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[nenjin]

I just had good moment.

Like I've said before, my diet is not clean. I track my calories but I make convenient food choices to hit macros.

So......when I go to Arby's every week I get two Half-pound French Dip Sandwiches. Why? #1 I'm hungry AF. But for #2, it's a really easy way to get in 110g of protein in one meal. (Granted it's not high quality protein by any means, not like meat you cook yourself.) That's about 3/4 of my daily protein needs in one sitting.

Same lady has been working there for years. And today she finally went "You must work out. I see you eat that much food all the time and you look great."

I guess I would have preferred "You look like you work out." But regardless, this is not the first time I've heard this. I regularly order an amount of food that shocks people, and since I'm a creature of habit and go to the same places all the time, inevitably it comes up. I can out-eat people that are easily twice my size.

Always nice to get a little validation now and then.

[Ulfarr]

I dunno man. I don't think she would have said that " you must work out" if you didn't look the part

[nenjin]

I think that is one of the best parts of working out consistently and with intensity. You can eat, really eat, and still lose fat. Of course it comes down to metabolism and individual features as much as anything else, and it's not like you can shovel pure garbage in your face.......but in some ways you can. You can FEAST and as long as you're working hard to burn it off, it's mostly all good. Get empty, fill up, get empty.....repeat until SWOLE.

[Hanslanda]

I only eat a light brunch and a heavy dinner but I eat whatever I want with no worries because exercise.

Well, I eat healthy anyway and I save my empty calories for booze but still.

[nenjin]

I think that's honestly a great takeway.

You don't have to abandon empty calories or even guilty calories, whether that's sugar, booze, fast food, whatever.

You just gotta see its place in the bigger picture and make space for it.

And once you start working out hard and with a purpose....you stop wanting as many empty calorie for the short-term satisfaction they give you. If you're trying to be mindful of your calories AND you're working your ass off (literally)....you start craving real calories for the energy and nutrients your body is crying out for, moreso than junk.

At least this was my experience. Within three months of getting serious, I upended some of my food patterns. TBH the "real calories" I still pretty much eat the same things as I did before I was being mindful. I just jettisoned the really indulgent stuff (double quarter pounder from McDonalds, soda, fries and an extra Cheesburger because why the fuck not. I've always had a large appetite for my size due to my basic metabolism.) Instead of getting Fried Mozzarella Sticks as a side for my Arby's roast beef sandwiches, and a cup of cheddar cheese to drizzle all over it.....I just went for MORE PROTEIN instead. I'm not claiming this is some magical trick, but if you're gonna eat fast food, you can still manipulate the variables for more a desirable result.

The other thing I changed was just cutting back my empty calories 80%. I asked myself "what sugar do I feel absolutely cannot do without." The answer came back: sugar in my coffee. So I cut that in half and pretty much tossed the rest. No more M&Ms before bed as a dessert. No more buying Ice Cream just to have it around. I'd already started to become straight sick of soda so that felt pretty easy to give up and substitute with coffee. Still getting sugar and caffeine, just wwaaaaayyyy less sugar. From there I gave myself a couple cheat meals (not days.)

Luckily I don't have much of a taste for the drink, so those aren't calories I have to make room for.

My diet before I got serious about working out and weight loss was, in short, an abomination of overeating garbage. My metabolism and genetics is probably the only thing that saved me from being obese in another couple years. Now, my diet may not be clean but the only shocking thing about is the amount of food I put down on a few selected days. (Friday: A 16' roast beef sandwich with double meat from the local deli shop for lunch, and an entire pepperoni pizza and a coke for dinner. That's a 4000+ calorie day now that I add it all up.) But because I reign it in the rest of the week, coming in around 2.4k calories a day I'm still losing body fat with the additional calories lost from workouts. I'll probably only eat one meal and a snack on Saturday and Sunday because of weird hours.

And I've been doing this for over a year and a half. If people want, I can literally give them my weekly meal plan because I'm so fucking boring and habitual. Not because I think anyone should follow it per se, it works for me. But as an example of what's actually possible given what inputs.

So yeah: you can let yourself live and if not lose weight, at least maintain it. You just gotta make ROOM for that stuff around a decent diet. Nenjin loves whole milk for its vitamin D, fat, protein and creamy goodness. I like having a glass before bed with a protein bar or some nuts or something. But that's like, 200 calories in a big glass plus the actual food. So on days where I've eaten well I just....won't have that glass of milk and have water instead. If you know how many calories roughly you eat in a day, you can pivot around and make adjustments for the things you feel you can't do without, as long as you're _honest_ with yourself about it.

And that's just daily life. When you add exercise to the mix, you get a larger calorie budget to play with, depending on your goals, what you're doing and how hard you're working.

At least until actually getting lean is your goal. Then you gotta start making some harder choices. The more crap you want to eat at that point, the more you have to cut in to your actual nutrition intake and that can start to get dicey when you're already in a calorie deficit.

I dunno, the philosophy around eating and weight gain or weight loss, and fitness in general, that I've come to is this: "I doesn't matter what you do IN A DAY, it matters what you do EVERY DAY." If you drink _A_ soda on _A DAY_? No big deal. Sitting around A DAY instead of doing something physical? No big deal. But drinking soda EVERY DAY, those calories pile up. Just like the filth in your bathroom when you never clean it. You use your bathroom every day, and the detritus will continue to accumulate until you do something about it. If you sit on your ass EVERY DAY and never do anything physical, all the problems that creates compound over time if you don't do something about it. Working out _A_ _DAY_? Not really a big deal. Working out _EVERY DAY_? Now you're getting somewhere.

Life is like that. It's the little things that build up over time, so slowly you can't see, until suddenly you can and you have to start trying to ignore it. Life is about accumulation of your habits, good and bad, over time. Accumulate thousands of hours writing code? Be able to make programs. Accumulate thousands of hours in the gym? Get swole. Accumulate thousands of hours sitting on your ass? Get back problems and weakness and stretch marks. Drink and eat calorie dense, nutrient light foods every day and never do anything with those extra calories? Get fat, get diabetes. Smoking cigarettes every day? Get cancer. Drink alcohol everyday? Get cirrhosis of the liver.

Christ, I've just noticed the other day that I've finally got lines in my forehead because I'm about to join the old ass man club. Apparently it comes from a life time of raising my eyebrows up in surprise. Given this rant, no one but me is probably surprised.

It's so obvious no one needs to have it told to them. And yet it being obvious and actually living with it, both the good and the bad outcomes, is a different story.

[itisnotlogical]

It's so obvious no one needs to have it told to them.

You would be surprised how far people will stretch to avoid taking any blame for their actions.

It's always about cutting this food group or that nutrient. It's about eating certain foods on specific days, or their menopause, or low testosterone, or negative thoughts or closed chakras. It's about hacking your immune system to destroy fat cells, or how red wine and chocolate before bed prevents heart disease. Anything, anything to avoid hard work, no matter how outlandish it seems. They'll point to some past fad diet and go "See, Jenny Craig didn't work, Atkins didn't work, scientists don't know anything!" when the concensus among real scientists has always been "calories in, calories out."

It comes down to the age-old problem of something for nothing. This guy Wes Watson may seem kinda insane when he's ranting, but he constantly repeats one thing: nothing that will make you stronger is easy. That's what I tell myself when I feel like quitting a workout early or grabbing an easy snack when I'm not hungry.

[JoshuaFH]

I think that's honestly a great takeway.

You don't have to abandon empty calories or even guilty calories, whether that's sugar, booze, fast food, whatever.

You just gotta see its place in the bigger picture and make space for it.

And once you start working out hard and with a purpose....

This is what I'm really struggling with atm. Whenever I think about exercising lately, my brain auto-thinks "but why tho? There's no reason to do that." and it's right, there's just no reason. I crave a purpose more than anything.

[nenjin]

Spoiler: ***Overly analytical, flowery, philosophical, metaphysical rant incoming*** (click to show/hide)

There's a couple routes.

To live as strong as possible. I'm sure it's just selection bias now that I pay attention to fitness, but it seems like....I dunno, more people are woke to it right now than in the past. Or maybe just everyone in my cohort is at that age where every generation starts to realize being healthy isn't something that just continues to happen on its own. At any rate, a goal of being straight up fit is a worthy goal to have. Especially if the world gets any fucking crazier. Learning how to do more with less might be a valuable skill in the future.

Wish fulfillment. This is kind of the path I'm going for. It takes many forms. Maybe you want to feel strong and be strong to fulfill some childhood dream, or compensate for some life long feeling of weakness. Maybe you've always felt unattractive and want that image we've been conditioned to put on a pedestal. Maybe you've always been overweight and it's always bugged you. Or maybe, and this is where I come from, you've always felt like you've been halfway toward something, and thought "What if I tried to go all the way? What would I look like?"

Competition. It isn't really my bag but many people eventually gravitate toward it in fitness. I'm sure some folks here are or were at some time actual athletes. Whether you're playing a sport now, or want to do a power lifting, a body building, cross-fit or a physique competition, some people work and train hard to win at something. Maybe they want validation for all their hard work. Maybe they want to be known for something, be admired for it. Maybe they just want the high of being the best.

In the end though, I think, you can draw from all of these things at the same time regardless of why you're actually doing it and reap all the associated benefits: confidence, focus, discipline, health, strength, vitality, attractiveness, durability, perspective, stress relief....the list goes on.

For me, getting older, all that shit, how my life has been lived up until now and the society around me.....pushing yourself hard simply because you can seems like a virtue worth chasing. It's been as much an existential journey as a physical one. I feel like I grew up into a pretty decadent society, where I had it so easy I maybe never really got in touch with the idea of truly hard work. Truly challenging myself. Sheltered pre-millenial I suppose. Got all the way through college and in to a job doing like 80%. So choosing to do something actually hard, not because I have to but because I want to, was kind of a novel concept to me. Especially as a gamer and working technology, as a person who pretty much quit doing all things physical after high school, I spent the better half of my life living in the mind. Writing off my body as a meat sack holding my brain rather the temple that houses the holy of holies. As above, so below, the outside reflects the inside and vicea versa. Working out, pushing hard for a goal I chose feels like taking a measure of real control over where my life has gone. It's not a bad life, it's as comfortable as I think anyone can legitimately ask for, but it didn't have any real purpose other than basic self-gratification and a slow descent in to decadence. I grew up from my teens into my 30s not caring what I ate because I always seemed to be skinny so who cared! I'm just lucky! But as I started to get fatter in my mid to late 30s, I knew where my trajectory was headed following this same course: feeling worse about myself, getting even less motivated as I got more overweight, being in more pain more often and eventually getting weak. It lodged in the back of my mind and kinda stuck there. And then I got a prime example put in front of me by a family member of what that looks like it and it straight up changed me. And I went "A) I'm not going out like that and B) if I'm going to do this, I'm going to do it for real." I'd put all my passion and interest into having fun, and it felt like time to put it in to something that felt like it mattered a little more to me than just not being bored. Some guys make their mid-life crisis a sports car. I decided to try to turn my old ass body in to, if not a sports car, maybe at least a street racer.

Everyone has their own reasons and motivators. But I think fundamentally everyone can connect with the idea of feeling alive. Feeling the blood pump. Feeling their heart pound. Sweat pouring off them. Feeling muscle clench and unclench. Deep down inside we remember what it's like to run for our lives from a predator, to have to fight for our very survival. These are considered bad outcomes in the real world but it doesn't mean that mode, that primal connection to our bodies and how they work, isn't a good thing. Maybe it's a thing we've lost touch with sitting still, staring into CRTs and LCDs for the better part of our existence. Maybe it's part of the reason everyone everywhere all the time is pissed off, depressed, feeling anxious, nervous, displaced, aimless, compensating, OVER compensating, because we're all animals overstuffed with food and stimulation, forgetting that we were designed and evolved to run lean and efficiently and to always be moving, always be hunting for our next meal. Learning to do more with less......learning what it means to actually be hungry again, and to be SATISFIED in your hunger, like a little ape that spent all day fleeing predators through the trees only to land on a bushel of bananas and eat and pass out, their tummy full after a long day of staying alive.

Realize too...your brain is just doing what it's wired to do. "Hard work? Burn calories? Why in god's name would I want to do that." It's not interested in how you look or how strong you are, it just wants you to stay alive and keep breathing while spending as few calories as possible because, as far as it's concerned, you still live in the jungle and it doesn't know when you will ever find your next meal. The biggest and the strongest and the toughest and the fastest humans were that way because they had to be. Otherwise they'd be dead. They didn't succeed at survival by listening to their brain try and talk them out of running for their lives even though their hearts wanted to explode already, or hauling heavy objects around even though their arms felt like they wanted to fall off, or laying around instead of getting up and searching for food. They did these things in spite of their brains telling them not to. It's an act of pure will, overcoming your mind's tendency to tell you not to do shit. It's a skill you can cultivate and that is worth cultivating.

If NONE of that inspires you or feels like it's worth pursuing, then have you really pushed yourself? Because when your choice is to lift that heavy ass weight or get crushed by it, like during a bench press or a squat, it activates all those same systems. The fight or flight response, the do or die moment. It's why people play sports even though they don't need to, because in that moment they feel more alive than they do at any other time. Mind, body, spirit, all kind of humming along the same track for a little while before you go back home and sit down and your body goes still, your mind wanders off in to something and your spirit slumbers.

There is something of the warrior spirit in all of fitness, athletics, sports. Even that grandma doing her walk on a nice Saturday morning in her velvet workout clothes is tapping in to it: we are doing something challenging and living up to it. As gamers, we live this experience vicariously on a daily basis, in the mind. Why not.......live it in the body as well? Why not be the heroes and the warriors, some small fraction of them, that we've spent our whole lives acting out the actions of? Stoicism. Heroic suffering. Trial By Fire. Redemption. Change. Reforging. Leveling up. Victory! Defeat? These things are just emulating the actual human experience, in a nice, safe, fantastical, convenient, EASY setting.

My dad used to preach at me as a kid about the dangers of video games and why he didn't really approve of us playing them, or at least understand the appeal. Of living in a thing that isn't tangible in the real world, doesn't make anything, doesn't change anything. As a gamer I still disagree with him but in many way's he's not wrong. Who needs to be strong when you can just play a game to very briefly trigger some of those same endorphins with relatively little effort. But in other aspects.....video games are kind of the lens through which I was able to see this thing I think I've always wanted but didn't have enough commitment to pursue. Strength. Looking good. Looking tough. Being tough, and capable. All these basic human things most people try to intellectually deny aren't actually important to them on some level, denying their animalistic ego, because again, we're animals who aren't living like animals anymore.

So yeah. Do it because you can. Do it because you should. Do it to feel the warrior spirit. Do it because chicks dig it. Do it because it's hard. Do it because very few other people do.

My dad used to drop the Nike tag line on me all the time. "Just Do it." It made me roll my eyes then and it sounds a little patronizing even now. But I finally get the essence of it. The doing is what makes it worth doing.

[NRDL]

I can agree with the gist of that, Nenjin. Strength as an ideal, nebulous as it may be, is something I've always found worth pursuing. Admittedly, HOW one pursues it has changed for me over the past few years. For a few years, it was becoming the best boxer I could be. Now it's really becoming as strong and as muscular as possible.

Don't care if it takes me 20 years, I'll get to a satisfactory level of swole eventually.

[nenjin]

Likewise. I have no timelines any more. Every day is the best version of me that has existed, as long as I keep applying myself, keep learning, keep trying to grow.

[nenjin]

Additional note about deadlifts: watch out for your knees on the way down. In an effort to try and keep my lower back safe, I've been trying to slide the bar down my thighs. The heavier the weight gets, the more important it goes down in as straight a line as possible. Well, I'm clearly doing something wrong because it grazed off the top of my right knee.....multiple times.

I think MY problem was not sitting my hips back far enough. I cleared my left knee no problem, and I know my stance is lined up so.....that must mean there's some torsion going on, on the way down. Which is not good.

You wouldn't think it, but 205 even barely gliding past hurts. It's nice and sore and a little puffy. Hopefully I don't wake up tomorrow my knee tighter than a drum skin and sore to move. Man, my knees just keep taking a beating they don't really need.

On the plus side my back feels pretty good.

[Reelya]

One thing to keep in mind is that the some of the "common sense" advice doesn't work for some people with actual medical reasons for obesity, and society can tend to take a moralistic view of fatness. This fits with a "just world fallacy" type thinking.

Google "Adenovirus AD36".
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4517116/
Specific adenoviruses seem to cause animals to become obese. It's been demonstrated in a replicable experiments, and works across a variety of animal types.

Exposure to the (specific) AD36 virus is also correlated with obesity in humans, and while this isn't provably causative, that's because running the same experiments on humans is illegal. You can't just run an experiment that infects people with a disease to see what happens.

Also worth noting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adenovirus_serotype_36

To date, AD-36 is the only human adenovirus that has been linked with human obesity, present in 30% of obese humans and 11% of nonobese humans. In addition, a study of obese Americans indicates that about 30% of the obese individuals and only 5% of non-obese individuals have antibodies to Ad-36. Another study determined that children with the virus averaged 52 pounds heavier than those with no signs of it and obese children with the virus averaged 35 pounds heavier than obese children with no trace of the virus. AD-36 causes obesity in chickens, mice, rats, and monkeys also.

So a common counter-argument that "maybe fat people just get more viruses" (often stated without a shred of scientific basis, as if just saying that is of equal weight to published peer-review studies) doesn't hold water. Out of the 52 types of known human adenoviruses, AD36 is the only one correlated with obesity.

Some of the researchers who work in this area point out that the animal results are broadly accepted, but the same people are strongly hostile to the idea that it could also happen in humans, yet they can't actually articulate a scientific basis for the objection. The thinking is simply that people don't like the idea that some factor outside their control could cause obesity so they reject the science for psychological reasons: the "it can't happen to me" defense.

[nenjin]

Anyone responsible that tries to coach people about fat loss will always couch their assertions in bodies all being different.

So I don't discount that some people are genetically or due to some external factor are overweight.

But that also lends itself to the "I"m special" line of thinking. And rather being "special" in a good way, they're "special" in a way that hurts them.

Fat is one of those weird things. We hate it but we also make a lot of excuses for it.

Change isn't easy. Even being genetically predisposed toward being skinnier, it took me YEARS of a consistent plan to see real changes once I'd added on a significant (30+ pounds) amount of fat. And I'm highly motivated. For someone that a) is genetically predisposed toward being larger, having a larger build b) isn't highly motivated and c) doesn't have a real plan, fat loss can seem like something that's out of their control. I think the reality is though for most people it's an issue of time and consistency. The "Fat to fit" stuff in three months that the fitness industry peddles is almost complete bullshit. You do not go from a life time of sedentary behavior and unchecked eating to ripped and at a healthy body weight in three months, or even six months, unless you are supremely genetically gifted AND you make all the required sacrifices and stay true to them. Even if you are genetically hardwired to carry more body fat that someone else, within that spectrum of you, you can still lose some. The line between "you should lose some body fat for aesthetic reasons" and "you need to lose some body fat for actual health reasons" is one I think is getting seriously distorted by the fat acceptance/fat positive movement.

For the vast majority of people, real fat loss is a slow, measured process that truly involves changing their lifestyle. And most people aren't willing to do that. They may give it three or four months of 80% compliance, see a little change but be disappointed by how slow it is, that it doesn't meet their ideals that have been warped by popular culture, and eventually fall off the wagon and just stop trying. I've kind of watched this happen with people around me that have gotten interested in training but then stopped.

So while I don't disagree per se, I think it's a stretch to think that millions upon million of people have legitimate medical reasons for being obese, rather than those medical reasons being a result of being obese. It's patterns and a simple lack of activity, that's gone to the point where some people don't have a simple (but not easy) fix anymore. There's a rationalization that comes along with becoming disabled like that, of seeking reasons why you're steadily watching your quality of life decline. And medical reasons give the air of "well it's not my fault", they garner sympathy and there's no real expected change because it's out of their direct control.

I don't deny that being fat gets pretty maligned, but the only way I'm really interested in thinking about blame around fat and being fat is self-awareness and honesty. If you've got those two things asserted, then it doesn't really matter whose fault it is, it really just matters what one will do with that knowledge. People waste a lot of effort and energy on blaming and shaming, and an entire industry has built up on both sides of the issue.

It's weird, I was listening to the JRE the other day and he was saying how calling someone fat as an insult is just a weird insult. And it got me thinking. There's African societies that glorify obesity. They treat it as a sign of wealth and fortune and health to be what you'd consider typically American overweight. You don't see anyone that's like, 500 pounds there. But it's interesting to think about the connotations.

[Reelya]

But that also lends itself to the "I"m special" line of thinking. And rather being "special" in a good way, they're "special" in a way that hurts them.

Part of that is because we don't have a good set of tests yet for all the known causes. So people can just shrug and say they're different or special. Pinpointing actual causes fights against that. Right now the general rule of thumb from the much of the amateur bodybuilding community is to just shrug and say that "sometimes people are different", or to just deny all differences. More actual research will actually cut off some of those excuses. You've either been exposed to AD36 or you haven't. That excuse only holds if you have the antibodies, which can be tested for. And then those people can be put on a different training plan. They may need to avoid certain food or stick to a different eating schedule.

As for different cultures around fat, that seems to correlate pretty well with food or resource constrained societies. Which probably explains why it's desirable and why it's constrained at the same time. This can also vary over time in societies, for example you don't see images of curvy flappers in the roaring 20s, while there are few stick-thin models that were popular at the height of the great depression.
This has even been observed at the individual level:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-38003501

[Reelya]

Double post but I wanted to address this specific point I missed

So while I don't disagree per se, I think it's a stretch to think that millions upon million of people have legitimate medical reasons for being obese, rather than those medical reasons being a result of being obese.

I already addressed this point. Obese people only have elevated antibodies for specific adenoviruses, so this isn't about obese people being more subscetible to viruses in general. Then, the specific adenovirus they have elevated antibodies for just happens to be one that can experimentally induce obesity in chickens, mice, rats and primates.

Sure, you could say the elevated AD36 anti-bodies are as "the result" of being obese, however since it's only this particular virus it's true of, then that becomes a difficult point to make. If so, why not all viruses? And why only the virus which causes obesity in so many other vertebrates? Pure coincidence? This is smacking up against Occam's Razor now.

What I think the AD36 stuff suggests is that there are changes it induces which make it much harder to maintain bodyweight. There are anecdotes in the media surrounding it where they talk to e.g. a farmer who caught a related virus from chickens, and after that his weight ballooned out despite him not actually changing anything about his lifestyle. They have also done twin studies. When one twin is fat and another thin, they've found AD36 in the fat one, only.

One other piece of evidence for a mechanism here is that obese people with AD36 have abnormally low blood triglycerides, compared to other obese people, who generally have elevated triglycerides. So, a possible mechanism is that their fat cells just aren't releasing enough triglycerides when they're supposed to. That guy in the story I mentioned said that he became always-hungry and lethargic after the infection. So, when you haven't eaten your fat cells are meant to make up the deficit with triglycerides, but what if they don't? You get crashed blood sugar levels and you feel hungry and tired all the time.

But that also lends itself to the "I"m special" line of thinking. And rather being "special" in a good way, they're "special" in a way that hurts them.

This sentiment falls under an "appeal to consequences". Sure, maybe as a result of some discovery of medical or genetic reasons for obesity, something bad might happen such as people making excuses for being fat. However, how people react to finding out things doesn't actually change whether they are true or not. A similar argument format is the one that "there must be a God, because if there was no God people would be free to murder each other".