TDX00's Journal, 04 Jun 23

There are quite a few people in my life who are very obese, just as I was; friends, family, colleagues, etc. They've all seen me drop 40kg+ over the past 10 months or so, and all have commented on how impressed they are with my progress. Immediately after these graciously received complements, they either go on to tell me that they need to start a diet, or that they're on a diet too. They all have two things in common. They all seem genuinely concerned about their weight issues, and none of them want to hear any advice on dieting from me whatsoever.

It's not like I going around dishing out unsolicited advice - I keep my mouth zipped and wait for them to ask how I did it, though they simply never ask. They genuinely don't want to know.

For those who tell me they're on a diet, I will always ask what kind of diet they're on - I genuinely DO want to know. Every single time, they whip out their phone and show me the random dieting app that's been helping them fail to lose weight for however long, and every single time I immediately spot massive red flags. It's at this point that I feel the NEED to gingerly, delicately, tactfully dish out some wisdom of experience, though it's always very clear that my carefully delivered concerns fall on deaf ears. They already know everything, and the last thing they need is advice from the guy who has pulled off what they've been failing to do for fuck knows how long.

Today I took my young son to his cousin's birthday party. Long story short, and closely flowing the patterns described above, I learned that my cousin's partner is following an app-based diet plan of three-fucking-thousand calories a day! They bloke already weighs like 125kg, he's perfectly fucking round, does zero exercise (not essential, though might've justified the absurd calorie intake), and he seemed genuinely bewildered that he hasn't been losing weight even though he's been near-perfectly following the meal plans the app spits out for the past two months. Well what could I say but, "Oh wow, I could never lose weight on 3,000 calories a day - I'm only on half that! That's gotta be some kind of body-builder's diet, right!?" Rather than take the hint, he just defended the diet plan - some bullshit about the app using science-based research to design meals that blah blah blah... With the possible exception of a ketogenic diet, 3,000 calories of the healthiest meals on Earth is still 3,000 calories. He will not lose weight.

A bloke at work thinks he can solve his weight problem by throwing expensive technologies at it. He pays something like $40/month for a fancy health-tracking/calorie counting app, he wears a fancy fitness tracker around his waist that feeds all sort of data back into the app, and he even has a fancy bluetooth-enabled water bottle that tells the app how much water he drinks. Utterly pointless, all of it, because it's clear that he's not actually counting the calories he eats. He LOVES going on about all the things this fancy shit can do, though when I ask if if it's been helping him lose weight, all he has to offer is excuses. The bloke has lost no weight in the year I've known him. He's not putting in the work. Unless they invent a robot that can slap GyG breakfast burritos out of your hands, he will not lose weight.

My sister and her husband are (now) the two largest people in my family, and I care about them a great deal. They're some of the nicest people you could ever hope to meet. Nothing would make me happier than to see them lose some weight, because I want them to stick around long enough to see their two young daughters (my nieces) grow in to young women, who I fully expect to also become some of the nicest people who could ever hope to meet. When we all caught up a few weeks ago, my bother-in-law complimented my progress then told me that he and my sister were on a new diet - another mobile app, which focused on eating healthy foods with no real consideration to quantity. Further probing revealed that he had no real appreciation for how integral a calorie deficit was to fat loss. Because I genuinely cared about his health, I bent my personal rules on unsolicited advice and simply recommended that he just double-check how many calories he is eating in a day - you know, just in case. He feigned agreement, but it was clear he had no intention of doing so. He either believed that simply eating healthy was going to be enough, or that eating healthy meals was the limit to which he would go for his weight loss goals. He will not lose weight, and worst case scenario, I have to walk my God-daughter down the aisle at her wedding.

I'm not claiming to be a dieting expert here - I am most certainly not, not even close! To paraphrase Plato's account of Socrates, "I know that I know nothing". BUT... what I do have is experience. I know how to design and implement complex audio visual control systems because I've been doing it half my life, I know which songs will get people off their arses and on to the dance floor at a party because I spent the other half of my life DJ'ing school dances, weddings, birthdays... and I know how to lose a kilo of fat because I've done it over 40 times in the past year. It seems that an interested person with no experience would eagerly take my advice on AV system design, or even what the final song should be on their wedding playlist, but when it comes to dieting, everyone is already a fucking expert.

94.8 kg Lost so far: 43.5 kg.    Still to go: 4.8 kg.    Diet followed: Reasonably Well.

---

727 kcal

Fat: 30.20g | Prot: 30.70g | Carbs: 76.30g.   Breakfast: Coles Large Soft White Wraps, Coles American BBQ Slaw Kit, Thomson's Deli Short Cut Rindless Bacon. more...