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).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
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I've lost about 70 lbs since January. Go me!
Some notes:
Congratulations. But set point theory is absolute garbage science, and taking science & dieting advice from Dread Jim is like taking dating advice from Dread Jim. I wonder what Jim thinks about all the obese female devotees of "set point theory" as the reason why they can't lose weight. CICO, as some people below have pointed out, is true but simplistic. You lose weight by creating a caloric deficit. You could lose weight by consuming fewer calories but all of it as pure sugar. That doesn't mean that would be a good or enduring way to lose weight. There is some fuzziness in the whole "caloric deficit" concept, because people do have different metabolisms, which mean two people eating the exact same calories and doing the exact same amount of exercise won't necessarily see the same changes; that is what people mistake as a "set point." No, that doesn't mean your body has a higher set point than the other person's, it means your body doesn't burn at the same rate as the other person. So yes, it is (unfairly) harder for some people to lose weight (and we know testosterone helps, which is why it's much harder for women to lose weight), but no, nobody has a "set point" of 300 pounds.
(The rant about how "Doctors are hiding the truth from you that they aren't allowed to Notice!" is typical Dread Jim histrionics. It's true some doctors are spineless about telling patients to lose weight. It's also true that losing weight long term is difficult, but the mechanism is well understood if not popular: people lose weight by exercising and restricting calories more than they like, they lose weight, and then they go back to their previous habits. This is the Eliezer Yudkowsky theory of Why The Laws Of Physics Do Not Apply To My Fat Ass.
I get that most people don't like exercise (I don't love it myself), but even a moderate amount of exercise will make you feel immensely better (I like having exercised). The improvement curve in early stages is enormous. Back when I was overweight, regular exercise among other things made my back pain disappear.
I'm ambivalent about low-carb and keto diets; I tend to think most of these diets with some elaborate theory of how the body processes certain types of calories are just calorie reduction smuggled as "only/don't eat these things."
My theory on Keto is that by limiting carbs you feel full on fewer calories which is beneficial when you’re the kind of person who has trouble restricting calories if they feel hungry. Some people aren’t bothered by feeling a little hungry and aren’t tempted by seeing food available. Other people need to feel full and if they see treats around they’ll eat all of them.
Keto helps those people by making them feel full so they don’t seek snacks and giving hard rules that rule out most convenience foods. Breaded chicken is more carbs than keto allows, which means you have to make most meals at home and can’t just grab random food when it appears in the break room or during a meeting. That gives you more control over your diet.
The saying discipline equals freedom is true, if misunderstood. The best way to stick to anything is to decide beforehand. If you decide “im only going to eat these certain kinds of foods at these times,” saying no is a bit easier because you don’t have to decide if you’re going to eat that, you’ve already decided that food isn’t for you. It works for almost everything. If you decide to exercise on Tuesday afternoon at 3, you dont need to ask if you feel like it, you already decided.
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