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 have to say, it's incredible how well semaglutide is working for me. Literally the only effect I notice is a massive decrease in general hunger and a massive increase in how full I feel after every meal, with no side-effects that I can notice. No more desire to go buy chocolate bars each time I pass by a convenience store. No more finishing a 12 incher from subway and still looking for stuff to eat. No more going to sleep hungry. The other day at subway I finished half of my sandwich and was absolutely amazed to find out that I didn't especially want to eat the second half. To be clear, I still get hungry, it's just that my hunger levels now automatically lead to me eating 2000 calories per day, instead of my old 3500.
I'm simultaneously amazed that I finally found the solution that I've been looking for, and angry at the prevalent "willpower hypothesis of weight loss" that I've been exposed to my whole life. I spent a decade trying to diet with difficulty set on nightmare mode, and now that my hunger signalling seems to have been reset to normal levels, I realise just how trivial it is to be skinny for people with normal hunger levels. All the people who teased me in high school didn't somehow have more willpower than me, they were fucking playing on easy mode!
Glad it's working for you! Honesty, that sounds amazing.
I've become a convert to "set point theory" of hunger and, with a convert's fervor, I now view the opposite view as imbecilic and harmful. Almost no one can sustain weight loss for long periods of time via calorie counting and exercise. The fact that so many people believe otherwise is troubling. How long can a society be so obviously wrong and double down on failure? At least several decades, apparently.
In good news, we finally have something which actually works. As this becomes widespread, I expect obesity to peak soon and then decline - similar to the decline in HIV deaths starting in the 1990s. Life expectancy will increase as well.
As for myself, since I'm only about 20 pounds over my ideal weight, I'll hold off for a few years just in case there are unknown risks.
My hypothesis is that the calorie/willpower model is appealing because it allows people to be moralistic. Fat people aren't very nice to look at, but if you can tell yourself that they chose to look like this because they wanted to be lazy and gluttonous, well then you can justifiably dislike them.
Me and girlfriend have had this conversation a few times, and what's fascinating is that she doesn't seem to have any particular model of what causes obesity. Instead, when presented with my version of the setpoint hypothesis (personally I think it's the vegetable oils), she reaches into a grab bag of other explanations (laziness, shift work, hyperpalatable food, snacking, processed food) but never settles on one and refuses to assign a weighting to any of them.
Nothing about set point theory suggests that people don't get fat by being lazy and gluttonous. Even if it absolves people of blame for failing to lose weight, they still get fat through sloth and gluttony.
I guess that could technically be correct. But then it just begs the question as to why sloth and gluttony increased linearly in the latter half of the 20th century at the exact time as countries adopted seed oils into their diet.
If it were true, we would also expect to see people who work longer hours get less obese, because they are demonstrably less slothfull than their peers. We don't see this. Instead we see people who are objectively smart and hard working (for example, medical students) getting fatter just like everyone else.
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