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John_Maxwell_IV comments on Procedural Knowledge Gaps - Less Wrong
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At this point, my Expectancy for positive results from single changes like "just use a trainer at the gym" has hit essentially zero - I've tried all sorts of stuff, nothing ever fucking works - so I'm not willing to spend the incremental money. If I have a lot of money to spend, I'll try throwing a higher level of money at all aspects of the problem - get a trainer on weights, try the latest fad of "short interval bursts" for aerobic exercise, get LASIK and a big TV and a separate room of the apartment to make exercising less unpleasant (no, dears, I don't get any endorphins whatsoever), buy a wide variety of grass-fed organic meats and take one last shot at the paleo diet again, and... actually I think that's most of what I'd do. That way I'd be able to scrape up enough hope to make it worth a shot. Trying one item from that list doesn't seem worth the bother.
I did try Shangri-La again when Seth Roberts contacted me personally and asked me to take another shot. It was just wearing tight, uncomfortable noseplugs while eating all my food and clearing out time at night to make sure I took oil 1 hour away from eating any other food or brushing my teeth, a trivial inconvenience when I'd walk over broken glass to lose weight. I lost 20 pounds and then despite trying out around 10 different things Seth Roberts said to do, my weight slowly started creeping up again, and when after a while I gave up and stopped taking the oil to see what would happen, there was no change in the behavior of my weight - the same slow creep. It's clear that Shangri-La worked initially but then, contrary to all theory, it just mysteriously stopped working. So far I've gained 10 of those 20 pounds back, in accordance with the one truly reliable law of dietary science: 95% of the people who manage to lose weight put it back on shortly thereafter. BTW, exercise didn't lead me to lose any weight whatsoever, even when combined with an attempt at the paleo diet (albeit not one that spent lots of money, or involved a personal trainer).
So far as I can tell, all the advice here is from metabolically privileged folks who don't know they're metabolically privileged and don't comprehend the nothing fucking works phenomenon that obtains if you're not metabolically privileged.
If you want to give advice, that's fine. Don't tell me how well it's going to work or how easy it's going to be; that just tells me you're clueless.
If you don't mind my asking, why do you feel such a strong compulsion to lose weight? It feels to me like you're certainly justified in giving up at this point.
If thinking about your weight brings feelings of low status, this seems like a problem worth fixing. It's certainly much harder for me to think well when I'm feeling low status. But there are other methods for fixing low-status feelings, like having people social proof you, taking drugs, taking acting classes, meditating, giving yourself therapy, etc. (I'd be happy to elaborate on how any of these worked for me.)
I have given up, and it was indeed a great improvement in quality of life when I stopped trying to manage my weight - gave up and ate whatever, stopped going to the gym - and observed that my weight behaved in exactly the same way as before, the same slow upward creep at the same rate.
I don't know to what degree being overweight would be less painful if there wasn't a social stigma attached to it, but we don't actually live in that world.
Some questions from someone who is genuinely curious and has almost zero domain knowledge (I've never commented on this topic before, I don't think):
It seems to me that any social stigma would be based not on being overweight per se, but rather on the visual appearance of being overweight, i.e. being "fat". However, I don't find that your visual appearance is outside the normal variation that I expect to see among people in the contemporary United States. (In fact, I never would have guessed that you had an interest in this topic if you hadn't discussed it here.) So I'm quite curious about what evidence you've seen that you're suffering a social stigma.
Turning back from the social to the medical: given that you seem to naturally tend toward a certain "high" weight (I presume it doesn't actually increase without bound!) to what extent have you considered the possibility that the medical establishment's definition of "overweight" is wrong, or doesn't apply to you?
Do you think you would be experiencing the same phenomenon if you were living in the ancestral environment? Why or why not?
Have you tried eating less (e.g. only one meal per day)? If so, what was the result? If not, what do you predict would happen to your weight?
EY describes what happens when he eats less here:
Best wishes, the Unofficial Guide to Less Wrong (take that, Zack M. Davis!).
Yes, but I was asking specifically about the effect on weight.
(And notice that this also reinforces the relevance of my question #2 above.)
I'm curious: leaving aside weight and social stigma, have you found that the different levels of diet and exercise you've experimented with had any positive or negative effects? (E.g., mood, energy levels, endurance, etc.?)
I can walk farther after getting in a couple of weeks of regular walking.
That's it.
Basically, "no effect that I can detect with the naked eye".
It's true. But there are ways of dealing with social stigma's psychological effects that aren't removing the source of the stigma or changing society.
Could you expand on that?
As I mentioned above, having people social proof you, taking drugs, taking acting classes, meditating, and giving yourself therapy are all techniques worth experimenting with.
I could probably write a post about how I give myself therapy, but it might be difficult because essentially my self-therapy methods amount to phrases that get triggered in certain situations that remind me that feeling unhappy is not the rational thing to feel. (Example phrases: "I can deal with this level of emotional discomfort." "I give you my permission not to think about that." "As an exercise, try to feel [insert emotion here]." "Work with what you have." "Take a risk." "If I could choose to do X, I likely would.") It might be hard for me to extract all of my heuristics, because they get ingrained over time. (E.g. I find myself using "work with what you have" less because as a result of using it, I've made progress in ingraining the principle of not feeling demoralized by setbacks.)
Come to think of it, this approach (mostly implemented subconsciously) has been so effective that I'm thinking it might be a good idea to consciously invent phrases to correct other undesirable mental patterns. For example, I've noticed that if I hold some radical opinion, my radical opinion tends to get weaker over time--when left unmonitored, my opinions tend to drift towards socially accepted opinions. But maybe if I said "No opinion drift" to myself whenever I noticed that happening, then I'd be reminded that I should only change my opinions based on evidence and arguments and not intuitions that might be corrupted by what's socially accepted.
Oh yeah, one disadvantage of this self-therapy stuff seems to be a decreased ability to feel strong positive emotions. Basically to a certain extent, I've trained myself to stop feeling more or less any strong emotion whenever I start to feel it. So it's up to you to decide whether you want to be more of a robot or not.
Please write a post on this, if it's at all possible to discuss how you implant these phrases and how they help. I think it would really help me as well as others.
This isn't how I implanted them, but you could try using a spaced repetition system such as Anki:
http://ankisrs.net/
Whenever you saw a card corresponding to a phrase, you could challenge yourself to come up with a situation in your recent past which you could have used the phrase.
Alternatively, you could describe to me what stigma you tend to experience and I could tell you which phrases to use and how they apply to your situation. If you give me your email address, I can trivially send your future self a few reminders on what you should be keeping in mind (I use http://www.boomeranggmail.com/ for sending delayed emails). And, I'm extending this offer to anyone, not just Blueberry. If people are too embarrassed to discuss the stigma they are harmed by under their Less Wrong usernames, they can create shill usernames or email me with a shill email address at dreamalgebra on google's email service.
Also, I wonder if the system can be tweaked so that it doesn't undercut strong positive emotions which are in the harmless-to-useful range.