#anyway i'm feeling less and less erratic so we are getting back on track

[a-s-levynn]

Time got away from me a bit today with all the Tiny Token stuff so i kinda.. haven't done a small offering.. but it'll be back from tomorrow on. I just completely forgot i got to get to work tomorrow and i can't be half asleep for it. :/

[littlestarprincess]

I'm sorry if I'm being overbearing with chiming in here; previously I was avoiding the weight talk too much because you definitely have a very balanced perspective and I didn't wanna argue with it, but I was at a point where I couldn't necessarily be as coherent as I wanted to be, but I do have lots of thoughts!

I have lost a fairly more drastic amount of weight very recently (about fifty pounds in the last four, almost five months? So it's been pretty fast) and I haven't really been too worried about gaining it back for the same reason I don't think you should be!

I'm not dieting, at all, even remotely. I do keep track of calories (just as much to ma e sure I get enough as to make sure I don't go too overboard -- what's gonna happen with me and food can be ver erratic otherwise) but that is the nearest diet adjacent thing, and it's mostly been genuinely changing my lifestyle. The big thing is that I eat breakfast? I still eat a fair amount of sweets and cheeses, but I eat smaller portions at a time throughout the day, and I end up with more energy overall, feeling more productive regarding things that make me happy (meaning I have a life outside of work). . . I don't see myself stopping once I hit my loose goal (which is also around 120, lol) and my actual goal is primarily learning to actually take care of myself! Which I think it is for you too!

One of my coworkers has lost weight at a similar speed because she started drinking water instead of soda and cut out a looooot of her sugar intake; for her, keeping the weight off could go either way? I think she has learned she genuinely enjoy a lot of foods she used to overlook, and I've noticed her dinner habits have changed a lot recently (which I don't think she's noticed; for clarification I work in a grocery store, so that's how I know what my coworkers eat), and if she does start gaining weight again it'll probably be because she will not drink enough water. But I can see her maintaining this outside of weight-loss (she has broken "diet" once or twice and been horrified by how sweet things are, so I think she'll probably be okay.)

And then. . . We have fad diets, like keto outside of a medical context, paleo, etc, where people cut out entire food groups (fun fact! You can't have fruit on a keto diet! Any fruit! All fruit has sugar!!!!) and then when their body has access to those nutrients it goes berserk and hordes everything it can. You can't be on these sorts of diets forever because they're unhealthy, and most of the time the goal is to cut out sugar (cutting out added sugars makes sense, especially for Americans, because we put sugar in everything, but all sugars does not make sense because we do need a certain amount of sugars, and fruits are a healthy source of those! Also there's sugar in milk, so you'd be cutting dairy out, and etc. I know less about paleo but keto is ridiculous) but your body is going to treat any return to that sort of diet (the goal of keto is to make the body think it's starving, so???) as a threat it needs to be prepared for, so you end up bouncing back, gaining even more weight, and then having a harder time losing it, which is where the soundbite "You'll just gain it back anyway" comes from. I know several people on keto, but I wouldn't be able to tell you if they'd lost weight from it, or if they gave it up. From my perspective, the difference seems to be pretty negligible?

It does not sound like you're doing a fad diet, but rather keeping track of what your body is doing and what it needs, so I think you'll be okay because the problem with diet culture is that it encourages people to punish their bodies and scare their bodies into submission as though it's not a part of them, while it sounds like you're actually learning how to take care for your body (for you, you're learning that listening to cravings doesn't necessarily work, and developing how to work around that, by using tools like calorie counters!) and I think that'll work out in the long run in a way that diet culture does not, and by being aware of your weight, you're not necessarily siding with diet culture.

. . . Sorry this is mostly in response to a teeny tiny part of your post |||orz

So, thing that seems to work well for other people but not too well for me:

“Your body is really smart and gives you cravings to help you!”

I don’t want to say this is never true for anyone, but “always listen to your body” is how I ended up prediabetic. Because it really liked to tell me it needed more serotonin and thought chocolate was useful for this purpose.

Which was not entirely stupid of it, no, but I was eating so many sugary foods I could no longer taste them, and my mood was not improving. It was when I saw the blood sugar results and made a commitment to reducing my sugar intake that I restored my capacity to enjoy foods that once had comforted me.

And, yes, when I lost twenty pounds? It restored some mobility I’d been very upset to find myself losing. I like that I no longer worry a cracked bit of sidewalk will leave its imprint in my face. It’s nice.

My body is not smart. My body is a blunt instrument that thinks it can do fine detail work. My body ingests sugar and goes !!!!!! ALL OF THE MORE PLEASE when it really should only be having some of the more please.

I feel like people are REALLY BAD at talking about competing access needs that have to do with diet (as in “the stuff one eats” not as in “the thing where one attempts to eat less than usual”).