Well yes, but that was because IIRC, doing that sort of thing to a cavy would have been cruel. Calorie restricting, generally not helpful. I disagree in some instances. It needs to be reasonable, though. Booze, also not helpful and in fact is the most calorie dense + nutrient void thing to can (relatively) safely put in your body. Even shit like fast food and Twinkies still have nutrients. Is there anyone who actually believes that booze is good for the body? I mean, other than topically. Diets in general are useless. Lifestyle changes are the hardest but also most effective. You are more likely to lose weight of you stop dieting and calorie restricting, even slightly increase activity, and select foods with the right balence of nutrient content. Which is where I go in and blur the line. Quick fad diets are mostly useless. Sometimes one of those 3-day things can make you feel better, including getting the scale to move if you have fecal-weight, but mostly they're placebo. CICO, Clean Eating, GF before the junkfood, eating like a diabetic, those are sustainable. CICO and clean eating are the sort of thing you could reasonably do for the rest of your life, and people are forced into the other two examples because of their health. I guess it is more of a lifestyle change, but with a period of being stricter than you would be later. I trimmed the part about calorie-restricting if you're severely overeating. There's also the part where it can help people that are undereating. (Not to mention that without CICO, I'm left with unhealthy fads or just not eating until it drives me crazy.) CICO is something that needs to keep being adjusted. However this is often not only hard but often also expensive. Many people do not have the time, money, or support they need to achieve these changes. Genetics, health conditions, medications and many other factors outside of people's control are also huge contributors to weight challenges. No one chooses to be fat. I agree that while most people don't decide "hey, I'm going to be fat" they do make choices that lead to it. I will concede that making the choices to prioritize health are sometimes too hard, and that's okay. I'm still listening to the "food desert" debate if it comes up, but mostly believing in it. I'm all for education in a way that will make a difference. I will concede genetics and other things, and sometimes you can't adjust enough because that's hard too. This entire go-around with you @Athol Magarac has been an attempt to demonstrate and convince you: Reddit dieting threads and their culture are not good places to get your information on what is or isn't healthy. You have to go in with a skeptical attitude. Places like Nerdfitness are better, or at least the NF I remember from a few years back, even though they were obsessed with the paleo. (Lots of lifters, so 80% paleo was probably close to right for a lot of them.) The wild west of Reddit is better than blogs unless you get the right variety. I got most of my clean-eating ideas from https://blackgirlsguidetoweightloss.com/ in 2010 or something. (Not doing the math, but I think I remember sitting in that one room while reading it.) Do not bring their ideas or phrasing into a mental health forum. Is this new? I think that might have been a good strategy to pull on me early. Did I just not notice? You should probably stop frequenting them at all because it is negatively affecting the way up think of your own body and how you approach trying to get healthy Damage done. Move forward and see if something new balances things out. Right now I'm still kinda anti-antidieters. I deserve to improve my body to its best state instead of trying to learn to be happy with its shabby condition just because people tell me that improving is impossible so why bother trying. Fat is not an indicator of overall health Correlation. You have unhealthy skinny people and healthy fat people. Just much of the overlap is that a lot of people who don't take care of their health happen to be fat. You are not entitled to know anything about a fat person's health history Not on an individual level. Certain health bloggers, it might come up. You need to stop making assumptions about fat people's health history or medical needs based on the fact that they are fat. On an individual level, I don't. On a general level I can say "that's bizarre" in response to someone saying they gained an extreme amounts of weight in response to a condition that shouldn't do that. Fat people do not choose to be fat See above. I am getting tempted to flip out about it though. Some people have decided to love themselves in the body they are in. They are not "promoting obesity" The people who try to promote obesity are the ones promoting obesity. I'm not drawing a hard line, but some thought does need to be given to where it goes. "CICO is automatically disordered eating" is something that should be fought against. Most tools have a good use and a harmful use. There are no fat people who are deserving of shame or judgement, not even if you're just thinking it at them. Thoughts influence actions. Even if you think you are being the good guy by not getting up in their faces irl, you still go to online communities and spread the fatphobic and shaming rhetoric that you pick up from these pro-diet (and sometimes pro-ana) communities. A lot of time in pro-diet communities, I try to disrupt things if it goes too far, but I can't be too discordant. I don't think that sort of thing would fly in a strong HAES group, so the only disrupt level is on the way in. I think that the only proanna sites I'm in are either open about it or get really offended and insist they're antiana. (EDfood, their OMAD would make a good breakfast or the snack I eat before starting to cook dinner.) My good guy looks at a fat-person IRL and doesn't load the thought-train right away. I remember seeing a person-of-size in the airport but I can't give any accurate details beyond "they were sitting in the gate-area, and the chair I found was adequate even with arms. Inaccurate impression is about as old as I look, which is an ambiguous 24-38, their clothes were neither ratty nor fine." That needs to stop. This list was incredibly useful up until this point. Stop what I was doing right alongside what I was doing wrong? Stop everything that you disagree with no matter what opinions haven't been perfectly swayed? You need to eat. Well yes. Aim for 1200. have an extra 300 if I'm feeling peckish, some days I might be more in the 1700-2000 range and not feel bad about it... is this about someone misunderstanding my meal-strategy of before-dinner calories as trying to live off of 600? I meant to respond to that. It's not even proper IF, it's an anti-loopy thing because I don't feel hunger properly. I can either allow boredom-eating or have a mild freak out unless I do those set meals. You need to get sober. Yes, mom. Given all of the above, is there still something you are not clear on or disagree with?[/QUOTE] I think I mentioned most of it except for trimming my defense of calorie-restriction.
i have no idea what that means That's not enough. Try to at least hit 1500. You're damaging yourself by doing less than 1500. You can still do clean eating and such, but you're damaging yourself. Not feeling hunger properly is, a symptom of not getting enough food. I've always had trouble recognizing hunger and I know a lot of other autistic peeps do as well, but your stomach should still be rumbling. If it isn't, there's a Problem.
again: literally no one is saying this at the very least no one HERE i saying it so i dont know why you keep bringing it up
https://goo.gl/images/3xeJ6k Otherwise known as a guinea pig. Other than that one morning when my mom thought those noises were coming from the game on my phone, my stomach doesn't generally make noise. And that was after days of not really making much more than 1000. 1200 is really low-balling things when it's naturally going to be around 1600x7/7. Brushing up against HAES.
HAES....is literally just an organization advocating that people can be healthy at pretty much any weight.......because that is how that works.....................you're gonna have to be more specific beyond "brushing up" because as far as i can tell theres nothing wrong with HAES or their message
data from the Minnesota starvation experiment, personal data based on when my body starts flipping the heck out
I think someone linked something about the starvation experiment a few bits back. Like, 1200 can sometimes be good. 1200 is better than 800. But for most people it's less than the basal metabolic rate.
"I don't feel hungry so it's fine" is such a warning sign I I used to know a girl who called half a banana and a saltine a complete meal when her anorexia was at its worst. This was completely filling to her. She was getting an abysmally small amount of calories and her stomach never growled. Don't use "but I don't feel hungry/my stomach never growls" to show that you're perfectly fine and OK because that can be just as much a sign that there's some major problems.
yeah. i wasn't getting enough food and my stomach just...stopped growling. unless i was reminded i could go for days without eating.
The only time I ever didn't feel hunger was when my gallbladder absolutely shat itself because of a two inch long stone in it and gave me like three weeks of also possibly acute pancreatitis where all I could eat without giving myself massive pain was plain boiled chicken breast and NSAIs so. Yeah.
tangentially related but I've always heard that a good rule of thumb when dieting was eat enough frequently so your stomach doesn't get a chance to growl because it's got food in it. Three big meals (Breakfast/lunch/dinner) with smaller meals in between (snack/easy to eat foods like fruit or parfaits). The bolded part is my emphasis because that was the key point of "make sure your stomach doesn't growl" when i looked up or heard diet tips. Any growling on a newly started diet meant it wasn't going to work because your body at that point would go into starvation mode and pack on fat to stave off the perceived death. i don't have a source on that since, again, i heard it over the years, but reading "not hearing your stomach growl is a bad sign" made me do a slight double-take. Like in hindsight that makes total sense and hearing your tummy rumble vs not in that context is way better, but I was until just now operating on mindset of "don't starve yourself to get to that point, dummy, eat the food, get the energy" edit to add: obviously the starting point of this mindset is "want to lose weight" and not "in the process of trying to lose weight." If you're in the process of essentially starving yourself and your stomach isn't growling, don't look at this post in a positive light. Eating a balanced, full meal three times a day with snacking in between to stay energized is MUCH better than going on a starvation diet.
Okay! Good, I will try to address these points one by one and you can tell me if I lose you. So this right here is one of the reasons that so many people have been linking you scientific studies. It's false. Patently, flat out false. Most people do not even have an option. They don't get a choice. Between genes, medical conditions, regional food availability, medication side effects, and income limitations, most people do not have any choice. Those that successfully make lifestyle changes are also people who are a) economically secure and b) have IRL community support, including from family members and good medical providors. They can afford things like constant fresh, high quality food, and personal trainers. You need more than a skeptical attitude. You need to have a finely honed bullshit detector. You've kind of proven several times that you just sort of absorb stuff uncritically and parrot it. That's not a bad on you, but it does mean you lack the skills needed to be able to accurately sift through good advice and damaging rhetoric. This is why I suggested dropping them all together for now. I might be mistaken, but wasn't the whole reason this thread got started is because you were throwing around offensive terminology like "hamplanet" and dragging out fauxspirational "cured of being fat" stories and pissing people off because you didn't know it was offensive? This also supports my point above. You do not have the skills and experience necessary to figure out the good from bad right now. That's not a dig on you; a lacking skill takes time to learn. I think you can learn it, but I think you also need to just put anything you've gleaned from a reddit community into a mental basket labeled "to sort though later". 100% agree, you absolutely deserve to be healthy and happy in your own body. I think our disconnect comes in here: were aren't telling you it's impossible, but we are telling you that the way you're going about it is counter intuitive. From other things you've said in this thread, I really think weight is the least part of your concern. You're putting the cart before the horse, as it were, and fixating on your weight because you believe/feel its one thing you can easily control, but there are so many aspects of your current lifestyle, and the way you're going about trying to change your weight that with inevitably sabotage your efforts, and leave you less healthy in the long run. We aren't trying to convince you to stop getting healthy, we're trying to warn you that what you're doing isn't healthy at all. One thing you mentioned upthread that I didn't see anyone touch on is that you have a great deal of pain in your feet, even when sitting and not actively putting weight on them. To me, this points to something is wrong that doesn't have to do with the weight. While the weight might exacerbate the condition, I highly doubt it's the cause. Have you talked about this, or your diet plan with a doctor? Have you seen a specialist and not just a general practitioner? If a health blogger chooses to volunteer their personal health history, that's up to them. That is still not something you are entitled to know. Good! That's good, it means you're absorbing and learning! I have literally never seen someone promoting obesity. Every time I have seen someone say that so-and-so is promoting obesity, the actual message has always been "I'm fat and beautiful and loving and living my life". Catchy slogans like "Fat is beautiful" do not mean "so everyone should be fat, go out and get fat now!!" They mean "I like my body and the way I am." People are capable of enjoying their bodies and lifestyles while fat. Not in spite of the fat- being fat is not some shameful caveat. It means that they are happier both mentally and physically existing as they are without trying to change themselves. We all chase our own bliss. If you have a link to an example of someone legit promoting being obese (that isn't just weight gain fetish which is a whole different beast) I would love to see it. So again, you've demonstrated you don't currently have a sufficient baseline for what "too far" is. The reason I'm putting these two things together, and the reason we keep coming back around to them, is that they are linked. If you are calorie restricting to starvation levels (which scientifically, that's what 1200 daily calories is, we have established this and provided links to the studies) AND ALSO getting a huge chunk of that calorie intake from nutritionless alcohol, I highly doubt you are getting enough of anything your body needs to function. Absolutely all of your critical processes are in emergency mode. You need to stop calorie restricting, and you need to stop drinking. Otherwise you are no joke going to die. I don't know how to put that any more plainly. This is urgently imperative. Reemphasizing. It is not impossible, but you also won't achieve it with what you're doing.
the problem with CICO is, again, that calories mean just about nothing in terms of nutrition. a plain calorically mathed out diet can still leave you utterly and horrendously unhealthy due to not getting enough micronutrients, or having your protein/carbs/fat balance out of whack. The body needs all three of those to function, and the human metabolism is a whole lot more complicated than just 'set food on fire, see how long it burns' (which is, incidentally, literally what kcal/kJ as measurement units describe. Measurements may nowadays be more sophisticated than literally just that but uh. Yeah.) What is meant with 'lifestyle changes' is that you are supposed to look at your food groups and adjust that. Don't restrict calories, don't cut out foods entirely (unless medicall advisable, obvs), just look at how much veggies/proteins/carb-sources you are eating throughout the week and try to aim for five portions of plant based stuff (3 veggies/2 fruits is preferred) a day, a majority vegetarian-ish diet with meat like twice a week and fish like about once a week and ideally use unsaturated fatty acids to get your necessary fats if possible, but getting the fat you need to perform your metabolic functions properly is better than not getting it at all. At least for me, the aiming for 5 portions of plant matter a day thing keeps me topped up really well, but then my problem is more undereating. Calorie counting is a tool, yes, but it is very unsophisticated, and cannot by itself provide a healthy diet plan.
Look, 1200 cals *of a carefully balanced diet* isn't likely to kill anyone, seriously. That's only slightly below most people's TDEE, and if you have some body fat to spare, that's a serious-but-doable weight loss diet. 1200 calories *where a chunk of that is alcohol* on the other hand - THAT is a crisis, even worse than if you were living on just sugar cubes. A calorie-restricted diet needs fat and protein and vitamins and fibre and *some* carbs to be sustainable. 1200 calories *absolutely does not* have room for alcohol, without sacrificing stuff that you NEED, and damaging your health. Even more to the point, it absolutely doesn't get you into the habit of healthy, sustainable eating habits - and without those, any progress will be completely temporary, and guaranteed to rebound even harder. A workable weight-loss diet is a healthy, balanced maintenance diet, only smaller. Get to healthy-balanced eating first, then worry about calories after that.
Losing one pound a week is a healthy threshold. 1200 is not a healthy threshold. As LL mentioned, and as numerous studies have been cited, 1200 activates starvation protocols in the body. It makes keeping the weight off in the long term harder and should certainly not be done without supervision from a doctor. If it's a medical weight loss diet, supervised to be sure you're getting everything you need? Sure. Commercial diet? Nope! Commercial diets often don't give a single solid fuck if you lose weight. It's better for them if you lose it over the short term and then gain it back, because then you'll keep buying the diet materials because they've turned an element of healthcare into a money making scheme. Commercial diets want you to feel shitty about yourself, it is in the best interest of the business. ETA: Again, the most efficient and lasting way to lose weight is lifestyle changes. Gain muscle. Worrying about the number on the scale will fuck you over as muscle is denser than fat. You need muscle so you can exercise safely. I've lost ten inches all around in my measurements since I moved to new zealand. My weight has gone up. If I just worried about the number on the scale, I would think I've done something horribly wrong, but no. I've lost fat, I've gained muscle.
