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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Would I be correct in saying that your body's natural hunger cues aren't working and you have to exercise willpower to control your weight?
While this may be relatively easy for you, it is probably only because your set point is near your current weight. For people whose set point is much higher, the difficulty is extreme. Imagine being hungry all the time and having no energy. People's bodies will fight to maintain a high weight and energy levels will plummet to reduce expenditure of calories.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230306231743/https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/02/health/biggest-loser-weight-loss.html
Let's say you are a 160 pound man who can maintain his weight with a 2000 calorie diet. How would you feel at 1200 calories? That is the level that some people have to maintain to not gain weight. The difficulty level varies greatly.
I know that intermittent fasting is kind of a fad right now, but following the above program only skipping the lunch about every second day seems to work OK for maintaining a deficit without being obtrusively hungry -- after a week or so the "hungry" signal just seems to kind of recede into the background.
1200 calories every single day does seem extreme -- but is this really a common setpoint for a ~160 lb male?
No. That would be an extreme case.
I'm suggesting that the grandparent is able to use his willpower to maintain a low weight because his body wants 2050 calories and he only gives it 2000, and that this is something that can be achieved.
A formerly obese person might need to sustain a 1200 calorie diet to maintain the same figure, which (from experience) means being hungry nearly all the time.
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