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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Fat people.
Not even once.
I really didn't know before I lived with him. Like, I've been average Amerifat on and off (have gained and lost the same 30ish pounds several times since being the fat kid who lost the weight after high school) but morbid obesity is a different game. Like, I've seen him take down a 14 inch stuffed crust pizza with a quart of milk in 20 minutes. I hear obvious bullshit like "I haven't eaten in days". (I have gone days without eating because stressed out me loses all appetite and when that happens I lose weight fast even while guzzling full sugar soda and alcoholic beverages.) or "This pizza is the first bad thing I've eaten in two weeks, so my diet shouldn't be causing my joint problems" (Again, bullshit. You told me that you went to the Chinese buffet last week, I've never seen you cook or eat a vegetable, I see the junk food wrappers/boxes in the trash, and you forgot to mention the full order of cheezy bread that you took down with that pizza.) and don't even have a response. At least every drunk I've known doesn't pretend that their hangover came from nowhere.
One of my siblings is living her 400lb life and it's fucking depressing.
I don't know if addiction causes people to lose their tolerance for discomfort or if the low tolerance for discomfort causes the addiction in the first place, but having been around enough of it you run into ridiculous shit like my roommate complaining about the heat during a power outage 30 minutes after the power went out (Yeah, it got humid and a bit stuffy, but it was during the night, below 80 degrees outside, and dark. It didn't get hot.) or a buddy's pillhead girlfriend requiring controlled substances to treat a headache.
It's about habit. Mind-patterns established by classical conditioning. Everyone feels that they need a way to cope with physical and emotional pains. If you establish the habit of pairing pain with [unhealthy thing], you'll automatically and mindlessly turn to that thing whenever you feel an ow. And because junk food, drugs, alcohol, etc, are addictive by their nature, the threshold for applying it to the ow goes down too. At some point, almost any excuse will be enough hurt to use the 'antidote'.
I noticed this phenomenon after I stopped drinking.
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While the scale that morbidly obese people lie on is insane, I see pretty much the same kind of lying and self-delusion even among people that aren't super heavy. Somehow, people really do become convinced that they're not eating that much, that there's just something different about their metabolism that prevents them from being able to lose weight. The obvious conclusion that you're still eating too much is treated as implausible, because they know they're not eating very much. I also know multiple people that did lose some of the weight but have become convinced that it's only because they found the one true diet, the one way that really works for their bodies (one guy insists that wheat specifically is what ruins him because of this stupid book). For people that have fully settled on these sorts of beliefs, having me stand in front of them and be thin without avoiding any particular "bad foods" isn't evidence of anything other than how cursed their metabolism is.
Food, Sex, and Shelter.
That the three of these things (and water) are so hard wired in as to be non-negotiable (with the exception of sex and a pseudo-exception of shelter) is why I think you see so much dishonesty around them.
Sex, more broadly, relationships, is the easy and obvious one. We all have the friend with the awful boyfriend/girlfriend that they just can't break up with. Many of us (myself included) have been that person at one time or another. Why not just cut and run? It's sex mixed up with emotional sunk-cost fallacy. This stuff has been fueling the music and movie industries since they began.
Shelter is a little weaker and less obvious, but you see it when people get evicted or when people refuse to move from obviously awful situations. I'm not referencing OP here. I have enough Appalachian Relations to know that people will talk a big game about "leaving this one horse town" but will also turn around and start spouting "but our history! is here" just as quickly. The inversion of this is NIMBYism in expensive enclaves in coastal cities. People tie a self-constructed history to land and dwellings. The truly ironic part is that everything material that actually services that "history" is utterly independent from the dwelling itself. No problem to take the pictures of grandma and grandaddy's old revolver. They fit in packing boxes just fine. I don't think anyone is really thinking, "Man those true 4x6 joists above the basement - I just can't go on without them" [^1]. But people invest their emotions in the the idea of a house, apartment, or dwelling of any kind.
Food, and associated weight problems, are almost as obvious as sex. Anyone who's dieted has probably encountered the self-delusion that is "cheat days" or "cheat meals." The sad fact is to really keep off the weight you have to fundamentally alter what and how you eat. Any even minor slip ups can really hold you back. Exercise is just as tainted by self-delusion and people fail to understand the adaptation principle. "I run three miles three times a week, and I've been doing it for three years!" Yep, and your body has become highly adapted to that overly specific and routine aerobic exercise. You're running those three miles incredibly efficiently compared to three years ago and, precisely because of that efficiency, burning nowhere near the calories you think you are.
I think that self-delusion and other cognitive failings occur so frequently with these areas because they have such a core place in human physiology. They're not negotiable. You can't ever put food / eating on hold for more than a few days. You can live outside, sort of, for a while but it gets debilitating. You definitely can remove sex as a component of your life but this is scene as so bizarre that's either (a) a religiously informed decision or (b) a horrible involuntary condition that may or may not make you a serial killer.
[^1]: Okay, seeing untrimmed 2x4s or 4x6s or anything like that would be really fucking cool, but I'm still not hauling them with me when I move to LA from Kentucky and rebranding myself as "Harlan Hazard"
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Yeah, the number of fat people I have known over the years who insisted they have totally eaten less than 800 calories a day while exercising 2 hours every day and could not lose weight is boggling to me. It's a very consistent pattern of claims that are so improbable as to be physically impossible, and 100% of the time I want to say "If I followed you around with a camera, I am absolutely sure I would find out that you are eating way more than that (and probably not exercising nearly as much as you claim either)." The "exercise" claims also frequently amount to "I have a very active child I have to take care of all day, he keeps me sooooo busy!" Like, no, occasionally lunging to stop Junior from drinking dishwasher detergent or picking him up when he cries is not an exercise routine, even if it does leave you breathless because you still have 100+ pounds of "baby weight"....
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You're not wrong. In my experience most people, fat or thin, either lack perspective on what they eat or are sufficiently ignorant of nutrition/serving sizes such that they don't even know what they're eating and drinking (Fun fact: one of my favorite IPAs from back in the day is 250 calories per 12 ounce bottle, so we're talking 1500 calories for a six-pack.). Morbid obesity is just a different magnitude of scale.
With that, the "one true diet" in my experience is something that is sustainable enough to stick to but excludes whatever category of food that the given person is prone to overconsuming. So, keto or low carb diets work not so much due to ketosis or gluten sensitivity or whatever but because their restrictions exclude pretty much any pre-prepared junk/restaurant food (I guess you could get fat on pork rinds from gas stations, but I think that would take work after awhile.) that's calorie-dense and easy to acquire.
One of my favorite quotes on dieting came from a military history professor I had as an undergraduate: "If calorie restriction didn't work to induce weight loss, people wouldn't die of starvation in sieges."
The only thin women I've met who will admit to not eating a lot are the ones complaining about their eating disorders. The one I was thinking of when typing the last sentence breaks my heart.
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