet like fleet of feet so my lumbering form worked quite well in the scrum. As to pitying looks from football fans, just tell them you support Brentford……
XX I detest football and have done so from a very early age. XX
YES!!!
And I thought I was alone!
Bloody shower of queers playing with their balls on a dod of grass! If that was in your local kiddys play ground you would be demanding the police did something about the doggers!
You couldn’t make it up….
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2543880/Fame-Ed-Balls-squeezed-middle-BBC-uses-shadow-chancellors-belly-illustrate-story-obeseity.html
or, rather more disturbingly, the Telegraph has:
‘Labour heavyweight: BBC deploys Ed Balls bulge’
Ed Balls is just the type of thuggish arsehole that I avoided like the plague and just the type to think that kicking a ball about was a useful use of time. Looking at those pictures, I see everything that I learned to despise.
I was another one who found that cross country running was the best option for avoiding “rugger”. A 20 minute run, hot shower and on our way home before the rugger buggers had even kicked off! 😉
🙄 😉 🙂 😯 🙄 😆 😎 😈 😆 😉 wtf?
I think my mother summed up football wisely when she described it as “twinty-two stupit men kicking a bag o’ wind aboot a park, wi’ twinty-two thoosand even mair stupit staunin there watchin’ them.”
Indeed. Football is probably the most stupid game ever invented. The tedium of watching twenty-two prima-donnas poncing about a muddy field chasing a silly ball makes drying paint look positively entertaining.
If people wish to waste time doing it and watching it, that’s fine by me – I only get annoyed these days when they assume that I would have any interest in such idiocy. And as a child, I resented being forced to take part in something that was so obviously cretinous. As far as I was concerned, I was at school to learn essential life-skills (numeracy, literacy and such), not waste time on a muddy field, half naked, freezing cold and expected to prance about chasing a fucking ball.