Xisor wrote:Sounds like a bit of a miserable hospital experience, to put it mildly. On the upside: result on finding out about the liver.
And for diets, I'd heard over a few years the attestation that 'dieting, on average and over a long period of time, leads to weight gain for most people'.
The reasoning around this is multifold, and somewhat speculative, but is something like this:
- it's not being incorporated into your intended 'final state' - e.g. living on 1800kcal a day, for the rest of your life.
- people are atrocious at self-control, they'll dive in with big expectations and modest self-determination then, eventually/inevitably, fall off the wagon and rebound.
You get the idea.
Nah. It's mostly connected to the role of fat tissue which is protecting from dying from starvation and to effects of caloric restriction on health. And to make it worse, being fat doesn't enable safe living off fat tissue or being fully functional during it.
Most important thing to understand is that human organism doesn't differentiate between losing weight from dieting and famine. And that's where the whole concept of dieting fails.
Hence both poverty and dieting usually feature malnutrition/binge-eating cycle. There's no "atrociousness at self-control" in context of the yo-yo effect - it exists in context of portion control, emotional eating, etc. which I will talk a bit later but it's not really relevant to what I'm talking about. I'm talking about about symptoms of malnutrition. The most damaging thing that dieting culture has done is presenting caloric restriction as somehow not being a form of malnutrition.
Caloric restriction produces following symptoms, basing on experiments with it:As the men lost weight, their physical endurance dropped by half, their strength about 10%, and their reflexes became sluggish… The men’s resting metabolic rates declined by 40%, their heart volume shrank about 20%, their pulses slowed and their body temperatures dropped. They complained of feeling cold, tired and hungry; having trouble concentrating; of impaired judgment and comprehension; dizzy spells; visual disturbances; ringing in their ears; tingling and numbing of their extremities; stomach aches, body aches and headaches; trouble sleeping; hair thinning; and their skin growing dry and thin. Their sexual function and testes size were reduced and they lost all interest in sex. They had every physical indication of accelerated aging.
Depending on individual the symptoms can appear much faster. For example I get trouble concentrating, impaired judgement and comprehension, sluggish reflexes on any caloric deficit when awake. Leaving modest deficit for night like 300-400kcal resulted in worse sleep, with crazy deficits like 1000kcal per day, it would also include waking up in the middle of the night from hunger.
But dieting culture makes people somehow treat it as business as usual. Like people somehow find it completely natural that they feel ill, lose basic functionality, etc. in the name of diet.
…they became obsessed with food, thinking, talking and reading about it constantly; developed weird eating rituals; began hoarding things; consumed vast amounts of coffee and tea; and chewed gum incessantly (as many as 40 packages a day). Binge eating episodes also became a problem as some of the men were unable to continue to restrict their eating in their hunger.
Stuff like this pretty much guarantees disrupted relationship with eating even after the physical damage done by dieting is healed.
Xisor wrote:- Count calories. Not in infinite detail, but in a sense of 'this meal is roughly five hundred, that snack is another two hundred, and those plums that were in the icebox, were another two hundred', but so you've an actual idea of how much food your eating, day to day. This knowledge alone might give the fortitude to say no to unnecessary snacks, without overwhelmingly altering your diet.
I have a spreadsheet for counting macro-nutrients and calories. Like, not for purposes of caloric restriction any more as I'm done with dieting but to not go overboard, especially with protein and carbs. These are the hardest due to overwhelming misery of living here. It's just constant stress and despair. Lately trying to find something more manageable. I wish there would be more stuff that comes in portions of, like 40-50g and doesn't have glucose-fructose syrup.
It sucks that all the optimal diet stores went bankrupt because I wish I could just buy confectionery that isn't made overwhelmingly from sugar/glucose-fructose syrup/flour.
Though it still had problems with portions. Annoying thing that I noticed is that lots of stuff that actually tastes very good, makes it much harder to control portions due to spices and various taste combinations preventing normal sense of satiety.
Some of that stuff:
Vegetable salad, stuff with vanilla aroma like ice cream and cheesecake, apple pie.
Like there's stuff that
can must be eaten in near-infinite amounts until it runs out.
Xisor wrote:From what I've heard from MDs on podcasts/blogs, it sounds like the sensible advice is along these lines:
- get some more exercise. Incorporate it into your life, don't expect one day to cut back on exercise: treat it as a new part of your life, here to stay. (Which also means: don't go wild in committing to four hours in the gym, evert hour. For one, it's too ambitious to sustain. For two, time doesn't work that way. That'd be four hours of exercise every hour. The mind boggles, but I bet the body would rebel.)
- slow, steady changes.
- Count calories. Not in infinite detail, but in a sense of 'this meal is roughly five hundred, that snack is another two hundred, and those plums that were in the icebox, were another two hundred', but so you've an actual idea of how much food your eating, day to day. This knowledge alone might give the fortitude to say no to unnecessary snacks, without overwhelmingly altering your diet.
My pretty much worst dieting experience was with a slow sustainable diet. That is I initially got diet from a doctor which was utterly insane - with, like 1400kcal deficit. Kept it for, like a week because I quickly started feeling cold and hungry all the time, was waking up at night from hunger, sometimes couldn't sleep, my libido just tanked.
Then after about a month, I tried with lower deficit, 400kcal, almost all of it kept for night. It worsened quality of my sleep but managed to do it for half-a-year and lost 10kg and then just crashed and ended up being hungry and feeling cold almost all the time, even when eating at caloric balance. It only stopped after I regained the weight I lost.
Basically all that advice is worthless for most of people when it comes to dropping weight. Yeah, some people have weird biology that makes it possible for them to live off fat tissue without experiencing symptoms of malnutrition just as there's a minority of people that can function normally on 4 hours of sleep per day. But for 80% of people it's not possible and results in months of suffering symptoms of malnutrition and then crashing and rebounding.
Of course, the few people that maintain can maintain weight loss experience health benefits, while for the rest that regains weight both process of losing weight and inevitable regaining of weight is harmful.
I knew one of these mutants and he was bewildered that I stop being fully functional on any caloric deficit - get dizziness, lowered cognitive abilities, lowered dexterity, etc. because according to him it happens only when having very low fat percentage. When I asked about it the owner of the blog analysing scientific papers on fatness, she told me these are typical symptoms of being on caloric deficit.
That's why it's necessary to hate the mutant, hate the alien. The mere existence of their alien biology is an existential threat as they seek to remake the society in their own image.
I already learned to hate the alien, the mutant, the heretic when dealing with the abominations that need just 4 hours of sleep as they try to remake the world so that no one would get enough sleep and enough time off work.
"There can be no bystanders in the battle for survival. Anyone who will not fight by your side is an enemy you must crush" -Scriptorus Munificantus
. Existence of lots of other fun things that don't involve bloodshed just proves my point XD .
It sounds wholesome, in a cautiously moderate but still good sort of way.