Absolute train wreck (My 600lb Life Show)

[nakedfrog]

OK what you say about me, but that video you refused to see is made by an award-winning Ph.D.

That's fine, I don't watch any videos people post here, I'm not here to watch videos. If it's in article form, I can parse the data in far less time.

 

[Kaido]

Unless a person genuinely (and VERY few actually are) is diagnosed with a health condition mental or physical preventing them from losing weight I have very little sympathy

Short of doing hard drugs, being overweight is the worst thing you can do for your body. However, there are a lot of invisible barriers in the way. Like, I was a beanpole growing up & then was overweight twice in my life. Highest ever was 60 pounds. First time I tried to "eat clean", which worked, but wasn't sustainable. Second time, I did macros, and have just stuck with that ever since:

Macros tutorial

So for me, being overweight was never an issue. Then once I got married, started eating well all the time, and was stuck in a cubicle, I blew up lol. At that point, it wasn't about willpower, or self-discipline, or motivation, or anything like that, it literally just boiled down to a lack of knowledge:

1. I didn't know how macros worked
2. I didn't know how to cook
3. I didn't know how to meal-prep

I lived in a fog of misinformation: cheat meals, cheat days, clean eating, protein powder, protein drinks, protein bars, heavy exercise sessions, etc. The reality is, weight management boils down to food, not exercise. I've watched a few of these shows, and there's always a lot of invisible barriers going on. The first layer is access. To maintain that type of lifestyle, outside of fairly rare medical issues like Cushing's disease, requires one of two things:

1. A codependent relationship
2. The finances to pay someone to take care of them

This video demonstrates that. Not everyone has the emotional defenses required to be a drill sergeant for someone they love in their life, so they become enablers to make the people in their care happy, even when they know they shouldn't do it:



Another common thing is past trauma. This is also the case in pretty much every single hoarder's episode...they had a family member die, they were raped, or something else equally awful happened to them, and for whatever reason, their brain locked up & withdrew their mental energy & left them engaging in hoarding as a way to cope, kind of like a turtle withdrawing into its shell. That's why those shows usually get a de-junking team, an organization person, and then some type of therapist or psychologist to help the people work through the mental block they have for dealing with something that should normally be a non-issue (i.e. just cleaning up!).

Food is a little bit harder, because like in my situation, I had no background of every having to babysit my diet because I never had weight issues. Then when I ran into a situation where I became overweight, there's so much marketing & misinformation out there (I have multiple threads of adopting & dropping one false belief after another lol...now I know the food itself doesn't matter, the schedule doesn't matter, it's all about the macros if you want to precisely control your weight & have high energy all the time!) that it was REALLY difficult to cut through the hype & see things clearly, which is why I always spam my macro tutorial above lol...it's literally life-changing information! So for me, I didn't have a physical, mental, or emotional issue blocking my way, I simply didn't have:

1. The information I needed to know
2. A support system to enable the type of lifestyle I wanted to achieve (i.e. to be at a healthy weight & have high energy 16 hours a day)

Now throw on the fatigue of being overweight, the constant verbal harassment, depression, codependent relationships, denial about the seriousness of being overweight, living a typically reactive life where they've never been exposed to taking proactive adult control over their lives, and the lack of information about macros & the lack of information about how to have a meal-prep system is just compounded 1000x! Not to mention, without the truth of how our bodies work (macros) & without knowing how to operate a meal-prep system, the game is about work rather than effort, which is a BIG deal!

"Work" is when things are hard to do & require effort, and when you have to do that day after day after day, i.e. try really hard EVERY day, then it becomes unsustainable & people get burned out! Which is why I like an "effort"-based approach: choose to put in the effort to learn about macros, choose to learn how to use a meal-prep system, choose to use it to play out the meals for the coming week & choose to put in the effort to cook a little bit every day or once a week on a weekend to be prepared for the upcoming week. We don't have to do huge amounts of hard work all the time...we can split it up over time, whether it's food (meal-plan, then meal-prep, then eat) or exercise (a basic 30-minute cardio workout program can be split into 2x15-minute sessions or even 3x10-minute sessions to still get the benefits).

But even the willingness & ability to put in effort can be buried under layers & layers of invisible barriers! People have to be willing to take control into their own hands, find the right information for what actually works long-term & is sustainable for them, create a support system to enable them to consistently do it through variable effort rather than massive, constant hard work, and also invite people in to help them like healthcare professionals, therapists, etc. Which is a HUGE amount of stuff to do when you're already fatigued & behind the energy curve & struggling with complex about their condition, food etc. In psychoanalysis, a "complex" is a "related group of emotionally significant ideas that are completely or partly repressed and that cause psychic conflict leading to abnormal mental states or behavior."

Normally, people wouldn't let their physical situation get to the point where they weigh 600 pounds. But if you're dealing with the idea of heavy work, of misinformation, of lack of a clear understanding about how your body works (macros), no access to a functional meal-prep system, childhood trauma, low energy, etc., it can be really easy to be buried day after day, which turns into months, weeks, years, decades, and a lifestyle! So the show itself is more like the tip of the iceberg, with a huge invisible piece supporting it, made up of complex reasons as to why each person allowed themselves to get into that state.

It can be hard to have sympathy because the answer seems so obvious ("just eat less!"), but if that were the case & life was just as easy as deciding to do things, we'd all be millionaires with 6-packs living in clean houses haha (wait, this is ATOT, of course we're all ballin'! lol). My own weight issues took me years to work through simply because I had zero experience ever having to deal with them & literally had to start from scratch! Now I can cook, I know how to maintain my body, I have some really great tools for helping me plan & execute a meal-prep system, and I even teach it to other people!

I had a friend a few years ago who was struggling with some health issues, like severe acid reflux. He didn't have a weight issue, but he basically ate out on the road all the time because he was a successful traveling salesman & could afford to hit up restaurants night & day. He had literally NO IDEA that food was the culprit for his declining health! He actually ended up adopting macros, got really serious about it, and I just went to his first bodybuilding show this year, where he killed it! His situation was the same as mine...it wasn't readily obvious what the story was in the beginning, and that's just the first layer, before people with serious obesity even get to issues like enablers in their lives, trauma, fatigue, emotional issues, mental health issues, physical disabilities, etc.

This guy did a really interesting experiment where he purposely gained weight. If you skip to 12:45 into the video, he's 40 pounds into his 60-pound weight-gain goal, and he's already fighting depression. He talks about how he's gained empathy because he now knows what it feels like to feel trapped. This is why I love that phrase "let food be thy medicine", as so many problems - emotional, mental, physical - come from weight gain, things that people don't see on the surface & things that people don't understand until they've gone through them themselves. I never really gave a second thought to what I ate or how I felt until I started having food issues & gained weight, and over the years, I've come to value the gift of having high energy & being in-shape because that's something I was really missing out on for most of my life!



I also really like this quote by Arnold, where he talks about gaining that mastery over our low energy & our default impulses culminates in "having a body", which isn't something you can just go & buy. There are fat-loss surgeries available & even 6-pack implants available these days, but at the end of the day, we're all still stuck with our personal habits, systems, and worldviews, so until we adopt truth (ex. macros) & adopt or create an interface or a "steering wheel" for that information (ex. meal-prepping), it can be really, really difficult to have all-day energy, to be in EXACTLY the same you want to be in, to eat yummy food all day, to eat on your schedule, to save money by cooking at home, etc.! Which is a big reason I'm such a nerd about the Instant Pot & my Anova Precision Oven...they make the job of doing what I really want to do in order to live how I really want to live so much easier!

 

[Muse]

Arnold's is a unique story. Of course, being 7 time in a row Mr. Olympia makes you enviable in a way that's all but unobtainable for all the blokes envying him, which is part of his schtick. I'm better than you, period full stop. That's how he psyched out his competition at the Mr. Olympia contests. Some of his competition was absolutely capable of defeating him but he was stronger than them in gamesmanship. He was a master at that.

Arnold grew up super poor. I don't remember the details, maybe I never found them out, but I think to say scandalously poor, unimaginably poor might best characterize his Austrian upbringing, at least much of it. His first opportunity to do anything with his life came with developing his body, his physique and he latched onto that like a bulldog on a bone. He eventually realized his weaknesses (e.g. his legs, in particular his calves) were very underdeveloped, and he figured out how to overcome his weaknesses (as a BB competitor). By then he was killing it in his competitions.

BB as he got older got harder and he had to quit it in terms of competitions, in the way that ultra successful athletes need to retire from their sports. He wasn't one to retire to the gym a has been after being at the pinnacle of his sport and movie star was the next phase, he'd already been in a couple interesting flicks, "Pumping Iron," and I forget the other one I think about winning the Mr. O contest.

Not to be forgotten is the fact that to compete on that level you have to take steroids! That wasn't just diet and exercise.

 

[Kaido]

Not to be forgotten is the fact that to compete on that level you have to take steroids! That wasn't just diet and exercise.

Copious, copious amounts of steroids lol. I just went to a natural bodybuilding competition & exactly zero people there looked like Arnold lol. Stay puft!

 

[Torn Mind]

If humans cannibalized each other, the grain-fed ones would be on the bottom of the totem pole.

Easily digestible carbohydrates should be consumed in proportion to how much physical labor is going to be done and how many times you really want a deep cleanse of your mouth. The only amount you need is avoid feeling the cravings, which is not much. And the should be eaten in mannered manner with fork and knife(pizzas especially; I realize the French have the superior method of pizza-eating).

 

[Torn Mind]

Arnold's is a unique story. Of course, being 7 time in a row Mr. Olympia makes you enviable in a way that's all but unobtainable for all the blokes envying him, which is part of his schtick. I'm better than you, period full stop. That's how he psyched out his competition at the Mr. Olympia contests. Some of his competition was absolutely capable of defeating him but he was stronger than them in gamesmanship. He was a master at that.

Arnold grew up super poor. I don't remember the details, maybe I never found them out, but I think to say scandalously poor, unimaginably poor might best characterize his Austrian upbringing, at least much of it. His first opportunity to do anything with his life came with developing his body, his physique and he latched onto that like a bulldog on a bone. He eventually realized his weaknesses (e.g. his legs, in particular his calves) were very underdeveloped, and he figured out how to overcome his weaknesses (as a BB competitor). By then he was killing it in his competitions.

BB as he got older got harder and he had to quit it in terms of competitions, in the way that ultra successful athletes need to retire from their sports. He wasn't one to retire to the gym a has been after being at the pinnacle of his sport and movie star was the next phase, he'd already been in a couple interesting flicks, "Pumping Iron," and I forget the other one I think about winning the Mr. O contest.

Not to be forgotten is the fact that to compete on that level you have to take steroids! That wasn't just diet and exercise.

Copious, copious amounts of steroids lol. I just went to a natural bodybuilding competition & exactly zero people there looked like Arnold lol. Stay puft!

View attachment 54105

Bodybuilding these days is the equivalent of male insecurity and ED's. When look matters more than proper body function and vitamins. Quite a few have expired prematurely.

 

[Kaido]

Bodybuilding these days is the equivalent of male insecurity and ED's. When look matters more than proper body function and vitamins. Quite a few have expired prematurely.

There is a vocal fraction of the bodybuilding population who promote that whole situation online, but I found out it's actually a lot different in practice! The bodybuilding scene is actually one of the most inclusive groups I've ever been in. The natural bodybuilding competition I went to the other day had like 300+ people & everyone was CRAZY supportive of their friends & family who went on stage!

Growing up in the 80's & 90's, I always thought big muscles were cool because of movies, Arnold, etc., but I also thought it was a somewhat vain thing to do in-practice (read: my excuse for not exercising, LOL) until I started to get in shape. You feel good, you look good, you have LOTS of energy, and it really boils down to the mental challenge: can you be consistent at doing simple (but not necessarily easy!) things? Can you put in a 45-minute daily workout 5 days a week? Can you meal-prep so that you have yummy food available to eat all day that also hits your macros? Can you get enough sleep every day so that exercising & cooking aren't a major drag? These things are INCREDIBLY difficult to do day after day because they're our minor comfort items in life: eating what we want, when we want, without having to babysit our food intake, being able to stay up as late as we want, being lazy & not having to exercise, not having to make or follow a progressive workout plan, etc.

There are a lot of people who use steroids. The "Bigger Faster Stronger" documentary on Netflix is worth a watch & really changed my mind about steroid use (I choose not to use or support them personally, but I also understand them a lot better after watching that show), as I had a lot of misconceptions about them Trailer here:

For my buddy who got into macros & bodybuilding, the bodybuilding aspect is almost a side perk to just feeling good all the time, as he struggled with some health issues, such as chronic, severe acid reflux, and simply doesn't have to deal with those things anymore after cleaning up his body & his diet! So there are multiple angles to the story of bodybuilding...there are some "bros" who goof up their bodies, but I'd say the majority of people do it to look good, feel good, to get themselves to cook & eat consistently, to be healthy, etc. as it is VERY motivating to continue to workout when you get great visible results & when you feel awesome all the time!

I was a lump for most of my life (mostly due to undiagnosed health issues) & exercising daily, doing macros-based meal-prep, and getting enough sleep really changed my life around! The approach I take is effort-based, not work-based. My workouts are consistent & incremental in growth, not huge, heavy, infrequent sessions, and it's the same with my food...I rummaged through the pantry & fridge growing up, and now I have a really simple meal-prep system & some nice kitchen gadgets that help me eat great for every meal! So there's actually a lot of depth beneath the surface of the bodybuilding iceberg!

 

[BUTCH1]

What about brownies? "Denser" cakes are hard to eat and swallow. But soft and spongy cakes just melt in the mouth and they aren't always too sweet. Depends on the baker.

You might find this interesting: Free Program Intro: McDougall Diet | Dr. McDougall (drmcdougall.com)



List of recommended foods for this diet:
Starch Staples - Dr. McDougall (drmcdougall.com)
Fruits and Vegetables McDougall Diet | Dr. McDougall (drmcdougall.com)

Acceptable supermarket foods: Acceptable Canned and Packaged Foods - Dr. McDougall (drmcdougall.com)

Forbidden foods: List of Foods Not Allowed | Dr. McDougall (drmcdougall.com)

Recipes: Recipes Archive - Dr. McDougall (drmcdougall.com)

Parameters to track: Track Your Progress - Dr. McDougall (drmcdougall.com)

Did you really read that list?, no sane human could comply for more than a few days, this guy is pimping another fad diet that gets little recognition from anyone mainstream in nutritional science. Let me help you, there are 3 food groups,
meat, grease, and sugar, stay withing those and you'll be fine.

 

[snoopy7548]

Arnold's is a unique story. Of course, being 7 time in a row Mr. Olympia makes you enviable in a way that's all but unobtainable for all the blokes envying him, which is part of his schtick. I'm better than you, period full stop. That's how he psyched out his competition at the Mr. Olympia contests. Some of his competition was absolutely capable of defeating him but he was stronger than them in gamesmanship. He was a master at that.

Arnold grew up super poor. I don't remember the details, maybe I never found them out, but I think to say scandalously poor, unimaginably poor might best characterize his Austrian upbringing, at least much of it. His first opportunity to do anything with his life came with developing his body, his physique and he latched onto that like a bulldog on a bone. He eventually realized his weaknesses (e.g. his legs, in particular his calves) were very underdeveloped, and he figured out how to overcome his weaknesses (as a BB competitor). By then he was killing it in his competitions.

BB as he got older got harder and he had to quit it in terms of competitions, in the way that ultra successful athletes need to retire from their sports. He wasn't one to retire to the gym a has been after being at the pinnacle of his sport and movie star was the next phase, he'd already been in a couple interesting flicks, "Pumping Iron," and I forget the other one I think about winning the Mr. O contest.

Not to be forgotten is the fact that to compete on that level you have to take steroids! That wasn't just diet and exercise.

I find it fascinating Arnold became pregnant and never lost his great physique.

 

[Muse]

I find it fascinating Arnold became pregnant and never lost his great physique.

View attachment 54153

He didn't lose his virginity either, he's quite a guy.

Edit: Actually, IIRC he knocked up one of his maids.

 

[Kaido]

I find it fascinating Arnold became pregnant and never lost his great physique.

View attachment 54153

His twin brother was very proud of him!

 

[Torn Mind]

Short of doing hard drugs, being overweight is the worst thing you can do for your body. However, there are a lot of invisible barriers in the way. Like, I was a beanpole growing up & then was overweight twice in my life. Highest ever was 60 pounds. First time I tried to "eat clean", which worked, but wasn't sustainable. Second time, I did macros, and have just stuck with that ever since:

Macros tutorial

So for me, being overweight was never an issue. Then once I got married, started eating well all the time, and was stuck in a cubicle, I blew up lol. At that point, it wasn't about willpower, or self-discipline, or motivation, or anything like that, it literally just boiled down to a lack of knowledge:

1. I didn't know how macros worked
2. I didn't know how to cook
3. I didn't know how to meal-prep

I lived in a fog of misinformation: cheat meals, cheat days, clean eating, protein powder, protein drinks, protein bars, heavy exercise sessions, etc. The reality is, weight management boils down to food, not exercise. I've watched a few of these shows, and there's always a lot of invisible barriers going on. The first layer is access. To maintain that type of lifestyle, outside of fairly rare medical issues like Cushing's disease, requires one of two things:

Not being antagonistic, but I find the macros targeting rather simplistic and did not bring to light on how the macros work by themselves or how they interact with each other. While weight loss is a goal that would improve health upon being reached, there are further matters that can arise even without being overweight. NAFLD and heart disease remain threats even at healthy weights, and other chronic diseases caused by eating inflammatory foods and being deficient in vitamins and minerals.

Carbohydrates that are easily digestible are one of the most enabling foods for weight gain for a variety of reasons. They include physically absorbing oil in foods to trigger numerous hormonal and neural responses that increase appetite and periodic hunger, it is the macro that is inherently comes with the unwritten rule is that someone better engage in "work" after eating them.

The term itself also leads to ambiguity and confusion, because not all carbs have the same properties. Fiber/resistant starch have no caloric relevance.

Proteins are a filling, rich food that can come in nasty, barely edible lean cuts or it can come in fattier richer tasting and pleasing cuts. Hard to go wrong eating them, as they provide the materials the body needs. Neglected protein are organ meats, which are essentially natural multivitamins and mineral stores.

Fats are the most villified, yet not actually that harmful in isolation. Stearic acid, DHA, and EPA are just a few "fats" that are necessary for function, and the fat soluble vitamins come from the fatty parts of food, like egg yolk. Stearic acid improves mitochondrial processing of fats. Human stupidity is another factor, focusing only on density, which a ratio, and not actual "Demand". When someone fears 9 calories from 1 gram of fat but then decides to eat 4oz of pasta, that's stupidity.

Fiber and resistant starch might as well be their own macro. The "filler" macro as they don't provide calories but can kill hunger and supposedly feed the "right" gut bacteria(but there is a YMMV among people who do eat it).

 

[Kaido]

Not being antagonistic, but I find the macros targeting rather simplistic and did not bring to light on how the macros work by themselves or how they interact with each other. While weight loss is a goal that would improve health upon being reached, there are further matters that can arise even without being overweight. NAFLD and heart disease remain threats even at healthy weights, and other chronic diseases caused by eating inflammatory foods and being deficient in vitamins and minerals.

Yup, and the difficult thing is that people get overwhelmed with too much information & quit, which is why macros works so well - 3 easy numbers to hit, can use an app to track, an app to count packaged food, and a scale to measure food at home. Every single functional diet that exists works based off calorie reduction, but just eating ice cream every day at less calories than you burn doesn't work to make people healthy, so exactly like you said, we need those micro-nutrients too - fiber, minerals, vitamins, plus stuff like phytonutrients, which is why it's so important to eat real, whole foods!

I've found the biggest enemy of weight-loss is simply diffusion. Without a clear understanding of macros & a meal-prep plan in place, it's REALLY difficult to stick with things, and then the fog settles in & people go back to the standard, reactive way of living, i.e. eating whatever they want whenever they want. I love macros because I get to eat whatever I want, whenever I want, as long as it fits my macros (i.e. IIFYM haha), so there's just that extra (annoying) tracking aspect involved. But it's easy to get diffused from that clear target with all of the information & product marketing in the world! That's why I'm always spamming my macros tutorial...I get to look great & feel great 24/7 now AND eat the foods I love with zero guilt, because otherwise, it's so easy for me to run out of the door without breakfast, work through lunch, hit the vending machine up for a quick simple carb hit to keep me going, and then get fast-food on the way home. Which is functional for weight-loss if I were to track my macros for all that, but like you said, we can still eat crap that will wreck your body if you ingest too much of it!