May or may not be a lower-class demon

scientia-rex:

scientia-rex:

scientia-rex:

scientia-rex:

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.

(via trans-metalsonic)

mindflamer:

sending love to every disabled queer who will spend the month seeing pictures of unmasked superspreader events from our own community. it’s okay to love pride, and also be upset that it’s being hosted in a way that puts your safety at risk.

if you’re not disabled, please mask in large crowds. pride is vital, and so is community care. covid is not over, despite the government minimizing it so that we’ll go back to work like everything is fine. mask for yourself, for your community, and for disabled & immunocompromised people. 10% of first infections (even if you got a vaccine) and 20% of second infections result in long covid symptoms at six months post-infection. nobody can afford to continue on pretending this is not happening!

you can buy high-quality, tested masks here.

#SpreadPrideNotCOVID

(via trans-metalsonic)

fucktheflagandfuckyou:

nightmarechamillian:

talus-the-broken:

kaijuno:

I need y'all to understand something, Arizona tea came out in 1992, same size, same 99¢ price, that has not changed in THIRTY YEARS in spite of inflation. They only recently got to the point that costs became a problem for that price point and even still the CEO refused to change the price. If the price had stayed exactly in lockstep with inflation it would cost $2.03 today.

They’re only having problems because their suppliers are increasing costs.

This is one of the most amazing examples there is of the fact that inflation as a metric is utter bullshit. Companies are seeing that number and choosing to raise their prices because everyone else is, and companies that recognize it as bullshit and choose to price ethically take the fall for it as their suppliers take away their profits. The actual change in cost to make a soft drink from farm to factory to retail has ONLY changed because some people in that process are collecting more process based on an economic measurement that is designed to fail and make excuses to raises prices.

IN THIS HOUSE WE RESPECT ARIZONA TEA

(via rebard-main)

lionfloss:

Puffins on a cliff, Fratercula arctica, Shetland Islands, Scotland

(via magimagali)

mortuarybees:

In terms of like, Please For The Love Of God Get Hobbies That Aren’t Scrolling Through An App For Six Hours A Day, I understand and experience completely the argument of like. with the stressors of modern work, you don’t have the energy at the end of the day to do anything but mindlessly watch Netflix and scroll through your phone. but like I would like to gently encourage you to simply force yourself for a time to do something instead of pick up your phone, bc the phone is literally designed to light up your brain with no effort from you whatsoever and it does in fact rot your brain. It makes literally anything but scrolling on your phone seem difficult and joyless. But if you stop scrolling on your phone all the time, and start like, reading or embroidering or gardening or going for walks, you will eventually find the joy in them once more

I understand and it is true that it is hard to have a life outside work and scrolling but there is not a near future where that won’t be the case and you should still live a life. And you won’t create a future where that isn’t the case if you don’t have the confidence and experience and drive to fight for it

(via sabertoothwalrus)

matt-the-radar-techncian:

kragehund-again:

my theory is that reincarnation is real and that’s why everything is so fucked up. we got too many people on earth and their souls were supposed to spend a few more cycles as endangered animals or smthn but we fucked the environment and overpopulated. so we get guys who was SUPPOSED to be black-footed ferrets or whatever til their soul reached maturity but instead they’re like, influencers and politicians. this is also why furries exist.

(via fullychaoticpatrol)

itistimetodisappear:

is-the-bird-video-cute:

trashbaby1996:

bmwiid:

flowersnteacups:

viejospellejos:

@bmwiid

wow - like…. I didn’t think corvids did that synced flying formations?!

I’ve only ever seen this with like ‘flocks’ of starlings and things

@is-the-bird-video-cute how or why are they so in sync?? Im so curious!

Rating: Wild/Cute

These are wild ravens in a courtship flight. It’s a rare treat to witness!

(via fullychaoticpatrol)

sunfortune:

so sick how the only way you can get experience is through experience. and the only way you can get good is through the humiliating ordeal of sucking ass at it

(via melodyofthevoid)

brightwanderer:

I think a lot about how we as a culture have turned “forever” into the only acceptable definition of success.

Like… if you open a coffee shop and run it for a while and it makes you happy but then stuff gets too expensive and stressful and you want to do something else so you close it, it’s a “failed” business. If you write a book or two, then decide that you don’t actually want to keep doing that, you’re a “failed” writer. If you marry someone, and that marriage is good for a while, and then stops working and you get divorced, it’s a “failed” marriage.

The only acceptable “win condition” is “you keep doing that thing forever”. A friendship that lasts for a few years but then its time is done and you move on is considered less valuable or not a “real” friendship. A hobby that you do for a while and then are done with is a “phase” - or, alternatively, a “pity” that you don’t do that thing any more. A fandom is “dying” because people have had a lot of fun with it but are now moving on to other things.

I just think that something can be good, and also end, and that thing was still good. And it’s okay to be sad that it ended, too. But the idea that anything that ends is automatically less than this hypothetical eternal state of success… I don’t think that’s doing us any good at all.

(via rebard-main)

cishetsbeingcishet:

genuinely so fucking tired of people leveraging the “groomer” argument against people who support sex ed because scientific literature over decades shows that comprehensive sex education starting around kindergarten actually prevents children from being sexually abused and groomed because it teaches children the correct words for their body parts and also teaches them concepts of privacy, personal space, bodily autonomy, the difference between appropriate and inappropriate touching, and the fact that sex is something that only adults do. children with this knowledge are not only better equipped to identify abuse and predatory behavior and communicate that its happening to a trusted adult, but also prevent it from happening in the first place by recognizing when something is happening that shouldn’t.

sex education does not sexualize children, it prevents children from being sexualized. anyone who is against early foundational sex education and claims they are doing it to protect children is a fucking liar.

(via lizwuzthere)