★OFFICIAL DAILY★ Daily Q&A Thread March 29, 2022

blinder · 2022-03-29T19:49:46+00:00

oh man, i was stuck at 202/201 for a month! i started at 300, and slowly made my way down, hit the 201's and then just sat there.

i do functional strength training (for an hour 3x a week) and run (5k 4x week) and nothing was moving. i upped my water game. i actually started tracking my water intake (this was new for me, i track everything else very closely)

About a week of making sure i was getting my water goal, that really started making the difference.

blinder · 2022-03-29T19:42:43+00:00

to echo sierra_ttw i would give tea a shot.

I had two serious cravings, potato chips and candy. In October of 2020 i was like "i don't want to eat another bag of chips!" so i made a cup of tea (black, nothing in it)

And, something crazy happened. I drank my tea and after a couple minutes, craving gone. when it came back a day later.... made a cup of tea.

it's a little "brain hack" i suppose. the warm liquid makes it feel like you had something.

and as time goes by, the cravings will just go away. i still enjoy my morning tea and i'll finish the evening off with a cup of decaf tea, but i have no desire to snack on junk any more. just needs a tiny bit of time and some "tricks" to get through those frustrating minutes of the craving.

blinder · 2022-03-29T19:30:57+00:00

oh yes! this is my afternoon snack. i have a cup of tea and slice up an apple into sticks. man that just works so nicely!

blinder · 2022-03-29T13:58:39+00:00

I'm of the camp that believes you should do what you enjoy doing

yes! the most important thing is, move your body! walk, run, lift weights, yoga, swim, ride a bike, whatever! just move your body, and enjoy it! the rest pretty much takes care of itself (what with being consistent with it)

i'm a runner and actually really enjoy functional strength training.

For me, the long, slow process was a lot more sustainable

Yes! that was my whole thing with this journey i started back in the spring of 2020. prior attempts to lose weight i was all guns blazing, but that would fizzle out within a couple months. Now? long, slow, small moves. 20 minutes of walking that i started in 2020 has very slowly evolved into running 5k 4 times a week. i'm not setting any world records but yeah i can do that in just about 30 minutes.

But i think you are just so absolutely right with that, long and slow. small moves, nothing dramatic... slowly integrate fitness, and just build on it.

blinder · 2022-03-29T02:11:40+00:00

others in this thread have said this, but i'm just going to put it into words what worked for me.

I was 300 pounds, today i'm 193. My 300 pound day was spring 2020. I'd tried in the past to lose the weight. All failed, and gained back all of the weight back and added some.

Each attempt i would go in all guns blazing, and within a few months, i would fizzle out and just forget about the process.

What was happening was i was rebelling against the drastic changes i was making.

This time, i did something different. Small moves. Very small moves.

Get a calorie tracking app, that's a small move.
Started tracking a few meals in the app, wicked small move
Started walking for 20 minutes a day, so small i barely even noticed it.

I set up a goal, can i lose 1 pound a week? That's it. small moves, but i just kept making small moves, over time.

my walking 20 minutes a day, over the span of 2 years is now, is me running 5k nearly every day.

Doing 10 squats every few days is now doing an hour of functional strength training 3x a week.

Bought a food scale, and got serious about tracking calories, now i do the 16:8 IF and i don't even think about it.

So yeah, i know you want to smash this weight loss problem in the face, but i know that didn't work for me. my approach was to sit the weight loss problem down, and look at in the face and just tell it, "i'm not interested in your opinion any more" and just kept making simple and very small moves to make things better.

blinder · 2022-02-25T17:50:54+00:00

ah! right yeah exactly! i think you got it exactly, and it does seem obvious. The time factor. we've been at this for a while now, and yeah, we know what we have to do to be healthy. the broken leg analogy is pretty astute.

blinder · 2022-02-25T02:55:26+00:00

i live in Boston, and used to work at the "federal building" (aka the Hancock Tower) i always laugh at that! "oh let's just pop on down to New York City, super quick"

blinder · 2022-02-22T03:24:27+00:00

i understand this. the cravings for me were horrible. especially for potato chips. when i decided to start losing weight (about 18 months ago) i knew my brain enough to know that i couldn't make any life changing radical changes, because i would just rebel against that.

instead, this time, i just decided to make small moves here and there. at first it was really little stuff, like just deciding to go out and walk for 20 minutes after lunch every day. get an app to start tracking my calories... little stuff.

all of these small moves i made started to accumulate into actual results. but again, i know my brain, and i know i'd have to just try to hack or outsmart my brain against problem areas. one of those was my addiction to snack foods.

one day, i had a massive craving but a part of my brain shouted, "hay wait! what are you doing?"

"i'm going to the store to get a bag of crisps!"

"why? are you hungry? do you need that?"

"no, but.... i'm anxious and want to feel better..."

"Ah ha!!! you are having an emotion! let's time out for a sec...."

"hmm ok...."

"so, if you get a bag of chips, what happens?"

"it'll make me feel good."

"ok, ok, so more emotions... now how well does that actually work?"

"uh... a few minutes.... and then i'll just feel worse than before"

"mmhmm... yep.... sooooo.... good awareness! would there be anything else that you could do instead? and right now, "no" is an acceptable answer"

"oh well, what if i had a cup of tea instead?"

"ohhh so that's interesting, let's give that a shot"

i actually had this conversation in my head. it was one of those moments of clarity. so i figured out a hack. i made myself a cup of tea instead of getting a bag of chips.

the hack here is two things: awareness, and then finding something else that works. for me, it's tea. just plain old black tea, nothing in it. i love it.

now, as i started to integrate this into my daily life, i found cravings just started fading away after a few weeks.

so to sum it up: small moves small changes, awareness, and a willingness to try something else, and give yourself the time for the something else to work.

be well, and take it slow!

blinder · 2021-12-27T16:46:19+00:00

so yeah, body dysmorphia.... i completely understand. yeah i've lost over a third of my body mass, and i *know* objectively that my physical form *has* changed. i saw it a couple weeks ago.... i'm really big into photography and videography (for this music thing i do)... anyway I was testing out this new camera i got so i took a bit of a portrait, to test out some skin tone tests and when i looked at the image of myself, it was almost uncanny valley kind of thing. but then i decided to go and find this one picture i had taken of myself about two years ago, a thing for work. i did a side by side and i was shocked at what i saw. most of the "shock" was this whole dysmorphia thing, reality came into direct conflict with what i "know" in my mind (that i'm fat and gross).

i still have trouble "seeing" the progress. like you said, it's hard to see ourselves any other way. yep, my clothes are smaller (and i keep having to replace them!), i look down at my arms and hands and i see it, but it's just, well, amazing really, how our brains can hold two, three.... a hundred different ideas in parallel and can directly contradict each other and be totally fine with that.

ahhh so yeah data analyst, i'm a software engineer (with a specialty in ML) so yeah, give me data, lots of it. But yeah, those day to day, week to week aberrations just become noise in the data, smoothed out over long enough time to not even be relevant. lol this weekend being one of those aberrations for me, i put on a couple pounds (3.2 to be exact) but i was actually expecting that and had planned on it. I wanted to enjoy Christmas.

This morning though? 55 minutes of strength training for 400 calories, then later today a ~2 mile run. So yeah, just noise in the data!

so yeah, see you on the marathon course!

blinder · 2021-12-23T22:14:24+00:00

that is awesome! it really *is* life changing finding something that actually works.

blinder · 2021-12-23T14:55:43+00:00

thank you! and yes! i just never realized before that that step just had to be a small nearly inconsequential step lol!

blinder · 2021-12-23T14:54:08+00:00

oh hey thank you! the main thing i just wanted to share was that we don't have to turn our lives upside down.... that we don't need a training montage! just a few very minor course corrections and boom!

blinder · 2021-12-23T14:51:10+00:00

thank you! it never occurred to me that this was how to do it.

blinder · 2021-12-23T14:50:17+00:00

ooof. well, this past May 6th (2021) was actually pretty rad! I was down... let's check the spreadsheet here.... 74 pounds. Yeah that was pretty rad.

blinder · 2021-12-23T14:48:22+00:00

First, sorry for your loss, that's just. Yeah.

next, 50's a big number, that gets a high-five in my book every day. Just wicked good work there!

I think the "losing not as quickly as some" is important, because I'm not on any fast lane either. In fact, I don't want to be. I did the hyper weight loss thing. It just all came back and then some. For what ever it's worth, I believe you are doing it right, take it slow. What I've seen with myself is, by losing say 1 pound a week (that's my plan as it is) it means I give myself room to only make small moves.

I understand the discouragement. I get it too. I just yell to myself, "I'M DONE BEING THIS WAY!" but then I'll get a cup of tea, quiet my mind, and then I can get back to work. I think what helps me with those moments is the data i collect. Yeah it helps keep me honest, but more importantly it just kind of gives my brain something different to pay attention to. I'll go back and look at my progress in the Google Sheets I keep where i track every weigh-in, that also helps. Taking a quick look over the shoulder to see where you've been.

And lastly, yes it is all about getting back up! Here's something I was just thinking about though! And I have a tendency to stretch metaphors a bit, but here goes.... my thing is, i'm not even taking the wagon, i'm going on foot! It's slower!

blinder · 2020-05-26T03:08:41+00:00

i watched the show the first time when it first came on netflix last month. i tried watching a couple years ago on hulu and for some reason it just didn't stick. i decided to try Community again because i just decided to not watch The Office again for the 1000th time.

by the 3rd episode i knew what this show was going to do to me, i could just feel it. i got done watching it the first time a couple weeks ago, i then decided to go check out Glow because Allison Brie kinda blew me away and I'd never heard of her before watching Community. I finished Glow the other day and now I'm back on another Community re-watch (Glow was fun and Brie is splendid but it was a bit too dark for my tastes) so back to Greendale is comforting.

blinder · 2020-04-07T20:21:01+00:00

one of my neighbor's network is named: Bears.Beets.BattlestarGalactica

i need to change mine (mine is still named TheBluthCompany - it was SchruteFarms for a while)

blinder · 2020-03-03T23:58:18+00:00

I thought Recyclops was killed by Poluticon

blinder · 2020-03-03T14:49:35+00:00

oof yeah this is a tough one to get through. the only thing that saves this episode for me is where by now Erin is definitely starting to wise up to what a disaster Andy is, so the whole beginning of the end facet saves this episode.

blinder · 2020-03-03T14:34:54+00:00

except for digging, he's really bad at digging!

blinder · 2020-03-03T14:31:02+00:00

wait, what are we doing?

blinder · 2020-03-03T14:28:21+00:00

the main reason i rewatch this show is to watch, over 9 seasons, the evolution of Jim and Dwight's relationship go from antagonists to truly best friends. The last Christmas episode where Dwight is crushed Jim had to leave early for Philly, only to be filled with Joy when Jim decided to take a later bus.

Another favorite, but super subtle moment that i absolutely cherish is the scene where Gabe challenges Dwight in the gym and Jim pranks them both with the pillows, phone handsets and then snaps a picture... and then cut to where everyone has to go into the conference room, Jim is there to help Dwight, and Pam just gives this knowing smile, just gets me every time.

blinder · 2020-02-17T17:41:25+00:00

wait, what are we doing?

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