Dropping 20lbs+ or more past 40 significantly ages people’s looks

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08/25/2022 16:39

Subject: Dropping 20lbs+ or more past 40 significantly ages people’s looks

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Anonymous

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The feminine dilemma of being unattractive because you are a round lump vs. being unattractive because you look old.

I love the advice in here about losing the weight slowly. Are you kidding me? I will lose the weight any way I possibly can! Weight loss (especially substantial weight loss) can be difficult to make happen in any state and a lot of the difficulty comes from getting yourself in the right mental state to do it. So making THAT part more difficult -- psyching yourself up to make those tough choices, and then putting a hold on that and going back to normal for a while, and then psyching yourself up to start again -- I'm sure some people can do that but no thank you. IT IS HARD ENOUGH! Not gonna make it harder on myself.

I'm not going to say I hate this thread and everyone in here, exactly ... but some of it is not good imho.

I am one of the posters who recommended this. I don't think you understand. If you stop eating and lose five pounds or more in a week it won't be sustainable and you will gain it back. But if you lose one or two pounds than your body adjusts to your new weight gradually. So, you have to have more patience but, it isn't harder.

I am a person who was 190 three years ago and now I weigh 143. I still have to lose about 8 more pounds but, I am much better than I was at 190. Do you understand?

I'm the poster who has lost over 75 lbs in the past year so I think I can wrap my mind around what you're saying, thanks. And fwiw, the actual advice in the thread I was taking issue with wasn't just to lose slowly, but to lose and then to STOP LOSING ALTOGETHER for a month or three and then to start up again:

So lose 10 lbs, pause and maintain for a month, lose 10 more. Or lose for 6 months, pause and maintain for 3 months, go back to losing.

I don't think I could have had the same successful weight loss journey if I had stopped trying to lose weight every month or so to level out and just maintain, and then worked myself up to losing again after another one to three months. My weight loss progress has mostly been a pound or two a week anyway, so I'm already practicing pretty healthy and sustainable habits. For someone like me who needed to lose a lot of weight, that whole stop and start approach would have been incredibly hard. If I had done what I did last year and lost 35 pounds in six months, and then heard this lecture that I needed to take a sunken cheeks three-month breather and just maintain (rather than losing another 35 lbs across the next 6 months), I would probably have stopped altogether. I would have lost all the momentum and positivity I was feeling just to add delay because a random person thinks it's a good idea. Maybe this would be helpful for folks who are trying to lose 10 or 15 pounds, or for folks needing to lose more who are psychologically built differently than I am, but holy moly I would never have made it this far doing that.

This whole idea that you're going to encourage people to put up additional psychological and temporal road blocks to making progress on their weight loss because someone somewhere thinks their friend's cheeks look sunken is in my opinion not very helpful but YMMV. I am glad that the approach you have described has worked for you over the last 3 years as you have progressed on your weight loss journey, but I hope you can understand that I also feel much better at 177 right now than I did 13 months ago at 256, that my approach has worked for me (though it won't work for everyone else), that my cheeks aren't sunken, and that for some people encouraging a mid-loss delay will just halt weight loss progress altogether and change their mindset. Weight loss is already hard, we don't really need to make it harder imho.

You don't do the weight loss pause to prevent sunken cheeks; some research suggests that periodic pauses are associated with better weight maintenance after weight loss. Which is for many much harder than losing weight in the first place. Note, your body often does the pauses for you with plateaus--many people find it more psychologically helpful to plan the plateaus themselves in their dieting--so they don't have the experience of restricting calories more and more and not getting anywhere. Intentional pauses seem for at least some people head off the inevitable plateaus. But like most diet advice, YMMV.