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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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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This is a tough one. Honestly, it's probably more about her than you. My ex was very insecure about this to the point where it was impossible to discuss. But my current partner and I can discuss this freely, even our exact weight in pounds, with zero hard feelings. She's kind of a unicorn that way.
Most men, even obese ones, can discuss their own weight in a frank and open manner. Most women can't. And there isn't some secret code by which you can discuss it productively with like 12 indirections and soft eye contact and compliment sandwiches. It just can't be done. And it's not you, it's her. Women don't help their fat friends lose weight either. They just lie and tell them they look hot.
Would love to be wrong on this, but honestly I'm not sure this is fixable.
So forget about discussing weight and dieting with a person who can't handle it. The best way is to couch things in terms of health. "I'm eating this boring salad to be healthy, not to lose weight." And if you lose weight yourself, she might get the point.
haha, that's the thing. She's already doing most things right. Eats salad for all lunches, walks a lot, works out regularly.
But she has a fatal love for chocolate and eats like shit when travelling. And she has been travelling A LOT.
I actually think it will be a lot easier for both of us to stay a decent weight once we move in together. But long distance has made that especially hard.
Well, step one would be to accept that chocolate has no place in your (her atm) home. That's much more important than eating salads. A 100g bar of cholocate is 500-600 calories. I switched to protein bars, thankfully I found a local brand that is both sweet and chewy in a way that triggers my "had dessert" flag.
That one is going to be hard. On our very first date, she made it amply clear that her "things ranking" went as follows:
I have finally made it to #3, toppling Banderas, but she would totally dump me before giving up sleep or chocolate.
But yeah, we've gone from a bar of chocolate to a couple of squares of dark chocolate. So there's progress.
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Is it that while travelling she doesn't have easy access to low-prep, decent tasting easily eatable food?
As a financially constrained student, if I wake up in the morning and don't have stuff prepped the previous night, I am going to gorge myself on milk, cheap chocolate and cereal.
Well, she is currently living through her 'Europe' phase. I can hardly blame her for wanting to try out great food while travelling through Europe.
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Yeah, losing weight is hard. There are lots of approaches, most of which seem to fail. The ones that seem to work are, in order of difficultly from most to least.
a) Permanent lifestyle change (i.e. become a park ranger, move to Vietnam, take up marathoning).
b) Tracking calories consistently and just dealing with the constant hunger (weight watchers / Jenny Craig / app-based weight loss)
c) Low carb / keto
And it goes without saying that its easier to maintain weight than to lose it, so half the battle is just never letting yourself go.
God damn, I'm grateful I've never struggled too much with excess weight. From all the people I've seen complain about it, really seems difficult.
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You obviously know the situation better than I do, and I'm just a rando on the internet, but by the way you describe it, it sounds like she's doing it wrong and actually following the exact script that many people follow when they try and fail to lose weight.
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