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Wellness Wednesday for August 30, 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).

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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:

  1. Sleep
  2. Chocolate
  3. the idea of Antonio Banderas in the 1998 mask of Zorro.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.