How did people in ancient times get fit? Did they know about proper nutrition?

Fuck off caps fag

Cardio kills gains, m8.

Only insofar as we're able these days to roughly count calories and determine what amount of it is in carbs and fat and protons.
Ancients couldn't. Most folks in history couldn't, come to think of it. Nutrition is therefore a pretty important aspect.

Your body actually has this amazing feature where it tells you if you are hungry.

>what amount of it is in carbs and fat and protons
Literally doesn't matter.
Lots of protein helps build muscle fast, buy you can still build muscle with very low amounts of protein.

>all that matters is you are getting enough calories
>Your body actually has this amazing feature where it tells you if you are hungry.
I'm guessing your cut isn't going well.

People who do physical labour all day and only eat when they are hungry don't have to cut.

Manual labor and a good diet makes you Veeky Forums.

Pic related, some user's granddad who was a farmer.

Backstory of pic? Long shot but looks funny

Sure, but you can't do it fast, keyword. And in any case, ancients knew that a meat heavy diet was a great way for athletes who would actually compete to keep their strength up.

It's a shop btw.

huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/23/john-bradley-boston-police-officer-_n_3141137.html

1. Those statues are all idealized human forms. Just like today, they didn't make statues of the average Joe. They were forms to look to and aspire to be.

2. They were fit because all they had was healthy food and hard labor. They didn't sit around for hours playing video games and television. They were out working in fields. Exercises may make some parts of you fit, but eating right and doing a hard day's work works all of you out. Humans did not evolve to weightlift, but we did evolve to walk a lot, lift shit, do hard labor, etc. And doing those activities on top of eating healthy will be of far more use to you than anything else.

As usual, powerful people did not care about that

I suppose that you imagine everyone from then to about 1980 spent the day mostly working with their hands, and no one ever got gout?
And in any case, insofar as the caloric intake of the average person at various income levels cannot be known with any exactness, we're lift mostly with the matter of nutrition as our window into looking at their culinary life.
It's a shoop. The face put on is of Mark Rippetoe, who recommends to underweight young males that they drink a gallon of milk a day alongside their regular meals and weightlifting.

You can't blame him. He's Mexican.

Ah yes. The ancient times of 1980

>then to about 1980
that time being around when I figured calories started being mandatory on packaged food. Looking it up, It seems I was a decade too early.
Do you have anything more substantial?

>And in any case, insofar as the caloric intake of the average person at various income levels cannot be known with any exactness
Yes, but we can say with pretty good certainty that overeating was not a problem for 99% of people up until maybe the 18th century.

People ate enough that they didn't feel hungry, and they did physical labour during the day. That kind of lifestyle WILL make you fit.

>buy calf
>carry calf around
>do this every day until the calf grows up to be a cow

You are now big and strong.

Sure, but we're pretty sure that the problem of overeating was not present mostly because folks could not overeat in the first place, not because they simply didn't eat when they were not hungry. We can think of more instances in history where food was deficient than when was overabundant, and though caloric deficiency is a pretty bad problem (cuz famine and shit) we can identify periods where even though caloric intake is probably sufficient (we only guess, of course) but nutritional deficiencies cause major health problems.

I mean, let's take the case of Beriberi, a sort of eastern scurvy (since it really fucked with the early Meiji navy) caused by a vitamin B1 deficiency. It's quite an easy thing to solve, just eat basically anything else along with ones white rice. Pickled vegetable or deep fried 1 day old chickens, whatever. But for those it affected, such was outside their budget, and they didn't really know that they needed anything other than white rice.

But that all aside, this can be challenged a little more simply: who eats simply when they are hungry? Don't you cook?

>Sure, but we're pretty sure that the problem of overeating was not present mostly because folks could not overeat in the first place, not because they simply didn't eat when they were not hungry.

Yes, but you also have to take into account that our modern food is heavily engineered to taste good.
Try just cooking and eating only from raw ingredients with no spices and sauces and you will find that it is very difficult to overeat.

>We can think of more instances in history where food was deficient than when was overabundant
Part of this is just economics. If food is overabundant, then there are too many people working the fields and some of them should probably be making tools or building houses instead.

If food was never abundant, then civilizations would never have progressed because in order to progress you need people doing things other than farming.

>Try just cooking and eating only from raw ingredients with no spices and sauces and you will find that it is very difficult to overeat.
Does garlic count? Garlics a vegetable, innit? Is honey a sauce?

As to the latter half, this model is always given as a theoretical one as opposed to an observable one. Let's say we take a look at rome, the big subject of this thread. There was surplus, sure, but it wasn't a surplus that farmers could indulge in, with smallholding peasants having to keep their products competitve against large latifundia's worked mostly by slaves, who definitely weren't in a position to indulge. It's not by choice that there is food to be eaten by urban dwellers and aristocrats and so on.

Calories aren't valid because they don't mirror our various metabolic processes that can be hindered and helped by the type of food.

Fats and protein give you high saitation value. It'd almost be impossible to overeat on a diet of eggs, bacon, and milk. You'd feel full MUCH quicker than our garbage carb snacks which have little saitation value in comparison.

google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.amazon.com/poor-misunderstood-calorie-calories-proper/dp/1453843612&ved=0ahUKEwjypcbwybnSAhVY0GMKHaQqDToQFgglMAM&usg=AFQjCNEvNuefplE9uGpP-RwQ9RwjP53gcQ

>It'd almost be impossible to overeat on a diet of eggs, bacon, and milk
GOMAD tho

>There was surplus, sure, but it wasn't a surplus that farmers could indulge in, with smallholding peasants having to keep their products competitve against large latifundia's worked mostly by slaves, who definitely weren't in a position to indulge. It's not by choice that there is food to be eaten by urban dwellers and aristocrats and so on.
I wasn't arguing in this post about the subject of this thread, I was just pointing out that there is a reason food was rarely overabundant prior to modern times. And it wasn't because they weren't capable of producing an excess of food.

Ok, my bad, I misunderstood. Nonetheless, my point still stands: when folks are in a position to overeat, they generally do. I mean, I know I am, there's no way I'm going to finish all dumplings I just fried up.

And you haven't answered the most important question: is garlic a spice and is honey a sauce? Cuz I tell ya, there's a lot you can do with that stuff. Honey and bread is one of my favourite broke foods.

>chair not invented
>Greeks
What?

>when folks are in a position to overeat, they generally do
I don't know that I agree with this premise.

If the food tastes very good then yeah people might eat more than they normally would.
I suspect that foods like honey and bread would have been more of a treat for most people and not something they eat too often.

Back to my original point though, overeating, if you live a very physically intensive lifestyle, is very different than if you live a typical modern lifestyle.
Those extra calories would basically just go towards muscle gain.

By what are you defining as "fit"? Just having muscle and tons of fat because you are eating poorly, but fuck cardiovascular health?

>Wish you could sit down to rest
>Unable to do so because no chairs
>Must remain standing at all times
Truly difficult times.

>How did people in ancient times get fit?
Excercise. Claudius Galen suggested to try digging to get a toned body.

>Did they know about proper nutrition?
Yup. Many Roman Gladiators would beef up before contests by eating porridge with beans. Galen thought that this practice made them far too flabby for real combat, however.

Well, if I don't have honey, bread does fine by itself. Granted, I haven't had emmer bread, and I'm told it's not that good, but I've yet to eat a bread that disagreed with me.

Now on the topic of honey, I don't myself know how it was back in roman times, but bees themselves are not too difficult to keep, no more than anything else romans could produce on a farm, especially with slaves to get stung instead of masters. In any case, it's certainly a lot easier of a sweetener to cultivate than sugar beets.

>Those extra calories would basically just go towards muscle gain
I think this is the point we should be focus on. We know that folks knew the value of protein-rich foods for lifting stuff, we can look at peasant diets and see quite a lot of beans and other forms of cheap protein, but from the evidence we have of roman lower class diets that they generally tried to get what they could in, but even then we can wager it was still more expensive than good old bread and vegetables. Conventional wisdom holds that you gotta keep the protons up to maintain and build muscle mass for the tasks we perform in gyms, but then we have places like China where rice consumption was to the point where they were having health problems apart from protein consumption, and they still worked the land as intensively as anyone else. On my mothers side there's a few families in rice, I've eaten with them, their diet on most days is pretty heavy on rice but sundays they're going ham on roast pork.

And uh, let me take back the comment on cutting that I made earlier. You seem a decent guy, it was shitty of me to pull that.

cardiofags get out

I recall reading that gladiators got fat to keep gut wounds from being too bad. I also recall reading that soldiers would usually keep quite a bit of fat on them at the start of a campaign, since they'd work it off instead of starving en route to wherever they happened to be fighting. Could you source the bit where galen says this? I don't doubt you, I just find it interesting.

>ONLY HYPERTROPHIC BARBARIANS STRIVE FOR SUPERFLUOUS MUSCLEMASS.

This is what rationalized laziness looks like, if anyone was wondering.

Well I mean Plato mentions that doing as an athlete wasn't necessarily the best thing for greeks who had something other than winning games in mind
He was into """functional fitness""""

>cardiofags get out

I also lift. Around 30 mins for a 4 mile run, 1.2 mile in around 40 minutes, squat/dl over 3 plates, bench 1.5x my body weight.

Step your game up.

>I recall reading that gladiators got fat to keep gut wounds from being too bad
That's a myth perpetrated by Grossschmidt. Gladiators, just like any other fighter, would not gain any advantages from excess body weight.

THIS IS WHAT BARBARIAN HUBRIS, AND LACK OF "READING COMPREHENSION", LOOK LIKE.

1.2 mile swim*

What did the rich eat? Lots of good bread, not what we are used to; legumes and such which are high in protean; lots of meat if they are near a sacrifice-heavy location (Olympia sure as hell was, especially during the Panhellenic Games); milk, cheese, maybe yogurt if it was introduced in the Archaic/Classical period we're probably referring to; a few other things I'm probably forgetting. Best of all, the only sweetener they really had was honey, which they had to gather from the wild by killing all the bees with smoke or something. Raw honey is also a much healthier sweetener than most we are used to today, and was not consumed daily.

Salt was not used commonly either, and while olive oil was of course consumed, their food was not literally soaked in it like some modern food is.
Really, the diet of the Aristoi was very good. The poorer ate more fish and less red meat, which is even better. The Aristoi were also expected to be fit, so even if they had the ability to sit around all day while thigh-fucking their boitoi, they couldn't justify it. They'd probably lose their boi too if they became fat and unsightly.

Secondly, doing manual labor or being an athlete or soldier, which most men of all classes probably at a good bit of experience in, is a good way to get fit.

The idea of wanting to prevent fatal wounds seems to make sense, but I'm of course not an expert in this matter. Could you elaborate further?

Not him, but body fat would not have served as protection against the weapons used by Gladiators.

You can read more about it here:
outofthiscentury.wordpress.com/2010/01/30/fat-gladiators-modern-misconceptions-regarding-the-dietary-practices-of-swordsmen-of-the-ancient-roman-arena/

Thanks, this is informative. I'd buy you a beer if I could.

SE Asians have a more "accelerated"/"efficient" metabolism when it comes to rice and other similar carbs.

People in a region develop, over generations, adaptations that help them with the local diet.

>SE Asians have a more efficient metabolism

[citation needed]

Your attempt to deflect me is effete and hilarious. The good news is, it's never too late to stop being lazy and pick up those weights.

>advocate for doing bodyweight and athletic exercise
>dude you're lazy.

It's not outrageous.

The Swiss in Europe and the Masai in North Africa developed adaptations to break down lactose in a proverbial blink of an eye.

They had nothing else to do

And think about it.

SE Asian civilization (based on grain surpluses like civilization in general) outcompeted and wiped out local H&G groups. If your power base is rice, those who process rice will outnumber other groupings in a "short" amount of time.

Whether or not it is outrageous has no bearing on whether it's true or false. And I Googled it and nothing came up about that, so I'm calling bullshit.

You're saying that hunter and gatherers couldn't process starch into simple sugars for energy?

The real advantage of farmers over H/G is that they could sustain more people, so they just simply outnumbered H/G, albeit on a weaker diet.

I did not comment on that portion of his post and have no intention of commenting on it as I have no quarrel with it.

What I do disagree with is (presumably) adult men who have somehow rationalized that lifting weights is bad. I can only assume it stems from a lack of drive to push oneself as it is an opinion that certainly has no basis in facts or statistics.

If you don't want to lift weights, don't fucking do it. Doesn't bother me. But when someone tries to justify that they don't want to by pretending it's a bad thing to do, they are either being dishonest or are ignorant.

manual labor

fitfags are horrible, fucking weak ass faggots cant work for 30mins but cant stfu about muh plates
ballooned up idiots

You might be right.

sciencemag.org/news/2010/01/rice-domestication-blame-red-faced-asians

It'd be funny if the farmers settled down to be able to brew more alcohol.

bmcevolbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2148-10-15

?

A lot of fitfags are probably horrible because they don't give their muscles enough time to heal. 3-4 days between weight lifting sessions allows the torn up muscle to regenerate stronger.

Case in point, this straw manning poster here:
Obviously, many people who train with weights also do manual labor for a living. It is very annoying to me when people pretend they do not train with weights for any other reason than they simply do not want to.

I think what he's getting at is big muscular guys aren't always "functional."

Why are so upset that people think other methods of exercise are more functional?

"Gym muscles" are for vanity

Because the ancients were smart people and not - like evolutionists/atheists claim, dumb primitives.

We are getting physically, morally and genetically worse every generation, thanks to entropy and decay. The only thing that is "improving" is technology but even that is up to debate because archeological discoveries have found amazing technology from Pre-Flood civilizations. And then there are the Egyptian pyramids which we cannot replicate TODAY.

The Tower of Babel has been the biggest structure ever built. According to Jasher, it took 3 days to walk around the building.

>Christianity

Not even once.

>Atheism

Not even once.

...

>no TV
>no facebook
>no Veeky Forums
>no video games

Its not wonder they were fit philosopher kings, they had fuck all else to do.

Wrestling

Let's be honest. Just like ancient man was a master of herbal remedies, it isn't a stretch to say they knew what foods and such were healthy for growth. In many ways they were far brighter than the average dunderhead of 2017.

Some of them ate healthy vegetables, lentils and pulses. They also worked outside with healthy air.
They knew as much as nutrition as the average "fad" eater; looking for that magic food that undoes the damage from an addiction to fructose.

But imagine the quads they forged tho