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Wellness Wednesday for April 17, 2024

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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I feel doubtful about this strategy, though of course it depends on specifics.

My husband is both taller and more hyper than me. Sometimes, he would cook a pound of bacon, and suggest that he should eat it all himself, since it doesn't really affect his weight. I was not happy about that, and did in fact eat the bacon. If he were to suddenly start doing a bunch of pull ups, then making extra food for himself, I don't think the aesthetics of a better looking chest would make up for the annoyance of eating meals together with him consuming twice as much food as me.

You might get farther by taking over dinner more and cooking things that are hard to overeat. I lost a decent amount of weight before by just living with people who would eat beans or lentils for dinner instead or burgers or piles of pasta. Inconveniently, my husband lost too much weight doing that, and making two different meals is annoying enough that I've mostly given up on it. Or taking up an outdoor hobby together that involves fairly basic packed foods.

The way we solve this is that we just schedule different snacks. My wife and I have the same meals, with calories planned so that they make sense for her, and then I have more significant and more calorie-dense snacks to fill out my requirements. I work from home, and she goes in about half the time, so I may even just have basically a "fourth meal"; e.g., if the plan for lunch is just a 200-300 calorie soup or salad, I'll just eat that at like 10:30 and then make myself another quick meal around 1-2.

She helps in this by making sure that I have plenty of prepared snacks available. She'll make tasty and protein-full snacks like chicken bites with various seasonings that are easy and don't lend themselves to overeating, like potato chips.

If you like food (and I do) it is easy to get resentful of someone eating 50% more than you for every meal. It doesn’t make sense but I know how you feel. I do reframe it as just an unfortunate reality, if I happened to be ultra short like 4’10 or something I wouldn’t accept getting fat just because I wanted to eat the same 2,000 calories a day as much taller people.

Another thing that helps is intermittent fasting, I’ve partially stopped eating lunch and eat no breakfast, so I can eat a large dinner and it’s chill from a caloric perspective.

I used to do intermittent fasting and part time veganism for Orthodox fasts, and generally liked it. Their feasts are more fun after fasting as well. At some point when I'm not pregnant/with small children, I'd like to get back into it.