To make certain I understood what you are saying I read this several times and I think I got it and will summarize.
You do not give a shit about losing weight, you only care about the time and effort it takes to lose weight which you could careless about..I highlighted that part red.
You lost 40 pounds quickly, which met you time and effort goal and because you did it quickly and it fit your definition of worthwhile you took your own bait. highighted in blue.
But now you are frustrated because your time and effort is failing but you realize progress has been made and would not like to give up that which was attained quickly and effectively meeting our time and effort goal highlighted in dark orange
I pointed out the illogical and irrational sections is red, blue and dark orange.
You strike me as a perfectionist who cannot do anything right. Is it really mandatory for you to create so much tension where no tension need be present? My hunch is the tension you create in this circumstance is present in all aspects of your life. Perhaps tension, I could use another word here but have chosen not to, is all you know and without a particular level of tension you remain uneasy and on guard. Things will most likely not change unless you decide to let go of some of that ever present tension.
It can’t really be as hard as you’re making it out to be. I don’t know, I’m not magical. Sometimes I peruse /r/keto on reddit and there are people who make similarly dramatic transformations, although granted not in quite the same time frame.
But I’m not saying I have to match what I did then. I just need some pace that I find to be rewarding enough to be worth it. If I could maintain half the pace I did before, I’d be happy.
Yeah, I don’t really know either. Lots of small reasons that aren’t really that important. Yeah, health scare was the motivator that got me started, but the motivation fades as I seem to get a bit better (or some things don’t get better and then it seems like the weight loss is irrelevant anyway). I want to be physically more capable of doing activities without wearing out. I don’t know. The fact that I don’t really have strong reasons is part of what makes it so difficult. Rationally knowing it’d be better if you did a certain thing that was difficult, but you didn’t really care that much, didn’t really feel it in your heart is a situation that a lot of people experience sometime in life, and mostly they just say fuck it.
There’s a certain ratio of effort to return I’m looking for. I mean, if I had to make myself absolutely miserable 24/7 to lose 1 pound a month, it wouldn’t be worth it so I wouldn’t do it. On the other hand, if I could lose 20 pounds a month doing 5 minutes of exercise a day, I’d do that easily. So you can see there’s a point where the amount of time and effort reaches equilibrium with the payoff. I’m not at that point - I feel as though I’m putting too much into it for what I’m getting out of it. That seems pretty rational to me.
On the other hand, giving up entirely would result in losing the gains I’d made. So I want to come up with something that lets me maintain or continue, but I need to change those incentives up. Either I need to be able to work harder and see more dramatic results, or work less and see similar or slightly lesser results. Or I need to come up with some sort of motivator that will make me feel like I really want to be doing this.
I really don’t, I don’t feel that this post demonstrates that. I think I have a very logical assessment for my current status, I just have abnormal values so it seems atypical. That doesn’t mean it’s irrational.
As I’ve covered extensively, the sustainability of the initial loss is completely irrelevant to me. If I could take a magical pill that would instantly get rid of 100 pounds of fat once, and would never work again, I’d do that in a second even though it was unsustainable. Because it’s once I get down to that level that I have to worry about sustainability. The actual loss can come in whatever way works best.
By this definition, if I can’t really come up with a good personal motivation to lose weight, it’s more irrational in your view to even bother to try in the first place, right?
I disagree that the maintenance phase is the harder job. It’s significantly more flexible. It’s just the longer job.
I think what you’re not getting here is the relative importance and values I’m placing. If losing weight were the most important thing in the world to me, and I’d work endlessly to do it because it was deeply satisfying to me, I might be willing to work really hard for a really slow loss. If weight loss didn’t matter at all in the slightest, I wouldn’t bother even if it was pretty easy.
So it’s somewhere in the middle. I care a little bit, but it’s a relatively difficult task. It’s hard for “care a little bit” to translate into sufficient motivation. That’s where the effort/reward ratio comes in. On a scale from 1-10 for effort and loss rate, it might be worth it to me to put in a 2 out of 10 in effort for a 3 out of 10 loss rate, or a 9 out of 10 effort for a 10 out of 10 loss rate, but maybe not a 5 effort for a 3 loss rate. That’s kind of like what I’m feeling now. I think that if I could jump up to 8 and boost the rate up to an 8, I’d do that. Or if I could put the effort down to a 2 and keep the loss at a 2, I’d probably do that.
There are conflicting factors that make it trickier, though. The fact that exercise puts me in a mindset that makes me fairly intensely miserable is a pretty harsh de-motivator. I’d also like to find companionship and I realize that losing weight is a significant step towards that goal, but I despise that it’s a necessary component and I feel shitty about it.
This has actually been really damn hard for me, it’s kind of remarkable that I’ve been managing to keep it going.
They’re unsustainable with my current plan. They might not be unsustainable with a modified plan. I’m probably going to go with the low effort/low loss experiment first, but I want to hit my goal first so I’m free from obligations. If I could find something to work up the motivaton, I’d try the hard work/fast loss route.
Incidentally, I’m well aware that I’m a confusing mess on this issue. It affects me most of all, so trust me, I know. It’s part of what makes it such a struggle beyond even the normal difficulties of losing weight. I don’t think I’m being illogical - I think I’m entering an unusual set of inputs in terms of motivations and de-motivations but coming up with the right assessment. Weird in, weird out.
I’m finding the irrationality of your posts quite enlightening. I suspect that many people have similar struggles as they attempt to lose weight. It makes it easier for me to understand why my brother cannot lose the 100+ extra pounds he’s carrying even though he has diabetes and a family history of heart disease.
Unless you guys can actually point out where I’m making some sort of logical error, I’m calling bullshit. I have conflicting motivations, and unusual values, but where exactly, in an A+B=C sort of way, am I not making sense?
It’s “logical”, but from any reasonable arm’s length perspective your value metrics are kind of skewed. Your obsessive preoccupation with blasting off weight like you did when you were a teenager is “logical” based on your self described value system, but it’s also kind of stupid from a practicality perspective as an adult. This is why people are calling it irrational.
Having said this your effort-reward decision making matrix is not unique. Many attempts at weight loss fail because they are making exactly the same kind of internal calculations about the effort required to lose weight and if it’s worth it to continue. Many, if not most, dieters decide “it’s just not worth it” even if they don’t verbalize this. In the end the decision is made through behavior that eating and not exercising is more important than being fit.
let us know when your logical and rational thought process has led you to your goal of…well I am not sure what your goal is but let us know when/if you get there!!!
Oh aren’t you clever? You’re saying that the only rational action I can take was to not bother to try to lose weight in the first place. Yes, solid advice there, you showed me, you’re a towering intellect.
no, what I am saying is, if your goal is to lose weight then stop with white noise bullshit and get on with it. If that is not really goal and the white noise is more important then stop pretending losing weight is a priority.
I am “getting on with it”, I’ve lost 70 pounds. Yes, that’s all pretend. Your contribution to this thread is worthless. If you’re not interested in a discussion, then what the hell are you doing on a message board going into threads that discuss things that you apparently don’t want to hear about?
it was interesting but then you basically were stringing others along with the “weird in, weird out, show me where I am irrational and illogical, mentioning you are indifferent and do not care about the process” and your point with all that especially being indifferent to the process was what exactly? so like you, I am now indifferent to your process.
It’s the internet; everyone is a French model. 2) It is really that rare.
So the “reward” that matters to you is the pace of loss?
Summarizing: you have no particular goal you wnat to accomplish with the weight loss, that which you have lost or that which you want to still lose. You are just doing it, now because you said to yoursef that you would. But only if it happens easily or quickly enough.
You have no reason to do that which you are doing. That is not an abnormal input; it is the lack of an input. Of course if the only reason you can come up for doing something is that you set it as an arbitrary goal for no reason then it is hard to do any rational or logical analysis beyond that. Logically if there is no reason to do something, no reason to have a goal, then making any effort at all is illogical and irrational.
And setting that actual loss goal at an unachievable level means that you never have to deal with the sustainability issue. You can just fail and quit.
Right. It may or may not be a good decision for someone’s long term health and function but if the decision is not being made on a rational basis, at least not by that person.
Wrong. Documentably wrong. The simple fact is that a large number of the obese can lose weight. Hardly any can maintain their weight loss. Most do not maintain the health benefits either because they do not have their eye on that prize, because they have not thought it through in a rational manner.
No. The fact that you have no value placed.
When you have no reason to have a particular goal it is hard to engage in a discussion of why that goal is or is not a good one.
Once again, if your goal is long term health then losing more weight with more effort is not a good choice. Transitioning into a sustainable helathy nutrition and exercise plan that further increases your fitness is … and trying again to get your depression treated better is.
If you have no reason to lose more weight then meeting an arbitrary “obligation” you set upon yourself for no particular reason then it also makes no rational sense to put in hardly any effort at all.
Well, yes, what else could there be? Again, you must understand intuitively that if I had to work out 12 hours a day for a 5 pound per year loss, there’s no way it would be worth it. If I could lose 100 pounds in a month with 5 minutes of exercise a day, it’s a no brainer. So at some point the reward matches or exceeds the effort, and it becomes worthwhile.
If I could maintain my current state of loss with almost zero effort, it would be worth it.
As I said, if I commit to something, I do it. I have a history of doing that, it’s part of my identity. If I slip in that regard, then I lose that, and what’s to keep me from doing that next time? So working to keep your commitments, even if you’ve decided you no longer feel about it like you did when you made that commitment, has value. So yes, at my current state, my primary motivator here is to get done and free from that commitment I made. That’s also why I can’t simply say “well I hereby commit to losing 150 pounds and being in great shape”, because if I push myself beyond what I know I can stick with I’m pretty much doomed to break the value of my commitments.
A commitment I made when things were looking like they were going to go much better. When I committed to my original goal of 40 pounds, going from my past experience I knew I could do it. I didn’t expect to do it as insanely quickly as before, but I expected a pretty reasonable ratio of effort to reward. That was actually satisfied - not as fast as I’d liked, but I did lose my first 40 pounds in, what, 3 or 4 months? I figured maybe I could tweak it a bit, up the effort, get it going a little faster, but it was decent enough. So I committed to another 40, thinking it’d be around the same pace. It wasn’t, and the next 30 pounds took more than twice as long as the first 40.
So I made that commitment based on expectations of effort/reward ratios that didn’t end up manifesting. So now I’m disappointed and annoyed, but still stuck by my commitment. But not for much longer. Almost done.
So what happens then? I either give up as not being worthwhile, or I try to rework what I’m doing until it hits an acceptable reward/effort ratio. Is that even possible in my current physiological condition/age/etc? Not sure. But I’ve got to try something different, because what I’m doing now isn’t working for me.
Irrelevant. I could fail and quit at any time, whether I was doing a sustainable plan or not. If I was doing something closer to what you recommend, I’d want to fail out and quit much sooner.
It really depends on how you define hard. By your definition, because I lost all that weight and then regained most of it over the years, the losing the weight was easy and the rest was hard. But it wasn’t. I put in a crazy amount of effort to lose it. To maintain it would’ve needed significantly less effort. I wouldn’t have to run a calorie deficit nor would I have to maintain a crazy workout schedule. Keeping it off wouldn’t be easier, I just didn’t care. It really wasn’t that big a deal to be healthy. I was pretty miserable. Disillusioned.
Now if you mean harder because it’s longer and more open ended and you can’t just focus on one goal and work towards it but rather have to shift your lifestyle, eh. It’s a semantics battle at that point.
Your conclusion is probably faulty anyway. You say that lots of fat people lose weight, but few keep it off. So losing weight is the easy part. But you’re failing to account for the huge number of people who try to lose weight and who fail at that stage. Those people can never even advance to the second stage, so they don’t count as second stage casualties. It gives a false perception of how many fail at each stage, how difficult each stage is. You can’t necessarily infer the conclusion just from the subset of people who failed at stage 2, because it’s not clear that the same skillset/motivations/etc is equally applicable to both. If there were people who were capable of living a maintenance-level existence, but found the extra effort of the loss too difficult in the first place, they would never manifest to add perspective on the relative difficulty of the two.
I have no idea how you’re still stuck on this idea. Do you honestly think that I somehow can summon up the will to be miserable and slowly lose 100+ pounds, and then maintain that loss, but that if I had a magic pill that made me lose those same pounds instantly I suddenly wouldn’t be able to maintain that loss?
There is absolutely no reason that the loss and maintenance have to be the same thing. They can be for some people, but that will not be the case for me. There is no way, as you can clearly see, that I’m going to stick with a miserable, shitty, slow weight loss. We would not reach this maintenance phase because I would quit within the first week of the loss.
Maintenance and loss are entirely seperable, as is demonstrated by the magical pill hypothetical. I understand that for most people who can’t or won’t or don’t know how to lose weight more effectively, or who cannot for whatever reason make a transition at the end of the loss phase, then recommending they be the same has some value. But I have no idea how I can convince you, despite this being like my 80th post on this subject, that this is simply unneeded for me and generally counterproductive.
I’m probably not going to do low carb for the rest of my life, although I’d be willing to consider it. But I’m not going to lose significant amounts of weight any other way. Tried that, wouldn’t even consider it again. So already, right there, it means my loss and maintenance phases will probably not be the same thing. If I follow your advice, then the end result is that maintenance is irrelevant because I will have never lost the weight.
Loss and maintenance are two entirely separable problems for which I will have to find two different solutions. Might I fail to find those solutions? Possibly. But what you recommend will definitely be a failure.
You are impossible to talk to (and I commend DSeid for continuing to try) because your comments in this thread are laced through with totally illogical and frankly bizarre opinions and statements, and whenever anyone points this out you become insanely defensive and claim that your whole “I have no reason to lose weight but since at one point in the past I said I would, I will continue to do so no matter what because I keep promises to myself, although of course if my weight loss were slow I would not do that, because I have no reason to lose weight” thing is totally rational and sensible.
I will just suggest again that you try to find some help for your depression, because I genuinely believe nobody should have to suffer through that, and I will, as I suggested earlier, unsubscribe from this thread, because I am finding it entirely too frustrating. I really do wish you the best.
I’m actually quite able to detach myself from my current situation and view it in a rational manner. I realize it’s frustrating, since my motivations, both for and against, are unusual. But I don’t think anyone has seriously attempted to demonstrate how exactly I’m being irrational or illogical. “Your motivations, values, and goals do not line up with mine” is not the same as being illogical or irrational. But here, perhaps this will help, I’ll break it up into a series of statements and you can tell me specifically where I’m being illogical.
Losing weight is generally beneficial, there are health, function, and other benefits.
I don’t value most of those as strongly as other people do, but still, there is basically no benefit to being fat over healthier. So I have weak motivations towards losing weight. But it does affect the rewards side of the equation.
Since I know how to lose weight and I’ve been successful in the past, I’m using a similar but less extreme method to work within my current limitations (age, fitness, injury)
I set a specific goal of weight loss and commit to it. Without doing this, every time I felt like wavering, every day I felt like splurging or not exercising I could simply throw it off and disrupt the process, every time leading to the possibility of quitting. By making a commitment, I know I have to get it done, so I can plow through the daily wavering.
There is an effort to reward ratio below which it isn’t worth losing weight, above which it is
My original goal fell within the latter case, the ratio was good enough to be satisfactory, so I committed to a doubling of the original goal
Since then, the second half of that goal has been going much slower, reducing the reward part of the risk to reward ratio, dragging it into the former case - not worth it.
7b) I have an unusual counter-motivation in that exercise makes me feel worse (perhaps not more depressed), and that I’m embittered and resentful by different treatment I receive. I list this as 7b rather than a separate point because this is effectively rolled up into the effort side of the equation.
I’m still committed by the goal I expanded on. If I fail on this commitment, there are consequences outside of this current attempt at weight loss (my commitments become worthless, spilling over into my ability to accomplish other things., so it’s worthwhile to push through even though I’m unsatisfied with the current state of things. But it’s as miserable as being stuck doing anything you don’t want to do is.
As per (1), weight loss is still desirable, but at the current ratio of effort to reward does not seem worth a greater commitment. Hence I’m trying to find something else - a different method, more or less intensity, or some other motivation to keep going. But nothing seems like a slam dunk.
This sort of exists outside of the current sequence, but the method of actual loss is entirely separable from the method of maintenance of that loss. I’ve tried a variety of ways to lose weight and one is vastly, vastly superior to all others, and the only one I’m really willing to consider because all others would run afoul of (5) very quickly. Maintenance is irrelevant to my current struggles with the actual loss, I can cross that bridge when I come to it. Trying to force maintenance into this discussion, and altering my method to be closer to my eventual maintenance method would actually decrease the amount of weight loss, worsening even further the effort to reward ratio. So it is not only separate, but counterproductive to try to force that into this stage.
The only thing that I might consider illogical in all of that is 7b. The first part of it is a physiological reaction and somewhat unavoidable. The latter part is indeed a mental hangup that perhaps I should get over. But the rest seems pretty logical to me. It would help if you attempted to actually tell me where I’m going wrong rather than just saying “you’re impossible to talk to!”. I haven’t simply declared whatever you say to be wrong, but rather list logical problems with your assertions, as one does when trying to convey understanding to someone else. 2 is unusual, but not irrational. People simply value things differently.
Incidentally, I’m not sure if people are trying to say that the motivations and hindrances - part 2 and 7b are the irrational things, or if it’s the way I apply them in the equation to determine the effort/reward ratio, or even the ratio itself, are the irrational thoughts. It would probably help me if I understood what you were trying to say, but again, just saying “you’re so hard to talk to!” is not enlightening me to the specifics.
Breaking it up into some sort of specific criticism would be a lot easier to understand and address. IE “you don’t really care about your health, that’s irrational” or “you feel worse when people treat you better as you lose weight, that’s irrational”.
Well, for one thing, your hypothesis that you are somehow unique and special due to the special knowledge that you have, and that this knowledge makes you different from everyone who has ever participated in an actual controlled research study on this topic, is fairly irrational.
The fact that you claim that your current method of weight loss is the only one that works for you, when you constantly complain that it is unpleasant, makes you unhappy, and is not going well, seems irrational.
As for your being hard to talk to, your habit of responding to nearly all advice and support given in this thread by telling people that they are simply wrong, that their ideas are bad, and that you know more than they do, often in a really argumentative and defensive way, is unpleasant. DSeid is in here giving you actual facts about actual research being done in this field, and you are countering it with, “Well, that’s incorrect and I am 100% sure of that because of a thought experiment I did in my own head.”
It is also very frustrating when someone continually says that they are 100% sure of what an outcome would be from a particular strategy, that it would not work for them and in fact could not possibly work for them and that people suggesting that it would work for them are deluded and wrong, wrong wrong, when they haven’t actually tried that strategy, and are basing their “you are wrong, wrong, wrong” information on, again, a thought experiment they did in their own head. Especially when that person is depressed. I happen to know from personal experience – which you routinely discount and discredit in this thread – that depression often leads to convincing myself that some piece of advice is doomed to failure and could not possibly work for me.
I’m really not interested in getting into some kind of nitpicky fight about your weight-loss plan, as we are now on page 5 and counting of you being completely entrenched in your mindset and unwilling to consider any opinions or evidence to the contrary, but you asked for specifics, so there you go.
Ironic, since Dseid was talking about how I did was indeed extremely rare and quite unique, and I was saying that it really wasn’t that unique.
What special knowledge have I claimed? How I react to different sorts of diets? Yes, I would say that I’m a pretty good authority on that subject. As far as being different from everyone else who participated in an actual study - I don’t know where I claimed this or what you’re referring to.
But how? I’ve tried the typical calorie controlled, macronutrient balanced diet that everyone recommends and it sucks. The effort/reward ratio on it would be way worse. I would not even consider doing something like that again.
I don’t actually think I’ve complained that the diet itself is unpleasant. It’s restrictive, it takes effort, it requires deprivation, but I mean, so does anything. It’s easily the least unpleasant sort of diet because I’m never hungry, I’m not constantly struggling not to eat. If you break it up and disclude the 3 month period where I stopped last year and regained weight, I lost 60 pounds over 9 months and then 30 pounds over 8 months (I know that adds up to 90, and I’m only -70, because I regained weight during my vacation), so by the common definition of success on diets it’s been solid enough.
There’s nothing wrong with my diet specifically. It’s easily the least miserable diet I could be on. The matter is more overall whether or not the effort to lose weight in general is worth the rewards. If I were doing a conventional diet, there’s no way I’d have lasted this long. The effort/suffering would’ve been far greater, and the reward/loss rate would’ve been smaller.
So I’m basically doing the least miserable thing I can do while still losing weight and it still isn’t quite enough to get me over that effort/reward hump because I can’t really work up the motivation to drive me through that effort nor really feel good about the reward.
Again, you’re essentially saying that because I’m claiming to be miserable losing weight, that I’m irrational for continuing to do so. To you, to be logically consistent, I’d need to stop bothering. Well, in fact, that’s the position I’m in. When this commitment finishes, if I can’t find something that works better for me, I’m going to stop.
Actually, I’ve altered my diet based on the information that Dseid linked a few days ago about the relative merits of different types of fat. I found the information useful and thanked him/her for it.
If you mean I’m not willing to accept that I’m absolutely required to use the same method to lose weight as I am to maintain that loss, I’ve detailed quite extensively why that is not only not logically necessary but actually counterproductive. If I’m being told that same thing 50 times, it’s hard not to get argumentative about it.
I’m not claiming anything based on a thought experiment. I either have personal experience (with different types of diets for example) or simply pointing out that it’s simply not logical (there’s no reason the method to lose has to be the same as the method to maintain).
If you could point out what specific advice you’re referring to, it would be easier to understand. I’m assuming you’re talking about the “must lose the same way you maintain” thing, which has nothing to do with whether I’m depressed or not. It’s simply not true. If you’re talking about my inability to tolerate a typical calorie-restricted weight loss diet - been there, done that, unwilling to even consider it because it would be inferior in every way to what I’m doing now, and if I’m barely able to keep doing what I’m doing now, what would be the point?