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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1009 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for October 14, 2026

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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I've lost about 70 lbs since January. Go me!

Some notes:

  • I never got around to buying the ozempic. Low conscientiousness strikes again!
  • I did get a metformin prescription for prediabetes. 500 MG twice a day. Very cheap; $7 for a 3 month supply!
  • I am no longer prediabetic. I hope the doctor does not remove my prescription because of this.
  • No exercise. I've been thinking of buying some kettlebells.
  • Low-carb diet. Basically the union of keto and paleo; if it's allowed on either one, I eat it.
  • No sweeteners. Dread Jim's theory that sweetness makes you fat regardless of calories makes sense.
  • After a few months without sugar or splenda, fruit tastes very good, candy and desserts taste absurdly sweet.
  • Have I changed my opinion on weight loss? No. Diet and metformin lowered set point. CICO is still garbage.

Keep it up! I like reading your comments so I would like to see you around for a long time.

5'11.46

4/100" too low to legitimately round up.

how is your blood pressure so low? mine was at 140 even at 180. congrats on weight loss . CICO is technically true in that sense that obesity reflects an energy imbalance, but also limited in the sense it's hard to predict how the "CO" variable will change.

this is a good point:

In 2025, a normal life makes you fat. It shouldn't take an extraordinary life to avoid being fat. And, for most of human history, it didn't. Sometime in the last few decades, something changed such that ordinary levels of exercise and satiety and willpower simply aren't enough anymore to avoid being fat. Since most people do not have the slack to redesign their entire lives around being thin, a realistic solution to the obesity epidemic needs to involve either identifying and removing the orange soda or inventing some kind of orange soda antidote. Telling people to just consume less calories than they spend is a useless distraction, like telling an adult who counts on his finger to just study harder for the AP Calc exam.

at least 75% of the US population is overweight through no effort. something is wrong. it's more than just "eating too much," as there is evidence people consumed similar or greater calorie counts hundred+ years ago without becoming as overweight. historically, when food was cut off during war or other famine , people rapidly starved to death , even on 1500 kcal/day like in Holland or Russia, yet we have entire Reddit subs where people cannot lose weight on 1200-1500 kcal/day (obviously, miscounting calories is an issue).

Congrats, that's impressive. I'm surprised your conclusion is that CICO is garbage. Keto/paleo diet naturally removes a lot high calorie processed garbage that causes people to consume more calories than needed. You ate whole foods that were high-volume and low-calorie, which put you in caloric deficit, causing you to lose weight. It's pretty much impossible to overeat with whole foods because of how voluminous they are unless you're treating yourself to huge pieces of steak every single day and eating other stuff on top. Especially in your case, even without exercise, being 360lbs at the start meant that your maintenance calories reqs were sky high because you were exerting enormous amounts of energy simply existing at that weight. You could pretty much afford to eat anything and everything on the keto/paleo diet list without counting a single calorie. Just as an example - 1kg of strawberries is 300 calories/~70grams of carbs and a standard bag of HARIBO gummies (350g) is also 300calories/80 grams of carbs, and not a single person eats this many strawberries in one sitting, while vacuuming a bag of those gummies is pretty damn trivial. I assume you could coast on eating keto/paleo diet without counting calories until you're about 210-200lbs and then you'll plateau until you get Cronometer/MyFitnessPal app on your phone and buy a food scale and/or start exercising. Best of luck! I'm on the other side of the coin right now - trying to gain lean muscle and it's been difficult. I found losing weight much easier.

CICO is garbage advice and dieting measure, but standard and acceptable physics.

Our bodies don't measure fullness via calories, there are many ways it can adjust metabolic rate to match food intake, and it has many ways to encourage food intake if body is using more calories.

Count calories all you want (and most people don't want to spend tons of time doing that), but what you eat is gonna determine whether you feel fine and satiated or hungry and miserable. Being hungry and miserable all the time is a great way to quit a diet. So why not skip the part where you count calories, eat the right foods, and don't feel hungry and miserable all the time. That's what the non CICO diets tend to offer.

yeah CICO does not tell you how the variables are changing. It's tautological.

Have I changed my opinion on weight loss? No.

So were you right? Has your experience been like what you had expected?

I expect the required measures to be extreme; exercising for several hours every other day, chugging water all day to kill hunger, moving to a cold climate to burn more calories maintaining body temperature, eating bland food like Soylent and MealSquares, avoiding social occasions like birthdays and weddings so that you are not tempted to break your diet, etc. In the worst case, they might have to move to an isolated rural area in Alaska to avoid just driving down to the Walmart for a snack raid. It'd be something like a medical residency, where you endure four years of hell in exchange for a greatly improved rest of your life.

Did you do that stuff?

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