site banner

Wellness Wednesday for August 2, 2023

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).

2
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Just Interested: how can you measure if you're on track if you aim for such a low goal? If you are 100kg, that would be 250-500g of weight loss per week, which even with a very precise balance may be affected by random variation in water retention and the like - if you weigh less, the situation is even more difficult.

Any idea here?

I'm about 100kg right now, with a goal of 95kg. 250g of weight loss in a week means a net expenditure of some 1900 calories over the week. That alone is quite noticeable to me just from an appetite/ caloric budgeting perspective. In order to end the whole week 1900 calories under maintenance I have to try pretty hard. I don't have room for cheat meals, regular drinking, heavy drinking, peanut butter, empty calorie snacks, etc. I had to make noticeable changes just to get 1900 under per week. I eat so many frozen veggies and chicken breast now! Some weeks I come in 3800 calories under (or theoretically 0.5% bw), but they're the exception. With a calorie tracking app you know exactly where you land. There is random weight variation throughout the day/week, but I habitually weight myself after my morning piss and make a note. The trend is down about 4kg's in 10 weeks. I've got 10-20 weeks left to go. It's the slow and boring route, but time keeps on slippin into the future, and all I have to do is stay the course. At the end, my fitness should be where I want it, and I'll just maintain.

So it's the calories you need to measure, not the weight!

Thanks!