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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My wife is getting fat. She’s not obese or anything, maybe barely overweight, idk. But she’s very clearly growing in her upper pelvis to a degree that’s very obvious if you’re married to her, and still obvious if she’s wearing tight waist-high pants while seated. She looks pregnant in certain clothing, and she’s buying new clothes at an increasing pace to replace her old clothes.
No, she is in fact very beautiful and very fashionable. But I’m worried that I’m not seeing her do anything about it. Her weight gain has been real and obvious over the last year, and I’ve been able to maintain my weight within a 5-lb. range in the same time thanks to my strange eating habits (I often tell her you should adopt normal American eating patterns when you want to look like a normal American. I haven’t convinced her yet.)
She hasn’t gotten to the “I should do something about this,” phase yet—she’s coping somehow. The bigger boobs are helping her do that. She is upset she doesn’t fit into old cute pants and dresses, but she simply jokes about getting fat and is fine because, for now, her clothes mostly still hide the weight gain.
Here’s where I come in. I am absolutely not going to sit down with my wife and tell her that she’s gaining too much weight and should slim down for my sexual gratification. I gently broached weight loss once, when she brought it up, and it didn’t go well. Now I just nod my head or otherwise remain silent when it comes up.
Observations: Couples get fat together. There is never one obese one and one skinny one. Couples get hot together. If a guy is ripped, his partner at least looks like she knows when to put the fork down.
Strategy: All I want is for my wife to have a flatter belly. Flat bellies are hot. My girl’s got hips for days—they drive me crazy, and I want them to shine without her waist getting in the way. This shouldn’t be an impossibly hard problem to solve given the realities of CICO. The mechanism? I think I need to get ripped. Right now I am solidly skinnyfat. Most of my clothes from 5+ years ago still fit comfortably, I’ve been able to avoid growing or even threatening to grow a gut, but my chest is very small and my waist is 1-2 inches bigger than it was when were were newly-weds. I must fix these things. Maybe not get jacked out of my mind, but I need to be toned and lean and look fantastic naked. To silently encourage my wife to achieve the female ideal of “be slim,” I must reach for the much higher male ideal of, “Fully develop every muscle group.”
That’s my plan for this summer I think. (If I fail you’ll never hear about this project again.) I do not want to be a gym rat or get humongous. I just want as much progress as you can possibly get with a pull-up bar and regular time set aside for a serious workout.
What could go wrong? Worst case, my wife has a hotter husband. Am I being mind-blowingly vain? Women, would you be incredibly hurt if you found your husband writing these things about you? If your husband started working out and getting hot out of nowhere, would you feel compelled to act?
What are your own experiences?
I wouldn't put too much stake on 'the realities of CICO'. No matter how much the public hears 'calories in, calories out' the obesity epidemic continues unabated. If it was as simple as choosing to eat less, we'd see far fewer fat people than we do. Nobody wants to be fat.
Maybe your wife will be able to reverse her expanding waistline, but if she does, it might be because she's started taking ozempic rather than through sheer force of will. Hoping that the latter will work has a good chance of disappointing both of you.
As @Walterodim said, you're confusing "simple" with "easy". Eating less to lose weight is indeed very simple, but it's not at all easy.
Does it matter whether you use "easy" or "simple"? The question in my eyes is: "Is it probable"? And statistically speaking, CICO is not likely to result in success.
This is basically useless evidence. Statistically speaking, most people don't get jacked. It doesn't mean that weightlifting doesn't build muscle. It's a pretty "simple" biophysical phenomenon, but it's not particularly "easy" to dedicate time and effort to doing it.
Moreover, we have good evidence for why CICO is not likely to result in success, because we can see a stark difference between studies of in-patients, where the researchers have complete control and ability to strictly account for calories consumed, and self-report studies, where they don't. The conclusion is that it's unquestionable that CICO absolutely completely works; it's that people do all sorts of shit to convince themselves of little lies here and there rather than wholeheartedly embrace truth and reality and take agency for their choices.
Two examples I've talked about here are my wife and a friend of ours. When I convinced my wife to just count the calories and see what the deal is, she still mentally rebelled against it. She would see the line tracking her weight (weekly average) not always dropping immediately, and be all, "MAYBE IT'S NOT WORKING ANYMORE!" I had to say, "Shut up and just keep doing it," more times than I can remember, and sure enough, it always kept going down. I don't know how many times it took for her to mentally "get it". At some point, she was like, "Yeah, I 'knew' that it worked like this, but I didn't 'know know'." Because society has been lying to her for decades.
Our friend literally went to her doctor and basically begged for advice on how to plan diet/exercise, but doctors hate to tell people to diet/exercise, because they know that most people have been lied to for decades and simply won't believe it enough to do it, so what did her doctor say to help her? "Ya know, you're just getting older." Even the fucking doctors contribute to the constant lying that people experience. It's no wonder that the statistics are what the statistics are, even if it works 100% of the time when you do it.
WaPo just had an article a couple weeks ago detailing one of the industries that are literally dedicated to lying to people about how the world works. These are the bootleggers. The baptists are the lying gyms and diet people who say shit on big signs like, "LOSE 30LBS IN 20 DAYS!" Everyone is constantly lying to people, and we shouldn't be surprised that, statistically, people get confused by those lies rather than doing the simple, but not easy, things that are necessary to lose weight.
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I don't know that this is a conclusion we can draw based on our observation that most overweight people in the west have failed at losing weight, though. First of all, because even though CICO is widely known, there's still also an incredible amount of other misinformation about stuff like "healthy foods" and various diets. There's also the fact that many people receive this very type of message along the lines of "CICO is trivially true from a physics standpoint, but the hard part is actually keeping to it due to self control and hunger" and as such, when they do diet, they pursue strategies for tricking themselves through other diets instead of literally just counting calories in and calories out.
All this means that the overall population of "overweight people who try to lose weight" does not necessarily look like the population of "overweight people who try to follow a CICO protocol for weight loss." I'd actually wager that overweight people who follow a CICO diet strategy while having a genuine belief in CICO and their ability to succeed by using it have higher success rates than overweight people who follow the strategy while being terrified by the prospect of failure due to their inability to control themselves in the face of hunger pangs. And as such, spreading the message that CICO is trivially true but ineffective actually harms people's ability to lose weight.
In any case, this particular comment was about manipulating the commenter's wife to following CICO via mechanisms other than just telling her CICO (i.e. the commenter getting ripped). This seems likely to fail for plenty of reasons, but those are different issues to whether or not [following as a diet strategy] CICO is likely to result in success.
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That's fine, but that's not the implicit claim that was being made. The implicit claim was not "CICO isn't likely to work", it was "CICO is not simple". As such, the distinction between simple and easy is relevant.
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