#*weight loss

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I'm just going to dread and resent work every day until I get a new job and that is going to be the reality until these new feelings about the current situation find their place. With all that in mind I'm trying to remember to have fun, go outside, stay off my phone, and talk to people I care about.

Sunday is meal prep day, and today I've made Paleo pancakes with plum compote and curried chicken salad. I will also make a kimchi tofu soup before the day is out -- right now the chicken stock is stocking.

Work on the final part of the first half of novel is going decently and it should be on track to finish up in the next month or two. I'm happy about that and I'm also happy about the prospect of putting the pen down on this book for a while. I would really like to write about other characters doing other things for a while before returning to a dystopian science fiction universe that features a cold war that never ended and characters living in perilous conditions in occupied territory.

D&D is going well. Two of my three teams have graduated from episode 02 into episode 03, with the third team about 2/3 of the way through episode 02. Episode 03 is my most non-linear, modular campaign component I've ever done and I can say with confidence: I'm not doing that again. It is way, way too much work. However, I am quite proud of how it came out and I like how the environments and characters ended up. To me, the maps feel crowded and frenetic, full of people to talk to, just like a bustling city neighborhood on a holiday weekend should.

Semaglutide seems to be working. I've lost 12 lbs so far and it's starting to feel like clothes are fitting differently and such. I was hoping for a more dramatic push at the beginning, but if it's just like a slow, steady progression alongside a lack of food noise and concomitant food anxiety, I'll take it.

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We’re learning more about what weight-loss drugs do to the body

GLP-1 agonists like Wegovy, Ozempic, and Mounjaro might benefit heart and brain health—but research suggests they might also cause pregnancy

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Therapy helped.

One of the reasons I entered therapy overall was that there was an increasingly large gap between how I felt I should feel and how I actually felt about two major changes in my life: buying a house and getting weight loss surgery. On paper, in 2022 I accomplished arguably the hardest financial purchase most people make in their lives and I lost over 100 lbs. The general expectation of everyone else around me was that I'd be ecstatic.

And I just wasn't. The house wasn't what I expected. It wasn't gratifying or easy to own it. It was stressful and a new source of constant problems and anxiety. The weight loss felt good, but it also made me feel conflicted and occasionally miserable. I hadn't just notched two big wins in a lifetime achievement book. I'd changed my location and standard of living while also completely changing how I related to food (both in a psychological/metaphorical sense and a biomechanical/literal sense) and those around me (because -- stop me if you are surprised -- people treat you very differently when you lose 100+ lbs).

One of the big downsides of my move, as discussed previously, was that my aquarium crashed. It hasn't come back from that since, either, and it makes me really sad to think about how far it's fallen.

But.

It's nonsensical to think of it this way. At the end of the day, the crash did happen, and being sad about it doesn't help. Comparing it to how it used to be just makes me get on my own way. I need to focus on what I do have instead of obsessing over what I lost, because doing so won't bring it back. Only by working on what I have can I truly bring the tank back to something I'm proud of again.

This is a metaphor for other things and it also isn't.

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I bought this in the largest size available about this time last year only to find that it was way, way too small to get around my wrist. I thought about going to a jeweler to get extra links added but at the time I was gearing up for weight loss surgery and thought "maybe I should just wait and see if it fits afterward."

I've tried it on a few times since then and was always disappointed to find it didn't quit meet around my wrist, or that it pinched if I tried to close it.

Today, it fits.

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I Tried Jane Fonda’s ‘80s Workout Tapes To See How They Hold Up

When did working out stop being this fun?

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I am having a new problem from weight loss: my butt hurts if I sit too much. Apparently I was actually walking around with a cushion strapped to my ass and now I've officially lost it. I don't know why it went from "no pain" to "pain" as if a switch was flipped instead of happening gradually, but here we are.

I bought a special cushion for this and it helps but wow I did not expect this at this stage. I'm still not like... thin lol. I wear an L or an XL! I thought this would be a problem for a hypothetical me who was one or two sizes smaller. My butt has other ideas, I suppose.

Also I knew intellectually that I'd lose weight from everywhere else before I lost it from midsection because that's what happens at a certain stage of weight loss. I was unprepared for the reality of it, though. I feel like I looked... I don't know. Maybe not better but more even and balanced twenty pounds ago. I feel lumpy and misshapen, lately, like all of the remaining fat is strapped to my belly like ballast.

This was supposed to be a lighter post than it turned out to be.

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This is going to be a post about diets and weight loss

On the one hand, I am really glad to see people starting to recognize that dieting is just... not effective. Because it isn't, sorry. You can lose an arbitrary percentage of your highest body weight via diet and exercise, and the more you lose:

the harder it gets to lose more weight

the easier it gets to gain back weight

These two things, in combination, mean that unless you are looking to lose a relatively paltry amount of weight, dieting is probably not the answer. It can work if you've gone up one size and would like to go back down. It does not work if you want to drop six sizes. The odds against someone doing that via diet and exercise alone and keeping it off are overwhelming.

I've done it, actually! Pre-surgery, I lost over 50 lbs (22kg) four times in my life: once when I was in highschool, once in college, once as a young adult, and once in my early 30s. It got harder to do each time, and required more extreme interventions each time. The first time was with good ol' Weight Watchers and a restrictive eating disorder, the last time was with a limited calorie diet that made me feel like I was going to pass out all the time.

People who can lose weight in this way and keep it off long term (the longest I kept it off was about 1.5 years) are outliers, or people who are willing to devote their entire life to diet and exercise, which is impractical unless you're an athlete or a personal trainer.

So it's encouraging to hear people in the weight loss industrial complex say "diets don't work." Because they don't. They just don't.

On the other hand, we are once again prescribing weight loss drugs that are touted as safe and effective to handle the "disease" of obesity. I have nothing against Ozempic and Wagovy in particular. I don't know enough about them to have positive or negative feelings. I do think it's safe to say:

The history of weight loss drugs is pretty rotten. Fen-phen, redux, (or the ol' speedball special of both fen-phen and redux), as well as amphetamines were all touted as wonder drugs that would help fat people become skinny. Largely, they just gave fat people health problems or killed them.

Weight loss drugs also don't actually drop that much weight from people. Again, maybe Ozempic and Wagovy are different! But the combination of fen-phen and redux was found to help people lose 15 lbs on average for as long as they stayed on the drugs. Then they gained it back. Not exactly a miracle.

To me, weight loss drugs, and dieting, and the weight loss industry in general falls into the category of "things we don't need proof to believe." We as a society want to believe that fat people are lazy, ignorant slobs because that excuses the daily cruelty and discrimination society heaps upon them. If weight loss isn't actually as easy as just dieting, well, there has to be something else that totally works that fat people are just not doing, or else we are being callous and shitty to a large percentage of the population for no actual reason. Therefore, diets don't work, but ozempic and wagovy totally do, and anyone who is fat is just choosing to be that way. Just like before, but now it's with medicine instead of a dietary regimen.