exercise

People have been talking about exercise as a possibly quick and easy route to improve one’s physical attractiveness.

It seems to me like this could mean two very different things.  If you have enough androgens in your system, it is pretty easy to build some muscle if you don’t have any.  Strength training doesn’t take much time per session, and it’ll have amazing marginal effects if you go from not doing it to doing a bit of it.  Telling guys who don’t work out to do some pushups regularly, or the like, certainly sounds like “low-hanging fruit” and good advice.

On the other hand, changing the amount of fat in your body is famously difficult.  It’s hard to get people to lose nontrivial amounts of weight (or gain nontrivial amounts of weight, through methods other than muscle-building exercises) even if you’re running a study and can order them to do extreme things because they signed a consent form.  Losing weight through exercise isn’t impossible, at least not for everyone, but describing it as “low-hanging fruit” seems very inaccurate.  It’s a strategy that many, many people have put large amounts of time into for, in most cases, remarkably little effect.

I get the sense that when people say things like “you can improve your appearance very easily with a little exercise,” they mean something like the “do some basic strength training regularly” idea, but it makes many people think of their struggles to lose weight, and seems totally wrong if you interpret it in the latter way.