"We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality." -- Seneca c. 4 BC 65 AD
This has been true for me, mostly in fearing that splurge of snacking would amount to more calories than it did once I logged it.
It also became true in that losing the weight -- although seeming to take a long time as I was losing it -- was relatively brief in the context of my life that preceded and followed it.
And that's a quality of suffering. While suffering, we aren't thinking about what preceded and what follows; we're thinking of the right now and projecting that now into the future (fear). We have no idea whether its imaginary or real, because we haven't yet evaluated it.
The antidote to fear is information, and one thing that /r/loseit members often do is keep track of calories, activities, dates, distances, charts, recaps. We have data. We can turn to our data; and we can turn the thing we're suffering about into data and look at it in context.
Yes, I ate the whole can of nuts. THE WHOLE CAN! How stupid and greedy is that? I suck!!!! It should have lasted a week or two!!
And so we do the math ... River Queen Fancy Nuts, 175 Calories per serving, 8 servings per container = 1400 Calories. Yikes. Yeah -- suckage confirmed.
Okay, so I was planning on being -500 today but 1400 will put me +900 instead. Yeah, not a "green" Calorie sum day today, for sure! Damn!
And so how bad? 3555 Calories in a pound of fat, and I ate 900 so I will gain 900/3555 = 0.2531645569620253 (why do calculators do that? C'mon!!)
So, I can round to the nearest 100th so +900 Calories is +0.25 pounds. Not great -- but suddenly "not great" feels a whole lot better than I felt ten minutes ago. If I was planning on losing 1 pound this week, I'll lose 0.75 pounds instead.
Because Seneca was right, it's true -- we suffer more from imagination than from reality
♂55 5'11/179㎝ SW:298℔/135㎏ CW:183℔/83㎏ [3Y AMA], [1Y recap] MyFitnessPal+WalksπΆHikes+TOPS
-> Learn the easy way to loose fat
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