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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I've lost about 70 lbs since January. Go me!
Some notes:
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.
You say many true and almost-true things.
Because the vast majority of people have absolutely no bollocks idea what the goal even is. They've been constantly lied to on this topic. How do you pick "the right foods" to eat? What are some plausible metrics? I would interpret from your comment that one plausible metric is "good satiety", but how do you even measure that? Do you have some normalization? Is it satiety per liter? Per kilogram? ...per calorie? You sort of can't even get off the ground if you're someone who has been taken in by the lies and doesn't believe that calories can possibly matter because I guess the body magically adjusts and makes them meaningless anyway or something.
Once a person actually acknowledges that calories matter. Not in a, "Sure, calories theoretically matter, BUT [insert any of a million excuses people give to proceed to immediately ignore calories]," way, but in a genuine, "Ok, my weight actually does meaningfully correspond in the long run to the calories I consume and the calories I expend, even if my measurement of the phenomena is noisy," way. Then a person can start to make meaningful choices and tradeoffs with eyes wide open. They won't fall for things like, "I heard once that nuts are the right foods, so I constantly snack on nuts all day."
Many people are never going to read a study on satiety of various foods. But if you get them to actually acknowledge that calories do matter (again, not in the fake and gay way where you immediately follow it by saying they don't matter), many folks can figure it out. "Oh, I can have that much of Food A and it's like the sort of equivalent of this much of Food B?!" And maybe they won't reconstruct satiety studies on their own, but they will likely be a lot more open to you bringing it up. At that point, they have a goal, and you have a valuable piece of information that can be very useful to their goal. If, instead, they think it's just about picking "the right foods", why do they care about that? "Haven't you heard, man? Avocados are like, a 'superfood'. That means they're the right food."
There are a lot of different ways for a person to ultimately put in place a selection of foods that satisfy their nutritional needs and also fit within their caloric budget. They may depend on many lifestyle factors. There is no one single "right way". If you're telling people that you have the magic one single right way, then first, you have to compete with all the other folks who have their own single magic right way, like the avocado guy or whatever. Those guys are also saying that calories are bullshit. Second, your magic right way may not actually fit with another person's lifestyle.
Instead, a person needs to understand that there are many ways, but calories do matter (yet again, not in a bullshit way where one immediately follows it by saying calories don't matter). One can certainly try different ways that are out there, but it is sure a useful diagnosis tool. "Joe is telling me to eat nothing but avocados. Since I know I'm targeting X calories, that means I can eat Y avocados. I guess I'll see if I can make this work?" Versus just randomly shooting in the dark aimlessly.
Once a person uses this diagnostic and is able to wrap their head around what the tradeoff space actually looks like, in terms of things like satiety as well, then they may not actually need to count calories anymore. But it's an invaluable tool for the people who are serious and real, whereas the vast majority of folks who forever chase the latest "right food" will never have enough grounding to even know what the point is.
The problem with the calorie-based paradigm of weight-loss and gain isn't that its wrong, it's that its advocates conflate describing a process and fixing it. Saying 'you gain weight because you ate more calories than you burned' isn't an explanation of weight gain, it's just describing weight gain with more steps.
It's akin to a bar owner asking 'why does my bar fill up on Friday night?' and responding with 'because more people enter than leave' when the real answer is 'most people don't have work on Saturday so they're more willing to go out and drink'.
Whereas advocates of the calorie paradigm (which notably doesn't include actual researchers of obesity) act as if the description is the solution. As if all you need to do is decide to consume fewer calories or decide to expend more. Whereas in reality, how many calories we consume is driven primarily by our hunger, and how many calories we expend is almost entirely out of our control. If you decide to undereat (without chemical assistance*), your body will reduce your metabolic rate and make you hungrier, if you decide to exercise more, your body will reduce the amount of calories that your body consumes at rest. And even calories 'stored' can be allocated to fat or lean mass depending on the body's hormonal environment.
Consider that when girls go through puberty, they go from about 10% body fat to about 20%. That isn't because insecure teenagers decide to consume more calories. Their hormones make it happen. The increased calorie intake is the mechanism of the weight gain, but it isn't the cause. The cause is puberty turning a girl into a woman by adjusting her hormonal profile.
*GLPs are a good example of how the calorie paradigm fails. They adjust your hormones in such a way that you will lose weight whether you like it or not.
Word choice is a bit funky. Burned probably better.
Thanks, typo on my part.
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