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@runhealrepeat
You CAN do pullups, my friend!
Gym Rings: https://hybridcalisthenics.com/rings Free DIY Rings (Save Money): https://hybridcalisthenics.com/DIYrings
i adore this guy. he’s got such chill energy, and gives clear information on multiple levels of an exercise. i’m disabled and largely bedridden, and having someone that tells you where to start without being condescending in ANY way is…much harder to find than it should be.
food that’s totally devoid of nutritional value doesn’t exist. all food has macronutrients which our bodies rely on to support life, and the vast majority of food has a significant amount of micronutrients. pop tarts, cheeseburgers, french fries, pizza, cookies, chips, white flour products and other demonized foods contain vital micronutrients such as iron, calcium, magnesium, potassium, b vitamins, vitamin c, and more. meat is a better source of some essential micronutrients than plant foods.
vegetables and fruits are great, as are legumes, but they’re not the only nutrient-dense foods. they tend to be lower calorie & higher fiber foods, tho, which in conditions of scarcity (the reality for many ppl on earth, incl the ~developed world~) are far less efficient delivery systems for nutrients.
“empty calories” aren’t a thing - calories are units of energy - and you’d have to work pretty hard to find a food that contained no significant amount of any micronutrient. again, all foods have the macronutrients that keep us alive.
kindly get off my posts about the health benefits of eating foods you enjoy w this shaming nonsense about “foods that have no nutritional value”. i’m sorry your relationship w food is characterized by fear & a mistrust of pleasure, but we’re not here to keep you company in your misery
5 simple exercises to awaken dormant muscles
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I appreciate this video a lot--people don't realize how important it is to start slow if you're trying to come back from a completely sedentary lifestyle, and they get really hurt as a result. Straining your muscles too much, too suddenly can land you in the E.R. and the wrong joint injury can permanently affect your mobility, so please start with absolute basics and easy stretches!
Yes!!!!!
they have a point though. you wouldn't need everyone to accommodate you if you just lost weight, but you're too lazy to stick to a healthy diet and exercise. it's that simple. I'd like to see you back up your claims, but you have no proof. you have got to stop lying to yourselves and face the facts
Must I go through this again? Fine. FINE. You guys are working my nerves today. You want to talk about facing the facts? Let's face the fucking facts.
In 2022, the US market cap of the weight loss industry was $75 billion [1, 3]. In 2021, the global market cap of the weight loss industry was estimated at $224.27 billion [2].
In 2020, the market shrunk by about 25%, but rebounded and then some since then [1, 3] By 2030, the global weight loss industry is expected to be valued at $405.4 billion [2]. If diets really worked, this industry would fall overnight.
1. LaRosa, J. March 10, 2022. "U.S. Weight Loss Market Shrinks by 25% in 2020 with Pandemic, but Rebounds in 2021." Market Research Blog. 2. Staff. February 09, 2023. "[Latest] Global Weight Loss and Weight Management Market Size/Share Worth." Facts and Factors Research. 3. LaRosa, J. March 27, 2023. "U.S. Weight Loss Market Partially Recovers from the Pandemic." Market Research Blog.
Over 50 years of research conclusively demonstrates that virtually everyone who intentionally loses weight by manipulating their eating and exercise habits will regain the weight they lost within 3-5 years. And 75% will actually regain more weight than they lost [4].
4. Mann, T., Tomiyama, A.J., Westling, E., Lew, A.M., Samuels, B., Chatman, J. (2007). "Medicare’s Search For Effective Obesity Treatments: Diets Are Not The Answer." The American Psychologist, 62, 220-233. U.S. National Library of Medicine, Apr. 2007.
The annual odds of a fat person attaining a so-called “normal” weight and maintaining that for 5 years is approximately 1 in 1000 [5].
5. Fildes, A., Charlton, J., Rudisill, C., Littlejohns, P., Prevost, A.T., & Gulliford, M.C. (2015). “Probability of an Obese Person Attaining Normal Body Weight: Cohort Study Using Electronic Health Records.” American Journal of Public Health, July 16, 2015: e1–e6.
Doctors became so desperate that they resorted to amputating parts of the digestive tract (bariatric surgery) in the hopes that it might finally result in long-term weight-loss. Except that doesn’t work either. [6] And it turns out it causes death [7], addiction [8], malnutrition [9], and suicide [7].
6. Magro, Daniéla Oliviera, et al. “Long-Term Weight Regain after Gastric Bypass: A 5-Year Prospective Study - Obesity Surgery.” SpringerLink, 8 Apr. 2008. 7. Omalu, Bennet I, et al. “Death Rates and Causes of Death After Bariatric Surgery for Pennsylvania Residents, 1995 to 2004.” Jama Network, 1 Oct. 2007. 8. King, Wendy C., et al. “Prevalence of Alcohol Use Disorders Before and After Bariatric Surgery.” Jama Network, 20 June 2012. 9. Gletsu-Miller, Nana, and Breanne N. Wright. “Mineral Malnutrition Following Bariatric Surgery.” Advances In Nutrition: An International Review Journal, Sept. 2013.
Evidence suggests that repeatedly losing and gaining weight is linked to cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes and altered immune function [10].
10. Tomiyama, A Janet, et al. “Long‐term Effects of Dieting: Is Weight Loss Related to Health?” Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 6 July 2017.
Prescribed weight loss is the leading predictor of eating disorders [11].
11. Patton, GC, et al. “Onset of Adolescent Eating Disorders: Population Based Cohort Study over 3 Years.” BMJ (Clinical Research Ed.), 20 Mar. 1999.
The idea that “obesity” is unhealthy and can cause or exacerbate illnesses is a biased misrepresentation of the scientific literature that is informed more by bigotry than credible science [12].
12. Medvedyuk, Stella, et al. “Ideology, Obesity and the Social Determinants of Health: A Critical Analysis of the Obesity and Health Relationship” Taylor & Francis Online, 7 June 2017.
“Obesity” has no proven causative role in the onset of any chronic condition [13, 14] and its appearance may be a protective response to the onset of numerous chronic conditions generated from currently unknown causes [15, 16, 17, 18].
13. Kahn, BB, and JS Flier. “Obesity and Insulin Resistance.” The Journal of Clinical Investigation, Aug. 2000. 14. Cofield, Stacey S, et al. “Use of Causal Language in Observational Studies of Obesity and Nutrition.” Obesity Facts, 3 Dec. 2010. 15. Lavie, Carl J, et al. “Obesity and Cardiovascular Disease: Risk Factor, Paradox, and Impact of Weight Loss.” Journal of the American College of Cardiology, 26 May 2009. 16. Uretsky, Seth, et al. “Obesity Paradox in Patients with Hypertension and Coronary Artery Disease.” The American Journal of Medicine, Oct. 2007. 17. Mullen, John T, et al. “The Obesity Paradox: Body Mass Index and Outcomes in Patients Undergoing Nonbariatric General Surgery.” Annals of Surgery, July 2005. 18. Tseng, Chin-Hsiao. “Obesity Paradox: Differential Effects on Cancer and Noncancer Mortality in Patients with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus.” Atherosclerosis, Jan. 2013.
Fatness was associated with only 1/3 the associated deaths that previous research estimated and being “overweight” conferred no increased risk at all, and may even be a protective factor against all-causes mortality relative to lower weight categories [19].
19. Flegal, Katherine M. “The Obesity Wars and the Education of a Researcher: A Personal Account.” Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases, 15 June 2021.
Studies have observed that about 30% of so-called “normal weight” people are “unhealthy” whereas about 50% of so-called “overweight” people are “healthy”. Thus, using the BMI as an indicator of health results in the misclassification of some 75 million people in the United States alone [20].
20. Rey-López, JP, et al. “The Prevalence of Metabolically Healthy Obesity: A Systematic Review and Critical Evaluation of the Definitions Used.” Obesity Reviews : An Official Journal of the International Association for the Study of Obesity, 15 Oct. 2014.
While epidemiologists use BMI to calculate national obesity rates (nearly 35% for adults and 18% for kids), the distinctions can be arbitrary. In 1998, the National Institutes of Health lowered the overweight threshold from 27.8 to 25—branding roughly 29 million Americans as fat overnight—to match international guidelines. But critics noted that those guidelines were drafted in part by the International Obesity Task Force, whose two principal funders were companies making weight loss drugs [21].
21. Butler, Kiera. “Why BMI Is a Big Fat Scam.” Mother Jones, 25 Aug. 2014.
Body size is largely determined by genetics [22].
22. Wardle, J. Carnell, C. Haworth, R. Plomin. “Evidence for a strong genetic influence on childhood adiposity despite the force of the obesogenic environment” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition Vol. 87, No. 2, Pages 398-404, February 2008.
Healthy lifestyle habits are associated with a significant decrease in mortality regardless of baseline body mass index [23].
23. Matheson, Eric M, et al. “Healthy Lifestyle Habits and Mortality in Overweight and Obese Individuals.” Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine : JABFM, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 25 Feb. 2012.
Weight stigma itself is deadly. Research shows that weight-based discrimination increases risk of death by 60% [24].
24. Sutin, Angela R., et al. “Weight Discrimination and Risk of Mortality .” Association for Psychological Science, 25 Sept. 2015.
Fat stigma in the medical establishment [25] and society at large arguably [26] kills more fat people than fat does [27, 28, 29].
25. Puhl, Rebecca, and Kelly D. Bronwell. “Bias, Discrimination, and Obesity.” Obesity Research, 6 Sept. 2012. 26. Engber, Daniel. “Glutton Intolerance: What If a War on Obesity Only Makes the Problem Worse?” Slate, 5 Oct. 2009. 27. Teachman, B. A., Gapinski, K. D., Brownell, K. D., Rawlins, M., & Jeyaram, S. (2003). Demonstrations of implicit anti-fat bias: The impact of providing causal information and evoking empathy. Health Psychology, 22(1), 68–78. 28. Chastain, Ragen. “So My Doctor Tried to Kill Me.” Dances With Fat, 15 Dec. 2009. 29. Sutin, Angelina R, Yannick Stephan, and Antonio Terraciano. “Weight Discrimination and Risk of Mortality.” Psychological Science, 26 Nov. 2015.
There's my "proof." Where is yours?
Apologies if you've already answered this somewhere, but apart from eating lots of vegetables - what are guidelines to follow or know about in eating a 'healthy diet' (especially if you don't eat meat)? I'm interested in trying to make sure my body has what it needs but confused about nutrition.
Yeah, that's because the sheer number of reversals in dietary/nutritional science over the last hundred years could fill a few dozen books. We don't know shit. Eat vegetables, fruits, and whole grains. Give up on the idea that you can eat "right." There are hundreds of specific regional cuisines all over the world that vary in every way and people manage to live long, fulfilling lives on all of them. Orthorexia is a poison and a curse of modern American culture. You need macronutrients--protein, carbs, and fat--and diets that severely limit any of those three will fuck you up. Yes, I'm including keto. Other than that, the only things I can tell you with great confidence are that margarine is worse for you than butter and the more plants you eat the better.
If you're vegan make sure you get your B12 somehow. That's about it.
If you want a more in-depth examination of how much we don't know, I recommend Marion Nestle's "What to Eat." Long read but good.
Do you have any moisturization tips? :0
Oh DO I!
Listen, skin has two jobs: keeping you in, and everything else out. Skin has to do a lot of complicated stuff to make that happen. Skin is chock full of glands and pores and whatnot. There's dermis (deeper layer) and epidermis (shallower layer), and 99% of what we're doing from the outside is about the epidermis.
Epidermis grows in as layers--there's a bottom layer that has cells that will just keep dividing forever, and then the cells that divide off that layer will start getting pushed up towards the surface of your skin. As they get pushed up, the cells get flatter and more keratinized and eventually dead.
That "stratum basal" is where you have your forever-dividing cells. So when you start something like Accutane, you can't transform the skin layers above it--you can only start affecting the skin as it marches upward towards its death and flaking off, so you have to give it months to take full effect. And we NEED to have some dead skin. It protects us.
Skin cells have proteins that hold them to each other. The goal is to form a watertight barrier. We need to keep water in because we are basically bags of water. Different protein issues (largely genetic) can cause different skin diseases.
Our skin also has glands that make protective oils (forming a powerful anti-bacterial barrier and trapping moisture inside) and sweat (because we DO want to be able to get rid of water, but only when WE want to).
So here's the thing about commercial moisturizers: none of them can put moisture back in your skin. That's just not a thing. The very best thing they can do is keep further water from leaving your skin. This is especially important if you have eczema, where you stand a good chance (about 50%) of lacking ceramides, which are critical to forming the natural skin barrier. As water evaporates off the skin, it takes more water with it. We don't understand the other half of eczema. Psoriasis involves dysfunction of the keratinization process, which is why those plaques form.
So the best moisturizers are those that create a moisture barrier without evaporating more water off. Any moisturizer where alcohol is a significant ingredient is worthless. Vaseline, or straight white petrolatum, is the best moisturizer. It feels greasy because it is. Its job is to form a watertight barrier, and greasy chemical are a lot better at that than thinner, waterlike chemicals. Moisturizers with silicones, like Aveeno (dimethicone is the active ingredient--I know, the bottle says oatmeal, it's a liar), will provide a fairly robust barrier without as greasy of a feeling. Lanolin, from sheep's wool, is also a great ingredient for forming a barrier, which is why I like Neutrogena Norwegian Formulation. Natural oils like jojoba (the best of the bunch) can be moisturizing, but just FYI, they're a tiny fraction as effective as white petrolatum. Like, less than 10%. I'm too lazy to get up and find my Cosmeceuticals textbook to remind myself exactly how much. So if you want "all natural," resign yourself to worse.
BUT!!!! Your skin is not all the same! You have scalp skin, face skin, neck skin, trunk skin, arm skin, leg skin, skin around your genitals, skin of the palms, and skin of soles of the feet. And all of those can act different. So I can't say "apply Vaseline everywhere" because that might be too much skin barrier for your face--what if your face has oil glands that work perfectly well? What if we need a lighter, less occlusive moisturizer? That's where my personal hell was for the last ten years as I struggled to find a facial moisturizer I like! What if you have oil glands that are overproductive? You may need a totally different moisturizer than I need! No good way to figure it out except trial and error while paying close attention to ingredient lists.
Sunblock is also a good thing to have but as someone who doesn't wear it because a) I don't go outside and b) it always breaks me out, I feel hypocritical talking extensively about it. I wear "dad hats" (at least a 2" brim all the way around) and long sleeves while gardening. You should definitely still wear sunscreen, though. Do as I say, not as I do.
women should lift weights because it prevents osteoporosis in old age and makes you a more capable person in everyday life please shut up about butts and waists and hourglasses i'm going to fucking kill
;___;♡♡♡♡
genuine question from someone who would rather chew their arm off than go to a public gym, and also doesnt have a lot of money: how do you safely get into strength training? are there youtube channels, apps (android), etc anyone recommends that makes it approachable and don't lean into diet culture / body shaming?
also the biggest thing that keeps me from working out is that I already have joint and spinal issues and moving the wrong way can fuck up a knee or a shoulder or my spine for days. I really don't want to injure myself, and have unwittingly done so before. resources that are extremely clear on exactly how to move and offer gentler / alternative ways to move for people with limited range are vital.
Okay, so this may not technically be strength training, but muscles are dumber than bricks and cannot tell the difference between your own bodyweight and actual weights.
So, may I recommend:
Hey everyone! My name is Hampton and my brand is Hybrid Calisthenics. You can find me by that name pretty much everywhere on social media.
He runs a YouTube channel where he goes over how to work your way up to more complex exercises (for instance, his pull-ups videos start with using a door jamb and moving your weight back and forth) so it's good for easing yourself into things.
You also don't have to fork out for expensive weights and such if you don't want to/can't. Substitute with stuff you either already have at home or can get from the supermarket and build up the weight you can exercise with. 500 gram cans of butter beans then 750 gram bottles of pasta sauce. 1 litre drink bottle then your 1.5 litre milk bottle. 3 litre bulk-buy bottle of laundry detergent. Etc. One of my dogs weighs 13 kilos and I pick her up on the regular (to her delight). One weighs 16 kg and I pick him up too (to his consternation and mild disapproval). You don't have to fit out some fancy home gym before you can start strength training.
I second Hybrid Calisthenics, that's the program I use. It's run by one guy who's taken it upon himself to make exercising more accessible and it's completely free! Each exercise has different variations based on your ability and each variation is further divided into different levels of difficulty so you can work up to where you want to be. If you can't do a single push up for example then this program will help you work up to the point where you can, and if you're a master of push ups then there are more advanced body weight exercises you can tackle so you can keep moving forward in your training without stagnating. The routine offers a full body workout with absolutely no equipment required for the beginning levels. The only reason you would need to buy anything is if you want to work up to a full pull up, at which point you would need actual pull up rings
Here's his actual website which I feel is easier to navigate than the YouTube channel on its own and organizes things in a way that's easy to understand. He explains everything you need to know about the routine and each individual exercise has both a text description and a video tutorial
anyway i looked up the post about seeing your grandma's boobs and tumblr has deleted the screenshot of the story where the finnish dude says that americans are "like that" because they haven't seen their grandma's tits
good job tumblr 👍
there it is!
my comments on that post were (sorry for shamelessly copy-pasting them):
american attitudes about nudity are fucking wild, and the worst part is that because they're american, they just assume that everyone everywhere thinks the same. i will never forget seeing people on a left-leaning, progressive site saying that families bathing together is creepy and gross and clearly a sign that something is wrong with the family, that they'd never seen their siblings or parents naked and would in fact rather die. meanwhile to this day i bathe and go to the sauna with my sister and mother and have been bathing and sauna'ing with various family members - and even strangers! - my whole life. but yes, can confirm, seeing your grandma's tits as a child does you good, and not just because it teaches you that "beauty is fake and temporary", but because it broadens your ideas about what beauty even is in the first place. my sister and i used to spend our summers at our grandma's house by the countryside and frequently bathed and went to sauna with her. we saw not just her breasts but also her flabby skin, her moles and liver spots, her body hair and varicose veins, and we didn't see any of that as weird or ugly because they were a part of our grandma who we loved very much. and when we see those things in other people - ourselves included! - we think "well it wasn't ugly on my grandma's body, so why would it be ugly on anyone else's body?". it makes you much more understanding and "forgiving", if you will, towards the completely normal bodies of strangers as well as your own body.
Whether it be filters, touch-up apps, or AI that feed us information about how we should look and feel, the truth is that we’re at our most beautiful when we’re unmasked and authentic.
From ‘This Here Flesh’, by Cole Arthur Riley…
@billy-babe
As a doctor, do you have any hygiene tips you think most people could use hearing? Like things people seem to neglect or do wrong that pop up and cause problems? Thanks!
EARS. Earwax is genetically determined. Some people get dry, scant earwax and others get wet, copious earwax. The biggest mistake I see is relying on Q-tips. Every time you stimulate the inside of your ear canal it makes your ears go “oh shit, there’s a threat! I better make more protective wax!” and next thing you know you’ve managed to jam a bunch of wax you told you ears to make back up against your ear drums and you can’t hear as well. Don’t rely on Q-tips. When you’re in the shower, let warm water run in, mush it around by pushing on your tragus (the cartilage flap in front of the canal), and let it drain. Repeat. Blot dry your ears with the edge of a towel or a Kleenex or something afterwards. If you tend to get really stubborn wax, use Debrox drops once or twice a week.
And vaginas. They’re mucus membranes once you get past the labia majora! You wouldn’t soap the inside of your mouth, don’t soap your vagina! It’s a self cleaning oven and if it smells weird GO SEE A MEDICAL PROVIDER because over the counter shit probably isn’t the right answer.
Dandruff isn’t because your scalp is dry. It’s because of a microorganism called malassezia furfur. It eats scalp oils. Dandruff shampoos mostly work pretty well.
Those are the three I can think of off the top of my head. Never use Irish Spring soap! It’s so heavily fragranced it’s a contact dermatitis waiting to happen! I once had a guy develop full body itching and I was JOKING when I said “what, did you just switch to Irish Spring?” and from then until he died he was convinced I was a witch because I was RIGHT.
Fun fact: the genetic mutation that distinguishes wet from dry earwax is the only truly single locus Mendelianly inherited trait in humans that can be quickly and easily phenotyped in a classroom without having to get blood out of anyone.
Everything else is either actually multilocus, actually entirely non-genetic (tongue curls fall into this category, it's just a learned movement), actually has multiple genetic causes of the "same" phenotype, or some godawful combination of these.
All that being said, you really don't want to tell children that their genotype at some point means that they're biologically incapable of being the child of their parents. If the kid is adopted, genetics class is not the best place to find that out. If the kid is NOT adopted, you have two possible options: either you're right and you've adequately identified that kid can't be Mom's kid with Dad... so she slept with someone else to produce it, or you're wrong and you've introduced one hell of a relationship time bomb for that kid's parents for no reason whatsoever.
For the love of fuck, just teach them using cats or dogs or ball pythons or whatever. Or human examples that you can't necessarily quickly genotype just by looking, like blood type. There are any manner of engaging examples!
Hell, you could even just follow @blueelectricangels ' example and use extramarital Muppet progeny:
You think the kids are going to forget that anytime soon? I certainly won't!
What's your opinion on that app Noom??
They monetized eating disorders
I gave my soapbox speech about how weight loss is mostly bullshit to two different patients in a row yesterday and so help me I’m pretty sure one of these days someone is going to say “but SURELY you agree I’d be HEALTHIER if I lost weight!” bc you can see the disbelief in their eyes. And like. Sure, maybe! You might see some improvement in biomarkers like LDL and A1c, and your knees would probably feel better. But you would be amazed at how much more good you can do for yourself by focusing on things you can actually meaningfully change without resorting to making yourself miserable. Eat more fresh fruits and vegetables—it’s hard bc they’re more difficult to prepare and more expensive per calorie and go bad faster than other foods, but they’re what we evolved eating the most of so they’re what our bodies need the most of. And walk around more; sure, cardio is great for you, but if it sucks so bad you don’t do it, it isn’t doing shit for you. And we evolved to walk very very long distances, a little bit at a time, so our bodies respond actually very well to adding walks into our schedules, which is vastly easier than adding workouts that are frankly designed to be punishing when the definition of punishing is “makes you less likely to do it again in the future.”
You get one life. It is shorter than you can begin to imagine. Don’t waste it hating yourself because somebody is going to make money off that self-hatred. You deserve better than to be a cash cow for billionaires who pay aestheticians and dermatologists to make them (or at least their trophy wives) look thin and beautiful no matter what they actually do.
And ONE MORE THING—listen. We are NOT evolved to lose weight, we are evolved to hoard it. We came about in a world of famines. Not only does your brain have MULTIPLE failsafes built in SPECIFICALLY TO PREVENT WEIGHT LOSS, but there are epigenetic factors—factors that are not DNA but travel with it and affect how it is expressed. So if your parents or grandparents lived through a famine, like, oh, say, the Great Depression, YOU are more likely to gain weight and more likely to have difficulty losing it. AND! We live in a world highly affected by industrial pollution—there is no corner of the world free from it, micro plastics and industrial chemical pollution have been found literally everywhere ever studied—and many of those pollutants affect our endocrine systems. Looking at records of lab animals going back to the 1960s, where we have excellent records of what genetically essentially identical animals ate, we know that LAB ANIMALS FED THE SAME AMOUNT OF THE SAME CHOW WEIGH MORE NOW THAN THEY DID THE IN SIXTIES. So no. You’re not fat because your willpower is somehow busted. (Willpower, fun fact, can be depleted! By DEPLETING BLOOD SUGAR! Baumeister’s work in the 2000s demonstrated that.) You’re fat because your body wants you to live, and because the ultra rich have knowingly poured poison into the world because they don’t care if you die.
So YOU need to care if you live. And how you live. Please love yourself, because the billionaires will never give a shit about you. Weight Watchers has a 96-99% failure rate. Weight loss is a scam that makes billions of dollars every year. Love yourself too much to fall for that. Don’t wait until you’re thin to love yourself or to start living, because a) that day may never come and b) it’s okay if that day never comes. You are worthwhile and enough right now. I promise you that.
Did I mention that all studies on the subject are very clear--like, we do not need more studies on this, which is a bananas thing for a scientist to say--exercise does not lead to weight loss. It just doesn't. Anyone who tells you it does is wrong. It's good for you because it's good for you, not because it makes you thin. It improves your blood vessel health; it improves your heart health; it improves your body's ability to manage blood sugar; it improves your muscular health. It does not make you thin.
Reducing calories can reduce weight, but your body, as previously mentioned, is trying REAL HARD not to lose weight. I see a lot of recommendations for 1200 calorie a day diets. Google "starvation study" and look at how much the men in that study were given. It was over 1500 calories a day, and they were miserable. They became skeletal. They felt awful, depressed, foggy--because your brain is the single biggest user of calories in your body. It is so metabolically active that your brain uses around 30% of all the calories your body uses. Guess what happens when you starve your brain? You feel like shit. You feel stupid and depressed. Don't starve yourself. It doesn't work and it makes you feel awful and you will get rebound weight gain above whatever you lost, guaranteed, and then you'll blame yourself for "letting yourself go" because our society is built on lies.
We also cannot and should not ever suggest that anyone can lose more than 5-10% of their body weight and keep that off. It's just not possible. Bariatric surgery is a WHOLE other can of worms, I don't have the energy to explain why I almost never recommend it to my patients, but just know that if anyone has ever suggested you lose more than 10% of your body weight through behavioral changes, they are bullshitting you.
Getting a lot of notes on this post! Many of them are people going "oh thank God" and then there are people going "but SURELY you agree I'd be healthier if I lost weight!" and people going "well I lost weight so it IS possible!" and like. Buddy. That's like two people out of the 10,000 notes on that. You are that rare statistical exception. Feel morally superior if you want to. (Right up until you hit that health problem that leads you to gain weight and suddenly realize, with great shock, that it WASN'T immorality that led you to be sick and fat.)
Lotta people asking me medical questions! No! Ask your doctor. Real professionals need a lot more details than you're going to send me in an ask. Giving you medical advice without knowing your chart and being your doctor puts me at actual legal risk.
Also people going "cite your sources!" No! I spent 10 years working in research before I went back to med school. You know how I find papers on stuff? Google! Learn to fucking Google! If you can find research that convincingly demonstrates that exercise leads to weight loss, shoot it my way, because on my way in to work last week I was listening to a national conference board prep lecture and the speaker very specifically told thousands of family physicians, out loud in words, "Exercise does not lead to weight loss," so you can either assume you know more than me and go prove it, or shut the fuck up.
Also people saying, "Wait, I thought I could lose weight, and now you're telling me I can't?" No. I'm telling you that weight is not the benchmark for how healthy you are, and if you let your eating disorder tell you that thinness is the only thing that makes you valuable as a person, that is a very different disorder--that you can recover from--than being fat.
Also people with just no reading comprehension going "you're saying there are ZERO benefits to weight loss?" to which I say go re-read the first two paragraphs of my first post.
I am literally an expert--on the brain, on bodily health--and if what I'm saying is unsettling, you need to think real hard about why. Examine your attitudes towards fatness. Ask yourself whether you'd still like yourself if you were fat. Ask yourself what you have to offer the world besides thinness. Why do fat people being happy threaten you? Why would you be happier in a world where fat people deserved the things fatphobia does to them? How much of your self-esteem is based on being thinner than someone else?
Okay, I am ADDING THE BARIATRIC SURGERY POST HERE. You can STOP ASKING ME FOR IT.
Hallo!! I really appreciate your blog and how open and invested you are in wellbeing outside of medical fatphobia and other ways medicine as
You know what, while I'm at it, my post about Ozempic/Wegovy:
Because my most popular post is about weight loss and how it's a crock, I get a lot of questions about various things, including bariatric s
And let's address the only two meaningful criticism of my original post series:
The Baumeister research on willpower as a depletable resource is probably BS. People have tried to replicate it and they can't. In my defense, I didn't know that because I finished my master's in 2010 and that conference where I watched his presentation was in like 2009, so I'm out of the loop. However, this criticism is valid. And kind of a bummer? I liked feeling like I was accomplishing something with a little treat. Ah, well.
The men in the Minnesota starvation study were given over 1500 calories a day in a setting where they were burning substantially more than that. Yeah! Grown men do! I have a patient who literally walked into my clinic room and was like "I don't know WHY I'm so tired" and it turns out he's working and also working out while on an 800 calorie a day diet, so it's worth talking about how much grown men should be eating, because they deserve to feel like human beings too--but if you want to get into whether 1500 calories a day is a reasonable amount for a human woman to eat, it's fucking not! ALSO, calorie science is a load of horseshit in the first place. Bomb calorimeters are still, as far as I know, the standard, and the question of "how much energy does this put out when literally burned" has VIRTUALLY NOTHING to do with "is this good for me to eat."
So, now no one can complain I didn't address those issues. I am actually grateful to the people who pointed out the Baumeister thing. I'm just annoyed at people going "he was BARELY hungry enough that he CUT HIS OWN FINGERS OFF AND DIDN'T KNOW WHY" as if that is, you know, in any way a defense for why we continually hear advice to go on a 1200 calorie a day diet.
To address two extremely common complaints on this post:
“If you won’t add sources, how do we know you’re telling the truth??” YOU DO NOT. GO LOOK IT UP!!!! I HAVE TOLD YOU REPEATEDLY THAT THESE ARE ALL AVAILABLE VIA GOOGLE WITH SIMPLE KEYWORD SEARCHES. TRY “microplastics deep ocean” or “fat lab animals.” THEY ARE RIGHT! FUCKING! THERE! Do not just trust somebody on the Internet. LEARN TO READ THINGS. Learn what makes a good source vs a shitty one. I quite literally once had a non-medical friend from research degree grad school send me a medical “paper” (it was not peer reviewed) about how vaccines cause autism. It had approximately 50,000 references and looked very official. She was worried it might be legit. I started LOOKING UP THE REFERENCES and I’ll be damned! None of them said what they were being represented as saying. NONE of them. Learn how to evaluate sources or you are doomed to be lied to with abandon.
“Oh great, I was already depressed about being fat and you made it worse!” The FUCK I did! I told you the truth! Society made you depressed about being fat. I’m showing you where all that cognitive dissonance is coming from. If truth makes you depressed, you need to figure out how to live with that truth and then grab the world that made it this way and throttle it into submission. I devoted my entire fucking life to medicine because I was so mad about homophobia and biphobia and transphobia. Get yourself an ACTUAL LIFE with MEANINGFUL GOALS. Being thin doesn’t count! Sure, your life is easier if you’re thin, but you have very little control over that. You DO have control over who you choose to become. Be someone you can respect. You don’t need to LOVE yourself, you need to RESPECT yourself.
RESPECT YOURSELF ENOUGH TO LEARN TO GODDAMN READ SCIENCE! I taught many MUCH less motivated undergrads than you to do it, I KNOW you can.
THIS. READ THIS. ALL OF IT.
I did get a comment questioning the validity of the multigenerational epigenetic transmission, but from a real douche, so I blocked them. However, I think they probably have a valid point about the weakness of the original study—it doesn’t propose a clear mechanism and you can argue there could be significant confounds. So you can decide that’s low quality evidence. Doesn’t invalidate the preponderance of evidence, however—the vast bulk of studies agree that we aren’t built to lose weight, and we cause real harm to ourselves in trying. Exercise is good for us because it’s good for us, not because it makes us thin, and same for eating lots of fresh fruits and vegetables.
its so shiddy when u have to convince yourself to do your hobbies. like, its fun, you like it, why cant you just do it. do it. do it. but what if.... mindless media consumption instead....
im so sorry to the seven thousand of you so far who relate
upset at the accuracy of these tags
For decades, the medical community has ignored mountains of evidence to wage a cruel and futile war on fat people, poisoning public percepti
"For 60 years, doctors and researchers have known two things that could have improved, or even saved, millions of lives. The first is that diets do not work. Not just paleo or Atkins or Weight Watchers or Goop, but all diets. Since 1959, research has shown that 95 to 98 percent of attempts to lose weight fail and that two-thirds of dieters gain back more than they lost. The reasons are biological and irreversible. As early as 1969, research showed that losing just 3 percent of your body weight resulted in a 17 percent slowdown in your metabolism—a body-wide starvation response that blasts you with hunger hormones and drops your internal temperature until you rise back to your highest weight. Keeping weight off means fighting your body’s energy-regulation system and battling hunger all day, every day, for the rest of your life.
The second big lesson the medical establishment has learned and rejected over and over again is that weight and health are not perfect synonyms. Yes, nearly every population-level study finds that fat people have worse cardiovascular health than thin people. But individuals are not averages: Studies have found that anywhere from one-third to three-quarters of people classified as obese are metabolically healthy. They show no signs of elevated blood pressure, insulin resistance or high cholesterol. Meanwhile, about a quarter of non-overweight people are what epidemiologists call “the lean unhealthy.” A 2016 study that followed participants for an average of 19 years found that unfit skinny people were twice as likely to get diabetes as fit fat people."
A surprising article to find on the Huffington post. I think, especially towards the end, there's still a saturation of healthism and diet talk (just of the "clean eating" variety), but the information about weight discrimination is absolutely on point, especially within the medical field ignoring decades of research.
Not only do we know that weight loss isn't sustainable or possible, we also know that weight discrimination kills, in a myriad of ways. If you actually care about "health" then start unlearning your weight bias NOW and realize that fat people are just people who are a different shape.
And this article doesn't even touch on "the obesity paradox"(the fact that fat people survive heart attacks and injuries BETTER THAN thin people) or the fact that dieting, especially "yo-yo dieting," is a better predictor for heart disease than weight, and that many of the fat people who have cardiovascular diseases have a long history of dieting that (understandably) didn't work.
encouraged to rb but fatphobes will just be blocked.
Michael Hobbes is an excellent journalist and he continues to advocate for body neutrality and fat acceptance! He currently cohosts a podcast with the equally fantastic Aubrey Gordon (@/yrfatfriend on twitter, author of the books What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat and "You Just Need to Lose Weight" and 19 Other Myths About Fat People) . It's called Maintenance Phase and is available on all podcasting sites and apps. The show centers on dispelling myths about the wellness/fitness/weight loss industry and how it harms people of all sizes (but especially fat people).
Michael is also one of the original cofounders of You're Wrong About, another amazing podcast - one of their earlier episodes focused on busting the myths surrounding "The Obesity Epidemic" and it's a great on-ramp for anyone interested in learning more about the subject. You can listen to it here!
I’ve been in such a funk since the concert. I’m not even sure I enjoyed myself that much. maybe I did. I don’t know
Hey hi hello! I got a potential answer for you.
After ANY thrilling and/or happy experience, it's very possible for your brain to quite literally run out of the proteins and vitamins you need to make more happy chemical. People get dopamine crashes anywhere from a couple hours to a couple weeks after abormal but exciting events - whether it's a really good day, they did a lot of socializing, had a lot of fun hyperfocusing on a project, had an intense sexy time experience, a huge performance they were excited for, a date, a day at a theme part, etc etc etc.
Your brain goes into overdrive coming up with !!!!!!!! chemicals to keep up with your environment, then -especially if that was an abnormal experience or if you don't have the !!!!!! chemicals in excess very often- then you just run out for a while.
You can remedy this by finding other things that will be good, but not expect the !!!!! along with it. Instead of something you really really like doing, find something simple and calm and comforting. Snuggle with a friend and watch a movie, pet a cat, write a letter, etc.
Definitely get some vitamin d, chocolate if you can / like it, and take a multivitamin. Protein is important for regrowth and restocking, so get plenty of that too to bounce back quickly!
Love you much, I hope this passes very soon 🫂
WAIT WAIT THATS A THING???
LIKE….
THATS WHY AFTER THE EXCITEMENT WEARS OFF FROM ME DOING LITERALLY ANYTHING THAT MAGKES ME “!!!!” I JUST FEEL BLEH AND IMMEDIATELY CRAVE *THING* AGAIN
SO IM NOT JUST BROKEN
ME AFTER MY FRICKING GAY BOOKCLUB WHERE I SEE ALL MY FRIENDS ONCE A MONTH
OR AFTER WATCHING AN EPISODE OF THE SHOW IM HYPERFIXATED ON
WHAT
Yes!! It can also be extra bad for different types of neurospicy bitches. My adhd brain has directly proportional drops every day. If I had a meh morning I’ll have a good evening (if no other factors interfere). If I have a FANTASTIC morning I’m sure to have a mental breakdown that night. I don’t regulate those chemicals well at ALL, and have extremely predictable emotional crashes as a result of that.
I see and experience this phenomenon often when I actually do things. First hear about it in a LARP group - they called it drop, and I hear that term in theatre sometimes too. (This is why everyone goes to eat at a restaurant right after the event is over.) Point is, I'm glad there's like Science Reason backing up that emotional dead zone after an event. And now I'm gonna start meal planning for events.
There's a fandom term called Post-Con Depression for the emotional slump (and sometimes physical exhaustion) you feel after getting home from a fun convention. After squeezing out all the happiness you can produce for several days straight, you run out of happiness for a few days. This is a known phenomenon!
*blinks slowly in BDSM*
I'm really glad to see some spread of the idea of drop and aftercare into other spaces, I guess? I forget there are people who don't know these things. I didn't know these things once. Welcome to today's 10,000!
This shit is true and caring for yourself works!
7 most adhd moods
–the Only Mood everyone else knows about: i wanna do THIS and THIS and THIS and THIS and THIS and–SQUIRREL
–galaxy brain: i was listening to the lecture but the prof said something that reminded me of something else and now i’m not sure how much time i was lost in thought
–the tutorial only comes in video format: i’m sorry, but you’ve thrown off the emperor’s groove *hurls product & its tutorial video into the sun*
–damn you hyperfocus: i went to bed intending to wake up and write but this morning i was possessed by a cleanliness spirit and spent the next 14 hours organizing the apartment
–i dont think u tried at all.jpg: did i seriously spend an entire free day refreshing twitter b/c i didn’t want to spend 10 minutes finishing my hw but wouldn’t let myself do anything else until i finished it???? (yes)
–patrick star: *unlocks phone* time to check the weather. *opens twitter* the weather. *opens messenger* the weather. *opens mobage game* the weather. *opens facebook* the weather. *opens twitter again* THE WEA–
–smells like depression: literally everything is too boring. i’m going back to sleep
Found it.
It’s difficult to tell because *gestures* Tumblr, but this is the post that actually got me to get tested for ADHD. I reblogged it back in late 2018 like “Wait, the video tutorial issue is a symptom of ADHD? Do I have ADHD? Surely not,” and a bunch of readers responded “Did…did you not know? Because you very clearly do, we all thought you were just being discreet about it.”
And then it took me three and a half years to get a diagnosis.
Although being fair to me, if you’ve ever tried to get tested for ADHD as an adult, just getting a motherfucker to call you back about setting up the test is a task. And after spending all of 2019 trying to accomplish that and failing, I then couldn’t get to a testing facility because of a global pandemic.
Anyway, thanks OP for the post, it only took me five years to find it again, but you did a good day’s work.
