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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2142 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for August 9, 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:

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Last time, I had "lost" 4 lbs. That was a weight measurement snafu: turns out, my home scale is consistently off by about two pounds, so it would be correct to say that at the time of the post, I had lost two pounds, not 4.

However, since beginning semaglutide, I have lost approximately 12 pounds. The number of calories I managed to avoid eating thanks to sugar reduction is more than 500 kcal/day. I'll not detail the experience in too much detail, but current conclusion is that the vast majority of my weight loss comes from being able to cut down on the soda.

I will note a few extra details: Loss of interest in bread. Not terribly strange, considering most bread is a vehicle for sugars. But everything from subway, to hot dog and bratwurst buns, to regular sliced bread. White bread now has the same palatability as low-sugar sarah lee's wheat bread. Naturally, I have swapped over to Sarah Lee's. Miracle Whip is nasty now, though regular, low-sugar mayo is still good.

If you are struggling with weight loss, especially snacking + sugar, Semaglutide is a miracle drug.

Congratulations!

I've been on a real cut for the first time in my life, and I'm below 200 again for the first time in like 10 months. New appreciation for how difficult it can be.

So does Semaglutide do anything for the weight loss mechanism except effectively suppress appetite? I mean I know it affects blood sugar etc, but in terms of losing weight, is the effect simply from causing the user to eat less calories? Put another way, if you stopped taking it, but were able to maintain the same diet as if you were taking it, would the effect be the same? Or is there additional effects of the drug that induce changes in how your body metabolizes the food?

As far as I am aware, it does affect digestion, though I do not know how. Nausea and constipation as well as unnatural stool are common side effects; I haven't had any of those issues personally, but I know a number of people who do.

Your gut craves sugar, and satisfying that causes you not to eat as much. Unfortunately, I'm not studied enough on the subject to say for sure how much more there is to how it acts.

I think the main reason I have been able to stay skinny is that I have a natural dislike of many carbs.

Even when I was a kid, if my mother put a bowl of sauce and a bowl of pasta on the table and we served ourselves, my bowl would be 80% sauce with a few spaghetti in it. I’ll eat most forms of carbs (except anything with semolina) in very small quantities, but it’s just to fill up, if I could get away with eating only steak instead of steak and fries, or only curry instead of curry and rice, or only the ramen toppings and broth instead of them with the noodles…you get the idea. I hate cakes or other dough-based heavy desserts, except for almond-flour cakes which I sometimes like.

The only savory carb-heavy dish I truly enjoy is french fries (and less commonly other crispy potato variants) but only deep fried in beef tallow or duck/goose fat because I dislike their taste in vegetable oil. Even so, I could take or leave them.

I’m not Keto, but it was funny reading about it a few years ago and realizing I’ve essentially practiced a Keto-lite diet since I was old enough to choose what I ate.

I grew up in the South, land of biscuits and gravy, chicken fried steak, and hushpuppies. To say nothing of deep fried (insert food), and of the ubiquitous "Meat & Three" diners which served (and still serve, if you can find them) a meat and three sides, most of which were either vegetables boiled in oily broth or fried in grease, or the perennial favorite of macaroni and cheese which apparently the cool kids call "Mac & Cheese." If, as I was growing up, my mother served us fish it was either in the form of fried catfish or something she called salmon croquettes which I somehow think was a 70s thing. I did not really understand in my heart that seafood of any sort could be served in any way other than deep, deep fried until my 20s, after I left to go very far away indeed. At this time I also learned it was bizarre to most other Americans to hear me use the terms "I might could," to mean "I might be able to," "I'm fixin' to," to mean "I am about to," and of course the first time, when driving, I was faced with a sudden burst of traffic headlights coming in the other direction at night and I asked, rhetorically, "Who opened the barn door?" my girlfriend at the time erupted into hysterics and asked me to please say more southern phrases. (I think she was a fetishist.) I of course had no answer to this.

Why do I say any of this? Because let us be frank: I grew up in the heart of Fatville. I was raised among the obese. "Bigun" where I am from is a term of endearment. I can recall not too many years ago on a trip home sitting among my aunts, who were all worried about the dangerous heft of my uncle. They spent many minutes fretting over this as we ate pecan pie and drank iced tea. Then this same uncle appeared at the door, and he had barely sat down on the sofa (with considerable effort) before these same aunts were insisting they be allowed to "fix him a plate," though he said he was fine. He eventually did receive a plate, of course, and a large one. Which I am sure he consumed. (Edit: not the actual plate. The food on it. Of course.)

All this as even further prelude to the point that my whole life I have been skinny. Even now, nearing the age when if I were to die, as Louis CK or someone made the joke: no one would mourn that I "died too young," but that "I had a full life." And yet thin I am. My sons are thin. My Japanese wife is thin, though that is no great rarity. I am 5'11" and weigh about 70kg. This is close to the most I have ever weighed.

Why? I do not know. I drink beer. I eat the carbs @2rafa scorns and has scorned all of her life. I heap the pasta onto my plate.

I had a dear friend who was overweight most of his life. He went through a weight-loss phase in his freshman year and I remember him telling me that he was suddenly getting a lot of attention from people (he was also rich, but I suppose rich and slovenly still weigh more on the side of slovenly, no pun intended). Once he became rich and relatively normal-weighted, his new girlfriend (who also appeared with the weight loss) began dressing him (madras shirts, argyle socks, woven leather belts, and even gold bracelets--this was the late 80s.) He told me once that he appreciated me being his friend, and that should anyone from the old days come up to him and want to be his friend now, he was going to tell them "Fuck you." I have no idea if he ever got to do that. He probably wouldn't have, anyway, but it was a funny thing to hear.

That friend is now dead, mostly from excesses of every kind (he gained most of his weight back, drank and drugged himself into an early grave, bless his soul). And I am still here. Some of us are just not meant to be fat. Probably I could put on the pounds if I set my mind to it--for a few years I started drinking protein shakes and going to the gym and tracking calories, and in the reddit days I was a member of /r/gainit. But here I still am.

This is not me bragging. Just, as always, another voice.

Why? I do not know.

People are born different. My MIL drinks tea with pastries between meals and isn't someone who's always up and about. She isn't overweight. Her main meals aren't large, though, but I doubt that alone can explain her total lack of extra weight. Her furnace just runs hotter or less efficiently.

I don't deny it. I cling to the idea that people are born different, I adhere to it, I embrace it, and it's not always HBD or some similar rallying cry. Vive la difference, and not just between the sexes (though very much that.) Thank you for your comment.

What year did you move to Japan? Pre-1993?

1998, August. Why?

Just curious if you saw it before the crash.

Ah. No, I was here well past bubble years, or the babburu jidai バブル時代　as it is remembered here, though one read much about those days even when I was first here. I can't imagine, from reading and hearing about it, how much the world must have seemed like a playground in those days. The wild excesses strain credulity. Nothing gold can stay, I suppose.

I have a friend who was working there at the time. If you were walking through the financial district (and were a reasonably well turned-out foreigner) strangers would literally grab you and pull you over so they could buy you dinner.

Fortunately a lot of the money got put into building programs. Museums, bridges and so on. Not all of which were necessary, or great value for money, but at least there was a legacy that outlasted the bubble.

I have been to places even now where it is very likely that I am the first real-life white dude anyone has ever seen. The foreign population here is still only about 2 something %, and caucasians are not the majority (that would be Chinese.) No one's ever randomly bought me dinner, though. Ou sont les neiges d'antan?

I think the main reason I have been able to stay skinny is that I have a natural dislike of many carbs.

Thanks for acknowledging that. This week's early semaglutide discussion was a little infuriating because of all the scolds who chalk up their own low BMI to some combination of self-control and moral superiority. And while, yes, there are some percentage of very fit people out there (at most 1 or 2% of the population) most skinny people are not particularly fit individuals. They just don't have the same interest in food as fat people. The skinny people I know can just leave french fries on the plate in front of them and not even show any interest. It's not self-control, it's effortless. Semaglutide appears to unlock this ability for everyone. It appears also to trigger certain people who feel that the drug users are getting an "unfair" advantage.

That sounds like you managed to avoid the worst of the Americana diet at least. I grew up on ultra-sugary oatmeals and cereals, and almost never had homecooked meals.

General mills' extra-sugary cereals were breakfast and often lunch at home.

Why do Americans put sugar in their bread, anyway? Even this Sarah Lee's wheat bread contains added sugar.

Because Americans go to the grocery store once a week. They need it to stay soft and tasty for 1 full week. Thus the sugar and the whole lot of other stuff in it.

suburbia wins.

As a preservative, and possibly for cultural reasons. The regular white bread Americans like is kind of just a variant on brioche, it’s a descendant of Anglo-Dutch bread rather than the crustier French or Italian equivalents. In big cities, upper middle class people differentiate themselves by being bread snobs and lamenting sugary bread, this has led to New York restaurants importing French Poilâne bread at $25 a loaf, but it’s mostly a cultural thing.

In America, breakfast is mostly sweet or, if it’s savory, doesn’t usually include a strong bread component (replaced by biscuits/scones, hash browns, grits etc). In Europe, breakfast is often a savory meal served with bread (eg in Germany, bread with cold sausages/meats). Maybe this affected bread preferences.

Aren't French and Italian breakfasts essentially dessert as well? In France the standard is to serve a 2 ounce coffee which comes with not one, but two, gigantic sugar packets enough to supersaturate the coffee. Paired, of course, with a pastry.

The distinguishing characteristic of the American and English breakfasts would seem to be their gigantic size, not their sugar level.

Italian breakfasts are definitely sweet. Cappuccino, cornetto, bread with jam or Nutella. It might look insubstantial, but you can easily pack 400-500 calories into a quick breakfast. They still eat proper bread with their sweet spreads, which makes sense: why add even more sugar?

In big cities, upper middle class people differentiate themselves by being bread snobs and lamenting sugary bread, this has led to New York restaurants importing French Poilâne bread at $25 a loaf, but it’s mostly a cultural thing.

I thought they all switched to handmade bread during the pandemic.

There's no way a few grams of sugar per slice has any preservative effect. Probably the opposite.

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