YOU ! but inverted.... Have you ever thought about stress this way ?

FunFormYep wrote: »

Xellercin wrote: »

I prefer the paradigm of distress vs eustress, where there are healthy stresses and unhealthy stresses.

High amounts of healthy stresses can contribute to overall well being, but even low amounts of unhealthy stresses can cause cumulative damage.

What determines if a stress is healthy or not usually comes down to the degree of autonomy the person holds within the stressful situation.

Autonomy is a major contributor to higher motivation especially when combined with a challenging/stimulating environment. I do agree with you on that one.

Xellercin wrote: »

So for example, I've been extremely stressed but energized by it when self-employed and dealing with difficult patients, but I cannot tolerate even a moderate amount of unfairness or unreasonableness when working for someone else.

If your life is primarily filled with healthy stress, it's remarkable how much of it you can take, just as it's remarkable how unsustainable chronic unhealthy stress is.

Working for someone else can be seen as taking away from the employee some autonomy which makes stress more annoying even unhealthy but nevertheless if it reaches the threshold of stress/arousal necessary for action it can still make the person do the right thing at the right time. Unfortunately a lot of employers benefit from that on the detriment of their employees health.

While on another hand, having a challenging community that you don't want to disappoint with your food choices is not technically working for them, but can still be stressful enough to keep you annoyingly away from that delicious chocolate bar !

• Is it healthy ? Unhealthy ? How do we judge stress here ?
• Is it better to stay away from unhealthy food rather than low on stress every time we have to make a food choice ?
• Or should we be looking to get a grab of our perfect "stress-autonomy-benefits" combination of our behavior that every time stress tries to play tricks with our minds more that we would like it to do, we recalibrate our thoughts on our sense of autonomy and the goals/benefits we have in mind ?

I wasn't talking specifically about diet, I was just commenting about a different model of stress and outcome benefit.

However, if we want to talk about weight loss specifically, I personally disagree with making it more stressful.

I lost from obese to very lean and kept off the weight by making healthy choices as easy and pleasant as possible.

By systematically designing a habit-building protocol with incremental, sustainable changes, using basic behavioural psychology tools, it's not hard to engineer a pathway to making a healthy lifestyle the easiest option.

Basically, in my life, eating a chocolate bar would be more effort than eating carrots and hummus because I don't have a chocolate bar in my house, I would have to leave my house, go to the store and buy one.

Research shows quite predictably that people crave whatever is the quickest option. So if you have unhealthy options available to you that take less time to consume than healthy options, then you will crave the unhealthy options.

One of the main reasons people crave convenience foods is because they are convenient.

This is basic neuroscience. Narcotics that take time to have their affects are less addictive than drugs that get people less high, but act quicker.

Use that basic biological function in your favour and make healthy food the quickest option available. I do this by batch cooking and never having processed convenience foods in my house.

If I want junk food, I have to leave my house to get it. Sometimes that's worth doing, but most of the time I'll just grab the extremely convenient and extremely delicious food that's already prepared and ready to eat in the fridge.

By making healthy options the laziest option available, it takes no will power to eat healthy the vast majority of the time.

When healthy habits don't depend on discipline and will power, they are much more resilient in times of added stress.

If you want a behaviour to become a persistent daily habit, it's best to engineer a way to make it as easy as possible so that it is the last habit to fall when times get tough, because when that happens *something* has to give.

This is why most people gain a ton of weight when sh-- inevitably hits the fan in their lives. This is unavoidable, life will predictably throw unmanageable crap at everyone, but gaining weight as a result is avoidable if the habits that sustain your healthy weight aren't built on will power.

So I'm a big, big proponent of making healthy lifestyle behaviours as minimally stressful and as easy as humanly possible. Let laziness work for you, not against you.

I'm wondering what the point of this discussion is for you, OP: What are you actually hoping to learn or accomplish in terms of real-world tactics or outcomes?

I do think the inverted U theory of stress makes sense in a physical training setting, but don't think that generalizes well to all forms of stress in all scenarios.

I don't have any particular credentials in the subject, but my personal operating idea is that stress is an energy expenditure. In a way, it's like a cost, a price tag.

As with dollar costs, I can spend my stress "budget" in various ways. Some of them are an investment, can lead to a productive outcome that's useful to me. (Well-managed exercise is an example of that, or a moderate calorie deficit that leads me to a healthy weight.)

Other stressors are a pure cost, but necessary. I might think of that as analogous to spending money on something tedious but necessary, like a car repair or the light bill. For example, my job included a good bit of stress, but I needed to accommodate some amount of stress on that front in order to have needful amounts of food, clothing, and shelter.

Another loose category would be (frankly) kind of dumb, optional stress. That's analogous to what we do with what's usually called discretionary spending, on the money front (though sometimes people do them with the rent money). There are a range of stressors there, some more dumb/optional than others. Staying up late at night and short-changing sleep might feel fun at the time, but it's high stress, and the fruits of the expenditure are bad outcomes, especially if I do too much of it. Staying in an overly-stressful job - if there are alternatives, but I'm scared to job-hunt, might be another example. There are tradeoffs in this category, sometimes, of short-term vs. long-term costs and benefits.

Overall, though, I have limited energy I can spend on stress - productive stress or dumb stress, cumulatively in total - before I crash and burn in some way. It's a budget that I need to manage.

IMO, that's part of the message of the inverted U for considering effects of physical training. The inflection point of the U is the cost/benefit change between productive stress and dumb stress. In other realms, the inverted U model might not apply as clearly.

If I stand back and squint, I'd say it applies in some ways to eating, but it's pretty approximate. For example, there's theoretically a calorie intake level where I achieve my weight goals (productive) but without damaging my health, without tanking my energy level to the detriment of my daily life, etc. (which would be dumb). I won't belabor it, but I could see some vaguely similar effects in terms of the tradeoffs between good nutrition, treats, and sustainability of an overall eating strategy. It's sort of straining the abstraction, though, IMO.

I'm going to pick at a specific point you made on the eating front, because I disagree with it pretty strongly:

Even though I can see the big picture of a varied diet, I can't seem to agree with you on this one. Only carrots is bad is due to the lack of diversion while Only candy bars is bad is due to the high artificial sugar content in it which is the core of bad health effects of candy bars in any varied or unvaried diet.

Only carrots is bad because it doesn't result in overall good nutrition, which is unhealthful. Only candy bars is bad because it doesn't result in overall good nutrition, which is unhealthful. It's all just food, with calories and nutrient tradeoffs.

Sure, in the "overall varied diet" that lietchi posited as the context for moderating either/both, we might need to moderate those two things in different ways in different amounts, because their calorie levels and nutrient density differ.

I'd say this, though, even though it's a silly reductio: If I had to choose one of the two diets, all carrots or all candy bars, I'd take the candy bars for nutrition as long as I get to choose the candy bar. Some of them have nuts, dairy, even raisins or stuff like that in them, so can be a more nutritionally varied, balanced stupid way of eating than the all-carrots stupid way of eating.

100g of carrots have 4.7g of sugar, and only 0.9g of protein. I'd need to eat around 11kg of carrots to hit my daily protein goal, at a cost of 4500ish calories. That would give me a whopping 521g of sugar, and sugar is sugar. I can't eat 11kg of carrots per day, I'd explode: 308g fiber, only 26g fat? Yikes - unholy digestive backup!

To hit my daily protein goal, I'd need to eat about 27 (50g) Snickers almond candy bars, which is admittedly more calories (6777) , but maybe not as much more sugar as you'd think (656g). I could eat 27 Snickers bars daily. Yeah, micronutrients would suffer, but I didn't even pick a candy bar with dried fruit in it, like Cadbury Fruit and Nut. I think that would probably kill me more slowly than the all-carrots diet would. (There's enough fiber for basic needs, and excess fats, of course, so no gut disasters in the short run, at least.)

Mono-diets are way stupid. The tradeoffs aren't always what you'd think. What matters is how a food fits in your overall diet. Y'know, some people need added sugar to thrive, such as endurance athletes who need to fuel long workouts without digestive distress. Pure glucose is better, in that scenario, than either candy bars or carrots.

Backing up again to the general point: I generally agree with Xellercin here from a theoretical standpoint (as I often do in threads), but I'm more hedonistic in my personal behavior so our tactics/tradeoffs differ. No need to belabor that. I also tend to agree with Lietchi, as I often do on a practical level.

I'm going to back to my starting question in my post: I'm wondering what the point of this discussion is for you, OP: What are you actually hoping to learn or accomplish in terms of real-world tactics or outcomes?

It's a super-theoretical question, which can be fun as an intellectual exercise. I'm not saying you're like me (I'd guarantee you're not, in diverse ways). For me, sometimes theorizing and over-analyzing is a scam I run on myself to avoid engaging with the concrete issue (IMO) of practical action (behavior) that leads to outcomes in my life . . . analysis paralysis is a snarky name for it. Like I said, that may not be where you're sitting on this thread, but my recognizing this as a weak point in me is what makes me wonder what you're hoping to achieve via this discussion.

Best wishes, sincerely, regardless of the point. It's a fun thing to talk about.

FunFormYep wrote: »

AnnPT77 wrote: »

I'm wondering what the point of this discussion is for you, OP: What are you actually hoping to learn or accomplish in terms of real-world tactics or outcomes?

I do think the inverted U theory of stress makes sense in a physical training setting, but don't think that generalizes well to all forms of stress in all scenarios.

I don't have any particular credentials in the subject, but my personal operating idea is that stress is an energy expenditure. In a way, it's like a cost, a price tag.

Overall, though, I have limited energy I can spend on stress - productive stress or dumb stress, cumulatively in total - before I crash and burn in some way. It's a budget that I need to manage.

IMO, that's part of the message of the inverted U for considering effects of physical training. The inflection point of the U is the cost/benefit change between productive stress and dumb stress. In other realms, the inverted U model might not apply as clearly.

Like I said to Lietchi in my last post, my goal was to see how people on here will react to the idea that we can see stress as a positive source of functioning. And maybe help them reflect on how they see stress, what is their own stress/arousal threshold for optimal functioning etc... and of course discuss just like we are doing !

Effectively, we managed to create a very good discussion. You people noted some interesting stuff that lack in the inverted U model and are usually used against it as a critic. Personal factors like sense of autonomy, psychology and mental & physical resources are not taken into consideration by the inverted U model.

Unhealthy is not decided by the amount consumed but by the effect the product has on health and it's contribution as a risk factor to different diseases. This is why I can't agree with you on the unhealthy food point, I think there are unhealthy food that are accessible for us and we psychologically enjoy eating them in different amounts but they are bad for our health no matter what.

This is what I just answered Lietchi and I stand by it. Mono-diets are not a good example unless someone is in a weird situation. I took it as a metaphorical example. But if you had the option to get your sugar from a candy bar or from a carrot, which would you choose? I will choose carrot every time. Food source, nutrient quality and insulin resistance are all better in the case of carrots instead of artificial processed sugar.

But has this ever actually been in question?

A lot of behaviour is motivated by stress, that's always been factually self evident.

It's not a question of whether or not stress is motivating, it is. The question is whether or not the person is working within their adaptive capacity or not.

If they aren't, then added stress will just contribute to more burnout and breakdown in their function over time.

Whether or not someone is functioning within their adaptive capacity comes down to how much unhealthy stress they are facing and for how long.

People don't generally fail to lose weight due to a lack of pressure, they fail due to a lack of adaptive capacity.

FunFormYep wrote: »

Lietchi wrote: »

FunFormYep wrote: »

@Lietchi

Unhealthy is not decided by the amount consumed but by the effect the product has on health and it's contribution as a risk factor to different diseases. This is why I can't agree with you on the unhealthy food point, I think there are unhealthy food that are accessible for us and we psychologically enjoy eating them in different amounts but they are bad for our health no matter what.

The effect the product has on health will depend on quantity and the overall diet.

+ @AnnPT77

Cocaine is bad because it has an addictive potential that destroys health over time. But we don't take that risk and snort cocaine once in a while.
Sugar has an addictive potential along side other acute (i.e. inflammatory) and chronic effects (i.e. insulin resistance). Why would I risk it and include artificial sugar in my diet ?

My point here is that the potential destructiveness of the product determines if it's healthy or unhealthy no matter if we have easy access to it or if we like to consume it or not. Unfortunately in our modern world, for example, sugar is unnecessarily included in quasi-every processed product on the supermarket's shelf. And it is because of that addictive like potential that will keep people coming for more. Artificial sugar is basically unnecessary and better glucose quality can be found in any other fresh fruit. If you don't agree on carrots you can still eat bananas for quick energy supplementation.

It's not orthorexia @AnnPT77 nor am I preaching. I am as vulnerable as everybody else concerning exposure to unhealthy choices. My goal is to discuss different visions and thank you for participating !

The anti added sugar force is strong in you 😉 yeah no, I totally disagree with the analogy between sugar and cocaïne. If it's addictive (big if, but that's another discussion) it is so for fewer people than cocaïne, and it definitely does not have the same destructive effects as cocaïne on health. (unless, obviously, you have diabetes for example).