Why Does Dieting Lead to Depression? - Huxiu.com#
#Omnivore
Highlights#
Here we are talking about "mental state," not physical strength, but the ability to focus on tasks. ⤴️ ^ef031d21
On the other hand, if you want to lose weight, eat too little, have a bad state, and can't do anything, not only is your work state not good, but your weight loss will also have no progress. ⤴️ ^e8078ec0
So being full of energy before losing weight is a correct statement hahaha
In fact, most of the time, people rely on attention rather than willpower. ⤴️ ^d35ba636
Why Does Dieting Lead to Depression?#
This article explores the reasons why dieting can lead to depression. The author shares their own experience with weight loss, pointing out that when faced with stress or boredom, overweight individuals often turn to eating to quickly restore their state. However, dieting itself creates an energy deficit and anxiety, leading to a vicious cycle. The article states that most people have a short attention span, and when their attention is completely depleted, eating becomes the only way to replenish it. However, dieting restricts the amount of food one can eat, leading to a decline in both state and attention, making weight loss even more difficult.
• 💡 A short attention span is one of the main reasons why weight loss is difficult.
• 💡 Lengthening the attention span through exercise can improve the success rate of weight loss.
• 💡 After successful weight loss, controlling diet is key to preventing rebound.
I didn't go to see that movie by Jia Ling. I roughly know what it's about from the Japanese version of "The Hundred Yen Love." The movie theater was a bit crowded during the holidays, so I haven't gone yet. But there's a behind-the-scenes video where Bai Zhan Tang saw that Jia Ling had lost so much weight and asked her if she was depressed.
I understand this very well. I am a seasoned weight loss enthusiast myself. After graduating from college, my weight has always had an impulse to rise, and weight loss has become a long-term thing.
I start losing weight every year after the Chinese New Year. By October, before the busy season starts, I lose weight back to normal. Then, during the delivery phase at the end of the year, I get busy and gain another 20 pounds in one breath. After the Chinese New Year, I have to start losing weight again. My weight has been like a sine wave over the years, and it seems like I've been trying to lose weight all the time.
Most people around me are the same. The most important thing in the lives of the coders in big companies is health issues because no one is really healthy.
This raises a question: why are there so many overweight people when everyone knows that weight loss boils down to "control your mouth and move your legs"? What's even more outrageous is that those people in first-tier big companies, almost all of them graduated from top universities. According to traditional beliefs, these people should be considered as having relatively high self-control after experiencing the brutal test of the college entrance examination and being able to work 996. But when you look at the obesity rate, it seems that they have no self-control at all.
I have a lot of experience with this.
If I have an important meeting in the evening, but I've been exhausted all day and in a very bad state, then I have to go and eat something delicious to restore my state. Or when I'm in a very bad state because of other things and want to quickly improve, the best way is to eat something delicious, and I can quickly recover. The higher the fat and high-carbohydrate content, the better the effect.
Later, I found out that it's not just me who has this problem. There are a bunch of people around me who seem to have this problem too. When they encounter troubles or need to be in a good state, they need to quickly recharge themselves, and the more high-fat and high-carbohydrate foods they eat, the better the effect.
It turns out that we are talking about "mental state" here, not physical strength, but the ability to focus on tasks. I think everyone has experienced this. There's no problem with physical strength, but you just feel annoyed and don't want to do anything.
Gradually, "eating" has become an important means of dealing with stress. What is stress? Stress is discomfort.
On the other hand, if you want to lose weight, eat too little, have a bad state, and can't do anything, not only is your work state not good, but your weight loss will also have no progress.
In other words, dieting itself can make you lose the will to lose weight.
Later, I read a book and understood this, that in fact, most of the time, people rely on attention rather than willpower.
I think everyone has experienced this. Sometimes, for example, if you wake up from a nap and drink a cup of coffee, you feel very focused and can do all kinds of difficult tasks without feeling tired or annoyed.
But attention span varies from person to person. Those energetic people have a very long attention span and can maintain stable output for more than ten hours a day. However, normal people can only sustain it for about an hour, and then their state is gone. They might play games, eat something delicious, or have a cup of coffee to recover a bit.
The extreme scenario is when some people suffer from "attention deficit disorder" and can't concentrate at all. They may need to take medication. Everyone, please note that this type of medication should not be taken without authorization. It is a controlled prescription drug, and taking it without proper supervision can get you into trouble. Many children have this problem. They can't concentrate at all, but their parents think they are mischievous and beat and scold them, but it doesn't work at all.
It's even worse for some middle-aged people. When they wake up in the morning, they feel completely drained of attention, dragging their exhausted bodies to do this and that. They are in this state all year round. This is the result of long-term overdraft, and it's really unbearable. You can't imagine.
In recent years, I have discovered that those who have high achievements in academics and careers are not necessarily very smart people, but they are definitely people with a lot of attention. They can withstand long battles of attrition and still maintain a good state.
Normal people can't do that. They get annoyed after a while of doing serious work. They can't even watch a course on Bilibili for twenty minutes without feeling overwhelmed. People tend to attribute it to "lack of willpower," but those high achievers don't rely on willpower to persevere. They just don't feel that anything is difficult.
You can understand each person's attention as a pool of water. Doing serious work requires consuming this water. Once it's completely depleted, you can't continue, or when you try to continue, your state is extremely poor, and you can't concentrate at all.
So overweight people are caught in a dilemma. Their biggest way to "replenish" is to eat, which means they need to use "eating" as a means to cope with work and weight loss at the same time.
When work pressure is not high, the attention span can cope with work and weight loss. When work pressure increases, they need to overeat to recharge themselves.
This is when you can see the difficulty of losing weight. The most difficult part is that when you don't eat enough, your state becomes extremely poor, and your attention is also affected. You feel annoyed and can't continue with normal work, let alone weight loss.
For me personally, when there's nothing special going on, I don't eat dinner and have a habit of exercising. I endure the feeling of hunger and lose weight quickly. But every year during the delivery season, when the pressure is high, if my state is not good, it means death. I can't help but eat a lot at night to maintain my state. The project is delivered successfully, but my weight soars.
Observing the people around me, they are basically in the same situation. Everyone can survive the brutal college entrance examination and focus on studying without entertainment during their four years of university. These are not problems because they are a group of people with a "attention pool" that is super large. But having a large pool doesn't mean they don't need to replenish it. As work after graduation becomes more and more troublesome, the attention pool is still not enough. The ultimate way for everyone to replenish it is to eat delicious food.
Of course, "eating" itself is a cheap way to replenish energy. There are many other ways, such as fishing, playing with cars, playing games, or playing other things that can't be mentioned. Both the monetary and time costs are outrageous.
That's why you often hear people say that someone quit their job to start a business and gained a hundred pounds within two years, giving the impression that stress leads to obesity. In fact, without exception, it is the excessive consumption of attention caused by work that needs continuous replenishment. "Eating" is the fastest way for them to replenish.
A year after my colleague left the company due to health issues, I saw him again, and he looked like a different person. He had lost seventy to eighty pounds. He said to me, "Losing weight is not difficult, what's difficult is losing weight while working." He also said, "Taking care of children is not difficult at all, what's difficult is taking care of children while working." After a whole day of work, you just feel annoyed and don't want to do anything.
You know there's a weight loss drug called Sibutramine, which I have also used. It does make you not feel hungry, but it doesn't reduce the continuous anxiety caused by the energy deficit. Moreover, this drug only controls appetite, and if you eat a little more, you can still gain weight.
So many people who use this drug haven't lost weight, or they initially lost some weight but gained it back later. In essence, the continuous anxiety caused by the energy deficit cannot be resolved, and it naturally leads you to "eat more." Once you exceed the body's energy consumption value, you will gain weight.
With that said, it is clear that most people who are prone to obesity have an "eating-prone constitution." When faced with stress or discomfort, their first reaction is to solve it by eating.
You can also choose not to eat, but the problem is that your state becomes extremely poor, and you feel annoyed and can't do anything. If you have a daily energy deficit of seven to eight hundred calories, you will lose weight quickly, but you may not even be able to play games.
Returning to the beginning of the article, Bai Zhan Tang is concerned about whether Jia Ling is depressed. I think Bai Zhan Tang himself understands this. He has become so fat himself, and as a celebrity, he definitely knows the importance of losing weight. He has probably tried countless times and experienced the continuous anxiety caused by the energy deficit. He thinks that losing so much weight may cause continuous anxiety, which is no different from depression.
There's a question these days, saying "give you one million, and you can lose weight too." Actually, it depends on the situation.
If you are simply given money and don't have to work, focusing solely on losing weight, then it's not difficult at all. You can even go to a weight loss camp. You may not know about weight loss camps. You pay the money, and a bus takes you to a camp in the deep mountains. Once the camp gate is closed, it's like Yang Yongxin's internet addiction treatment center, where you call heaven and earth, but they don't respond.
It's like military training there, with daily quotas for eating and drinking, low oil and low fat, early to bed and early to rise. A professional coach leads you to run and exercise. At first, you may resist, but if you can get through the first week, it's fine. Individuals can lose weight in this environment, but the cost is too high. Most people have to quit their jobs, which is obviously not realistic.
But the problem is, if you are given one million and still have to work intensively without making any mistakes, and you have to lose weight quickly, it's probably going to cost overweight people their lives. If the situation is more complicated, such as losing weight while participating in high-difficulty projects or taking the college entrance examination, it will be very, very difficult because the goals are conflicting.
With that said, everyone can see that for most people, the difficulty of life lies in having a naturally short attention span, which is then depleted by a bunch of trivial matters. The only way to replenish it is to eat. Now that eating is not allowed, it's better to just die.
In recent years, there have also been many fitness coaches among the readers. According to their feedback, most of those who were very fat but succeeded in losing weight in the gym were those who used other people's working hours to exercise. The worst ones were those who worked from nine to five without overtime. Those who worked during the day, went to the gym late at night, and on weekends had a very low success rate. If it weren't for performance pressure, the coaches would want to directly advise them to quit.
In fact, it's the same for other things. Most people end up with nothing because they naturally have a short attention span and are depleted by various things. They may not be unwilling, but their attention span is short, and they can't concentrate on anything, from childhood to adulthood.
Is there a solution?
Nowadays, the best solution is generally considered to be exercising and reducing carbohydrate intake to lengthen the attention span through continuous training.
This is a bit like the setting in the famous game "Elden Ring." The characters in the game have a health bar. When the level is low, they can be killed by small monsters. When the level is high, they can't be killed even if they are hit by the big boss three times. So if you can't beat the big boss because you have poor gaming skills, you should find a place to level up quickly.
Exercise is like leveling up for our bodies. Only by practicing continuously can we have a longer health bar and attention span to deal with the "big bosses" in life.
But this itself is an energy-consuming operation. If your life has been tormented by work and there is not much attention left, you may not be able to do it.
Reducing carbohydrate intake means eating more protein and less carbohydrates, such as cakes and rice. Here, it means eating a little less, not not eating at all. The human brain needs glucose. Except for a few people, most people's mood will collapse after a few days without carbohydrates. At least that's how it is for me.
And generally speaking, those who have successfully lost weight are those who have starved themselves. This involves a first principle: you must consume less than you expend. As long as this inequality is satisfied, you will definitely feel hungry. This is the basic mechanism of our bodies. If there is an energy deficit and there is no alarm, then there is a problem. Hunger is the body's alarm.
People who lose weight purely through exercise without controlling their diet generally have more free time, and their rebound will be very, very severe. In the short term, it may not be obvious, but in the long run, it's usually like this. Those who can maintain their weight loss without rebounding almost always control their diet.
The best way is still to continuously exercise and lengthen the attention span, so that both weight loss and work can be done with energy.
Generally speaking, if you treat weight loss as the purpose of fitness, it's easy to give up. If the goal is to lengthen the attention span, it is relatively easier. After about a month of exercise, you can feel the change in your physical condition. When the attention span becomes longer, both work and weight loss become much easier.
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