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:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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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.
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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.
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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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From what I've learned, I don't think there is a universal dietary weight-loss solution. I think there's too much individual variation in how peoples' digestive systems work. Too many people have reported success with a wide variety of diet types, often ones that contradict each other. That's why I think any individual seeking to lose weight should try several and see how their body responds, like a month or two each. Try weight loss drugs only after you've tried several diet types and failed to make much progress. I think it's probably best to avoid the worst types of food even if you've decided to turn to weight loss drugs. Consuming tons of junk food and sugary drinks every day just can't be good for you.
For myself, I went on Keto, and it worked amazingly well for me. I started in about 2018 and was able to lose weight and have kept it off. I actually got a little bit too skinny for a while, and backed off to a more sustainable level. At no point did I ever actually cut calories, feel hungry, or lack energy. I feel more and more consistent energy on it, and several other minor medical problems seem to have cleared up too. Granted, I was never at the 350lb level, but I decided I needed to fix my diet when I had gained 10-20 pounds, not wait until I had gained 200lbs. I have met several people who have been able to lose hundreds of pounds with it though.
I will say again, and more clearly, I do not assert that this particular diet, or any other particular diet, will definitely work for everyone. But I did ask thread OP what, if anything, they had tried so far as far as their diet, not trying to sell them on any particular diet, since they didn't mention a thing about it. I do think it's best to give several different diet types a best-effort try before turning to weight loss medications.
Why do you think it’s best to try different diets before medication? There can be important opportunity costs and health effects from spending a couple years longer than necessary with obesity. Diets like keto where one essentially eliminates certain basic nutrients might also have other negative health effects down the line especially if you stick with it for years.
Given that not a single diet system ever seemed to actually work for the general population before ozempic came along, I can’t help but to see this as a moral preference rather than a medical one. I agree there is a certain beauty to the idea of physical fitness coming from moral fitness but I don’t think that’s worth %60 obesity rates. We can surely find other things to he virtuous about
Perhaps it is a bit ideological. I would note in turn that widespread obesity is a relatively new phenomenon. I am not the person to know for sure exactly what change caused it, but clearly something changed in the last ~100 years to cause such widespread obesity. Maybe it's better to fix that, whatever it is, than for everyone to go on medication for life. Keto, or any other diet, may not be perfect, but I'm skeptical that there's anything worse about eating in a way more like some of our ancestors did than going on a medication that was approved for human use not quite 10 years ago. Where is the concern for what the long-term health effects of that might be?
I would ask in turn, do you think there is any possibility somebody's diet could be so obviously bad that they really should stop eating that, whether or not they go on medication as well? Like multiple 2-liters of sugary soda a day, multiple bags of chips, tubs of ice cream, etc? Do you agree with DradisPing's implication that it is completely impossible for anybody to lose weight and keep it off with dietary changes?
Fix what? Actually knowing what to fix is typically 95% of any solution. We aren't fixing "that" because we don't really know what "that" is other than some vague understanding that food being very cheap and widely available to everyone and heavy physical labour all but disappearing is a toxic combination. I would be interested in hearing your solution to fix food abundance and security. Since you won't fix the "culture" (Scott had a good article for this right?), fixing the human body to crave the right type of food at right amounts is your next best solution. And that is exactly what the ozempic derivatives really seem to be achieving.
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