#ask me to tag something else on it if you nesd to

[dea-certe]

You know, every time I prove that Calories In, Calories Out weight loss is bullshit, I'm always amazed at how people in my life are shocked. I'm also surprised by how many people call bullshit on it and tell me I'm lying.

So, my job had this yearly thing they do where they give out points (which can then be used for things like e gift cards or various things like jewelry, furniture, kitchen ware, electronics, basically anything you can think of) if you sign up in this app which you input your food, water, exercise, and weight. Keeping those metrics within a certain threshold (like enough water, enough daily steps) gets you more points. I (like most people) like the rewards because they can be used for real world dollars (you can get prepaid Mastercards with like 10, 20, 50 loaded on it). So I usually always participate.

And since I started on anti depressants, my weight has slowly increased until plateaued at 160-165. In the last 6 months, I haven't gone below 160 once. Until today. And the only change I made was to add an extra 400-600 calories a day. Basically, I started eating snacks in between meals. We get 2 15 min breaks during the day in addition to our lunch breaks and I used to use those to sit back and scroll online, but in the last week, I've started eating snacks while I do that. Granted, they are "healthy" snacks, but I've always loved veggies and so adding some peas and carrots and tomatoes and salads to my daily eating isn't really a huge sacrifice. I actually love those.

And it's only been a week, but I just weighed myself to add to my weekly updates and found that I only weighed 150. Now, I am on the low weight side of my monthly cycle, but I usually only go down to 160-162. So I've obviously lost weight by adding more calories.

Now, here's where things get shitty. The app we use shares our updates with everyone else. And I have gotten a few nasty comments about how I must be lying about what I eat because there is no way I increased calories and lost weight. And like, science does not agree but these people are so entrenched in their world view of CICO that they can't possibly accept anything else. And like, a look at their pages shows their BMI scores are similar to mine (I'm only 5 feet tall, so my BMI score says I'm horribly overweight, but I've never cared about that because BMI is so obviously bullshit, but of course the app we use uses it as part of the measure of our health) and they're eating like 800-1200 calories a day mostly. And I'm eating 2000-2500. And apparently doing that while losing weight is just such an affront to these people, that they have to assume I'm lying.

And of course I just ignored them and moved on because one should never feed the trolls, but it just struck me as like so on brand with our ulture around health and weight that these people felt no qualms about calling me a lying bitch because what my updates show threatens their entire sense of self. I've seen it before when I've mentioned that in order to lose weight (as so many of my coworkers talk about because our job is mostly sedentary and a majority of the people I work with are "overweight" women and until a year ago when I started anti depressants, I was barely able to break 110 on a scale so they assumed I must be the pinnacle of health despite the fact that pictures of me from then scare me because I looked like I was majorly ill because I was so skinny) you have to eat more often to get your metabolism to wake the fuck up and stop assuming you're starving from lack of resources and so it needs to hang on to every inch of fat and energy it can get.

And that is just so much the opposite if every diet industry advice that people get mad when that advice works.

Anyway, sometimes I butt up against the diet industries brainwashed victims and I am struck by the weirdness of it all.