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Wellness Wednesday for March 8, 2023

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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That's because this argument forces people to disambiguate between two definitions of dieting:

  • consuming fewer calories

  • voluntarily consuming fewer calories in the presence of abundant hyperpalatable food by exercising your willpower

CI<CO works. Yes, BMR goes down as you lose weight, TEF goes down as you eat less food, NEAT goes down if you diet too hard, but that doesn't change the laws of thermodynamics: CI<CO? Weight loss.

Voluntarily staying at the level of CImaint=COmaint works for some people, fails for others. Why? Two options:

  • they let they CO creep below COmaint, probably by dropping EAT. I think it's less probable, since EAT has a small impact

  • they let their CI creep above CImaint

Why do they stay at CI>CImaint? Because they enjoy it, it gives them hedons. But why do they enjoy it more than staying in shape, while others don't?

  • does eating more tasty food simply have a larger weight in their hedonic formula? Is it an endogenous or an exogenous weight?

  • or does their formula discount future hedons/negahedons at a higher rate? Someone might take into account the dieting they will have to do to lose the weight they are gaining by eating this brownie at -6h and eating the brownie at 5h, while someone else might discount the future dieting to -4h

  • or is there this magic "set point" of CIsp, and every CI<CIsp generates negahedons? Some have it high enough that COsp=CIsp means they have to up their EAT to unsustainable levels

Thank you. I should have posted something like this, but got frustrated. Honestly, I thought understanding this concept was table stakes for having this discussion here, and I was disappointed when a typical normie comment entered the conversation.

It's not a normie comment to say that not eating too much food works when half the population doesn't seem capable of maintaining a healthy size.

Fat people's opinions on dieting are obviously biased in the worst direction, with thin people's opinions having higher value, and formerly-fat-but-now-durably-thin people's opinions even higher.