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Wellness Wednesday for January 22, 2025

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Have you tried replacing sugary food with food with artificial sweeteners? An uphill treadmill is another thing you can try, I would walk around a lot when my son had colics.

Have you tried replacing sugary food with food with artificial sweeteners

Yes, I now have a Coke Zero addiction. Sugar-free chocolate is available, but still fairly high-calorie. I don't have any really unhealthy foods available at home; there my main problem is that I just keep eating. 2nd portions, a bit more rice, whatever is available. I also grew up with very strong morals around food waste. My wife is happy to let stuff go to waste, so I'm left finishing a lot of soon-to-expire things by myself.

I've read about how Semaglutide reduces "food noise". Really, that would be heaven. I think about food way too much, and to turn off those constant cravings would be a boon.

My experience is that it doesn't reduce the desire to eat. You're still gonna have cravings, at least I do (for sweets especially). What it does do is make you get full much faster. So, it might be helpful for you given that you have issues with overeating regular food.

Do you stop eating once sated? The really fat people I've known don't necessarily eat giant portions, they just eat all the time here and there. And eating even when full is something I've heard people do. I've never had that problem.

When I say "full" I don't mean "I feel good with this amount, I'm gonna stop now". I mean full like you've just had a huge meal and you don't feel like you can physically fit more in your stomach. In the former state, I can eat more if I want (though I am trying to get better at not continuing past that point). With the latter, I'm so full that the thought of eating more makes me feel a bit sick. But instead of being there after having a huge meal, I'm there after having a medium-large size meal.

Unfortunately, my primary problem is an addiction to sweets and they are really calorie dense. So by the time I filled up on those it would still be way too much. But it definitely has an impact on my normal meal times.

Are you physically active? This is probably out of scope, but as an (amateur) runner, I've definitely hit high training volume periods where fullness and satiety decouple and I've finished meals stuffed but still hungry for calories (past a certain point, there is the effort of effectively planning an extra meal every day, but that isn't often for me). It seems plausible to me that some people get used to the wrong signals (full stomach vs. satiety), especially for hyper palatable foods, but I'm hardly an expert.

I was very physically active until my son was born 6 months ago. But fullness and satiety have been decoupled for me for as long as I can remember. My stomach feels quite full quite quickly, but I still feel strong cravings.

Congrats, man! You're probably also missing a lot of sleep. Don't beat yourself up too much: balancing it all at that stage is hard.

Thanks, I don't beat myself up too much; I just want to get slimmer.