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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If we just ignore the large and unsolved issue of selection bias in weight loss studies we can still observe that some 20% sustain weight loss long term.
Similarly, for people with so severe alcoholism that they seek treatment the people that stay sober long term seem to be a bit more than 1/3.
Neither of these qualify as "almost never" in my mind.
I have a hard time believing that diet efficacy is much greater than zero given that a large percentage of people diet and obesity is only increasing. Is it possible for dieting to have negative efficacy? Perhaps.
Speaking of selection bias, choosing people who have already lost large amounts of weight selects for people who have HUGE amounts of self-control and probably wealth and free time as well. If, even among this august group, only 20% maintain the weight loss that's pretty damning.
I'm not sure where you are getting your alcohol stats, but the number I remember is 8% of AA users successfully quit. And indeed my memory is correct according to this source:
https://www.npr.org/2014/03/23/291405829/with-sobering-science-doctor-debunks-12-step-recovery
Fortunately, the Sinclair Method exists and seems much more promising. Are there other treatment options that work? Maybe. But I wouldn't trust the stats produced by these groups given the they would be so self-interested.
I believe you misunderstood. Its 20% of those that started the diet that managed to lose weight long term, not 20% of those that managed to lose weight in the first place.
As for alcohol (and substance abuse in general) there are a lot of studies:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1976118/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29705545/
https://www.hindawi.com/journals/psychiatry/2018/4829389/
https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/pdf/10.1176/appi.ajp.2008.07081308
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27614380/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30260382/
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMcp1204714
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30883295
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It might be the case that the obesity rates would be increasing even faster if people weren't dieting. In this scenario whatever bad stuff is causing obesity is steadily increasing with time, and dieting is working against the bad stuff, just not fast enough.
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