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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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.
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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