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).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I would like to stop being fat.
I have tried before, even got some ozempic, did not take it consistently. The inconsistency is from same reason of the obesity - intolerance of discomfort, in the case of ozempic, wanting to shit, not being able to shit etc
My plan is to consistently take the ozempic, but I have questions in support of my goal:
What have you done as far as your diet? I have tended to think that diet is by far the most important thing in body fat level. It's hard to say much, though, without some idea of what your diet is like now and what, if anything, you've tried. But I don't think any level of physical activity can overcome a really bad diet.
I'm skeptical of weight loss drugs too. I never liked the idea of taking multiple drugs to counter-act each other. Similarly, this might be more of a personal ideology, but I never liked the idea of eating a terrible diet and trying to counter-act the body-fat effects of that with drugs. Why not fix the diet first? It may be another thing, though, if you've tried absolutely everything on the diet front and can't make any progress.
Doctors have an old joke that goes something like "if your patient manages to loose weight, check for cancer".
People who don't gain weight have a feedback mechanism where if they eat a big meal in the evening they will not be hungry the next day and eat lightly. In fat people, for whatever reason, that's not working. They'll eat a big dinner and be hungry at breakfast. While dieting their body will respond by becoming lethargic to save energy and store whatever they eat.
Yes you can loose weight by aggressively counting every calorie for the rest of your life, but the effort is huge and the quality of life is bad.
The new weight loss drugs just dramatically improve people's lives. They get to experience the sensation of being not hungry for the first time in their lives.
The good news for thread OP is, basically none of that is true at all. You really should engage with some of the things we've learned about diet and nutrition in the last 30 years before you opine so confidently.
The key trick with fixing your diet and actually losing weight is that you have to take the morality out of it. It's a science experiment, not a religious law. If you want to lose weight, you need to find a diet that works for you. Not working includes not being able to stick to it, feeling hungry, making too much effort, and not having enough energy.
Calories in = calories out is not true; it's a vast oversimplification of how hunger and nutrition work. You don't need to count calories and stick to a limit to lose weight. Most of the failure of many peoples' dieting is a religious/ideological devotion to these terrible ideas about dieting from the 1990s - that you need to treat it as a moral failure that you are not able to stick to an ineffective diet. That is only a road to feeling even worse about yourself and still being fat.
Still being hungry after eating is not some magic thing that happens for "whatever reason", it's a specifically engineered outcome. Many foods are deliberately engineered to not make you feel full so that you keep eating. Obviously you're going to not feel full if you gorge yourself on foods designed to make you not feel full! If you're doing that, in my opinion, you need to fix that before you go on fancy drugs. Exactly as if, if you're doing heroin, and it's causing bad things to happen to your body, you should stop doing heroin, not look for even more drugs to counteract the effects.
This is the complete opposite of my experience. I've tried multiple kinds of diets over the years. All the ones where I didn't gain weight left me hungry and lethargic. The only one where I lost any significant amount of weight was "eat whatever you want, up to a specific calorie limit". The same was true for my aunt. She tried a bunch of different diets, and the only one that worked was the one where she breaks her food into categories and has a limit for each.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link