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).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I've been having similar thoughts for a bit, happy to be able to latch onto your post to discuss them. I think you are broadly correct, but that the common wisdom advice is the common wisdom advice for a few reasons:
Focusing on diet is good advice if you're in a hurry, or if you're already working out. At my age and size and weight and activity level, the basic calculators say I maintain weight at about 2,800 calories a day. That's pretty much my normal diet. I can cut 800-1000 calories a day with effort, but without suffering. I can cut 2000 calories a day while feeling it a little, but not dying or curtailing other activities. To burn 800 extra calories a day, I'd have to run something like eight miles (I'm going to use a simple 100 calories/mile number for simplicity). That will take a good runner an hour, it would take me at least an hour twenty or an hour thirty, and I'd be tired after. To burn an extra 2000 calories, well it's right in the username, it would take me close on five hours. A totally impractical quantity of time to spend in an otherwise full life.
Moreover, adding more than about two moderate miles a day to a full workout schedule is nearly guaranteed to interfere with squats, or kettlebell snatches, or whatever else I'm trying to do. For a sedentary person, anything bigger than a two mile walk (probably the equivalent 100 calories) is going to require effort and recovery. You've frequently discussed injuries in the WW threads, that shows right off how difficult it would be for you to add activity to burn additional calories.
So, in my mind, it's easy to cut 500-800 calories a day, on average. That's a pound a week. While it's easy to burn 100-200 extra calories a day. That's a pound a month.
Burning an extra 100-200 calories is going to get you a pound a month, give or take. Keep it up for a year, you're dropping ten pounds a year.
That's a lot in the grand scheme of things! If I was ten pounds heavier every year for the past five, I'd be fucking fat by now. And that's the case for a lot of people! If they took a two miles walk every day, 45 minutes of time, they'd be a lot lighter today.
But that's also mind-numbingly, unnoticeably slow. If I tried to do something today, in hopes of being lighter five years from now, that's tough for me. It sure ain't gonna help you get ready for that beach weekend. Where cutting calories, whether daily or in an IF format as I prefer, can get you ten pounds in two months, no sweat.
So in my mind, if someone is sedentary and fat and wishes to lose weight, the right move is to start by getting active, and then to move to diet. If one is already active, focus on diet.
The inverse is also undeniably accurate, that it's always possible to out-eat any workout plan, it is always possible to create a diet bad enough that it can't be outrun. I outweigh you by 50 pounds, I'd imagine that might be a difference between us: it's not difficult for me to imagine a dietary choice so brutal that no activity would save me. There's an all you can eat Sushi place on the drive back from the downtown courthouse, I could swing in there and with a few beers or sodas eat a marathon's worth of calories. I could sit down and house a half bag of oreos watching the Phillies, and not even think about it. I can power through half a pie when my wife makes one. Any Dairy Queen will happily sell me a thousand calorie Blizzard. Some degree of not-terrible choices must be made to even begin to keep a decent weight.
I also think that the viral memetic quality of "You can't outrun a bad diet" is in part a puritan strain in American culture that can't quite be exorcised. You can't be enjoying yourself, having fun, and getting good results. You must be suffering. Suffering is the only way to succeed. So don't think you can enjoy that donut and then pop in a podcast and take a pleasant jog or go climbing and burn it off. You can't do that! You must suffer!
In my experience, the main draw to addressing diet is either A: Culling excessive calorie intake and running a big enough deficit is a way to lose weight quickly, and it's easier to stay motivated when I see fast results. or B: My diet has become so bereft of nutrition that my lack of energy is interfering with my daily life (My job is fairly physical.).
I've bounced between "average overweight American" and "really fast weight loss" (My personal record is 25lbs in six weeks, starting at a BMI of 28.) more times than I can count, invariably prompted by something setting off my anxiety such that I totally lose my appetite (I suppose that being in a permanently agitated state might burn more calories than being calm, but surely not that many.). It's horribly unhealthy to have the majority or entirety of my calories come from Mountain Dew Voltage (If they made a sugar-free version I'd switch, but that's not what the Circle K is selling at 79 cents for a 44 ounce.) and alcoholic beverages (Oh, and you'll drink less and get more bang for your buck because the perpetually empty stomach and weight loss will wreck your alcohol tolerance. This can be dangerous when trying to have a fun night out.), but from the perspective of the scale it's almost amusing effective.
I'm actually kind of annoyed tonight because I went through the effort of acquiring a dinner that I was looking forward to/ meal prepping for the next few days and then barely ate any of it before getting too full to continue. I don't know if the stomach really shrinks after a few months of food restriction, being excessively tense tightens something around the stomach, or what, but when I get like this I have to force myself to eat at all or I'll go days without eating (By day three I'll hit a wall, run out of energy, and get really cold.). Oh well, I ate enough that the fat soluble vitamins should take, can refrigerate the leftovers, and I can always freeze the stuff I prepped.
My favorite bit of American puritanism (while not raised a churchgoer, I grew up in a churchy enough place that the values rubbed off on me) is that I refuse to take OTC anything to medicate a hangover. Hangovers are to be endured as penance for excess. With that, there is the very real thing that if you have anything like an excessive drinking habit you probably shouldn't touch Tylenol because combining liver killers is a bad idea.
Could be dyspepsia? Buildup of gas in the stomach, sometimes due to the output pipes getting clogged.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link