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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Obviously that won't work as an intervention. Maybe, and believe me, this is a hypothetical, what if we stopped telling people that eating less didn't work? What if we stopped lying to them by saying that CICO doesn't work?
My wife swears up and down that she "didn't know", even though on one level, you know. You don't know, in your gut. You hear all these tales of how it's this thing or that thing, that you need this special diet or that special diet. That so and so has a magic thyroid that causes a 300 cal/day diet to result in gaining weight. That the sign on the gym which says you can lose 20lbs in 30 days is real. And this isn't just misinformation on the internet; literal doctors are involved in keeping people "ignorant". We have a good friend who is quite obese. She literally asked her doctor for help. She practically begged for an actual plan; something other than, "Well, ya know, maybe you could eat less." I know doctors are constantly afraid to tell their patients that, "Diet and exercise will help with [insert condition here]," because sooo many patients either a) get offended or b) aren't going to do it anyway. So you know what this doctor told her? "You're just getting older." Seriously.
It requires actual education, planning, support, and discipline. For education, if you asked people, "How many calories per day corresponds to a 1lb/week weight gain/loss," do you think you'd get consistent answers? What if it wasn't so pointed, and instead something along those lines was asked in a multiple choice along with a bunch of other options? Like, lithium and thyroids? Maybe perhaps not lying to people anymore might help even a little bit?
For planning, even just estimating calories is surprisingly hard to the raw senses. One tablespoon of Substance A will have the same calories as two cups of Substance B, and they may have vastly different satiety characteristics. You need to have an actual plan for how you're going to measure, compare, and execute. Lying to people and saying that the only possible plan is to do nothing probably isn't going to help.
And, of course, support/discipline matter, too. Why do you think alcohol therapy/rehab deliberately plan support to help with discipline? For a personal example, when I convinced my wife to try tracking our calories and weighing ourselves every morning (putting together an actual plan), she obsessively tried to over-read the noisy line tracking our weight. Sooooooo many times, she whined, "The line looks like it's going up the last few days! Maybe it's not working anymore!" Over and over again, I needed to basically say, "Shut up; keep doing it; in a week or two, you'll see the line is continuing to go down." It always did, but in a few more weeks, she'd complain again that maybe it's not working this time, as if she just forgot the last seven times where no, it definitely still kept working if she just shut up and kept doing it. If I wasn't there to provide support/discipline, she'd probably have gone back to believing people like you and just failed. She has succeeded, by the way, and is incredibly attractive, maintaining her desired weight well, now that she knows how it works and knows how to plan adjustments.
Obviously, not having a plan isn't going to work. Obviously, just casually saying, "Maybe you could eat fewer calories," isn't a real plan and isn't going to work, just like casually saying, "Maybe you could just smoke less/drink less alcohol," isn't a real plan and isn't going to work. But having a real plan that includes actual mechanisms for education, detailed planning, support, and discipline absolutely actually works. It would be frankly stupid to look at the data, say, "Whelp, alcoholics still exist. People still smoke tobacco. The success rates are the success rates. It must just be impossible to stop drinking alcohol or smoking tobacco!"
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