Posts made by Derp

Ya'll: 30-100 bucks on food delivery.

Me: Two egg rolls from that place I like comes out to 3.27, and it's not that far to drive, so I'll pick it up and tip through BeyondMenu...

One of these days!

@rinel

You're doing the lord's work.

This is for Another Life, Season 2. if you haven't seen it through, then obviously don't click past the spoiler tag if you plan on watching it, and don't reply in a way that ruins it for others:

***=NSFW content***

@silverfox said in RL Sads:

A kitten we fostered died today.

@vixanic

I use Smartsheet in my work.

I love that I can have such granular permissions on it.

Edit my fields? Nope. You can view. You can comment. You can suggest a change. But you can't change anything without me approving it.

Lurve.

@macha said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

Assholes need to pay better.

This is pretty much universally true no matter what field you work in.

@ominous

You could make the argument, but assault almost always relies on the contact being rude, angry, or insolent, and I doubt you'd find a jury that things getting someone's attention via touch on the shoulder qualifies, even if it's repeated and unwanted. You might get harassment, but probably not assault.

@tnp

yeah, they've been doing tons of studies on stuff like that since -- at least I was in high school. In 2020, in order to eat what would be generally considered 'healthy' foods, it will cost you literally ten times as much calorie-for-calorie, and that gap just keeps widening.

@silverfox

I'd probably be of no help on this one. I think that we should have a nationwide vaccine mandate. Get the NRA people involved. Let them drive around with tranq guns full of COVID vaccine. Whatever.

But given recent RL evens I am probably biased. And angry.

@ifrit said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

I read a really interesting series of articles recently that posited (with graphs!) that there may be a chemical component to obesity that is down to industrial processing introducing additional chemicals to our foodstuffs (one of the suggestions is lithium from lithium grease for example).

I believe that the current leading theory goes like this:

The 'sedentary lifestyle' theory of obesity has been somewhat discredited just based on observable history: in the 1930's we started transitioning from farm work to office work, and beef, beer, and other high-calorie foods became readily available as industry kept taking off and prices kept falling as production and distribution tech got better and better. And yet, from the actuarial tables that insurance companies kept, there was no obesity epidemic despite rather sedentary lifestyles with lots of fat and alcohol.

But around the 50's and 60's, we start getting into heavily processed foods: starches and carbs that are very easy and quick to digest that our biological processes are just not meant to handle effectively. And so our systems freak the hell out, and by the 70's we're seeing an incredible rise in obesity despite activity and caloric consumption just based on the prevalence of these kinds of cheap, fast, ultra-processed foods.

And then we blame fat, naturally, because fat clearly makes you fat for reasons, it has a lot of calories, whatever. So we strip out fat and start adding processed sugars to absolutely everything, which doesn't actually help and really just makes it worse as the set points (the 'baseline' weight of our bodies, the one that it works to actively maintain) just skyrockets higher and higher and higher because the biological processes that regulate your metabolism in proportion to your caloric intake has no idea how to handle this crap that you're eating.

Here's the hat trick, though -- if you stop eating those kinds of foods, your body goes into an entirely different kind of starvation freakout and starts packing on as much fat as possible because your fucked up internal processes assume that you are dying and in a famine, so the more you try to eat 'regular' foods and move and work out the more your body thinks that you're in a desert death march and works against you.

Interestingly, this is one of the reasons that bariatric surgery has such a high efficacy rate: It does actually reset this system, whereas dietary regulation doesn't. It removes both producers and receptors of a buttload of hormones and biochemical regulators and forces your anatomy to start over from scratch.

Naturally, more research needs to be done to verify these results and whatnot. But from what we understand, right now, of the biochemical processes, it's the food supply itself that is causing it, not consumption or activity, combined with just genetic predisposition toward large or small bodies.

@solstice

Your current desk comes complete with Doggo and is therefore the best desk.

@greenflashlight said in RL Anger:

All the text messages I'm receiving today from six-digit phone numbers warning me that a bank I don't do business with is freezing my card. What card? Unclear! But I better call them right now with all my personal details ready to clear up this misunderstanding!

I'm standing by to take your call!

@faraday said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

A modest success rate means we (as a society) have more work to do, but it doesn't mean we should just give up and accept things as they are.

We have a modest success rate of people winning the lottery, too. But more people fail than win. Yet we don't counsel people to buy more lottery tickets and try harder, either.

And it's not that much different here. The ones with the modest success rates have other factors working in their favor. Or they've dipped into eating habits that would be considered disorderly for anyone else, and obsessive behaviors like exercising for 2-3 hours per day 6+ days a week.

If a person is 100 lbs overweight and goes on a super restrictive calorie deficit while working out well above the normal level we cheer them on because they must be making healthy decisions. If a teenage girl does that we call it a dangerous behavior and admonish them to stop. Because we recognize that this is a dangerous, disorderly behavior, but only for people whose form we already approve of as a society.

This is the level of stigma and double-standard that we're facing. We blatantly ignore evidence and dangerous behaviors while pushing people to conform, and then wonder why the results are terrible.

Let's change the stigmas around obesity and start talking about what we don't know, what actual health markers we should be looking for, etc.

@ganymede said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

I refuse to believe this is a damned-if-you-do-or-don't situation

But again, that's the problem. Yes, the article contains a slew of weight loss maintenance strategies. But at best, one out of five people actually manage to maintain weight loss for more than a year, and fewer than that for more than five. Many others never manage the weight loss in the first place.

And that's the received wisdom: That everyone can lose weight if they just work hard and suffer. But it's just not true. And people refuse to believe that, even though that's what the research bears out -- diet and exercise are a largely imperfect system that can be just as dangerous as not doing so, and possibly moreso due to the metabolic damage and insulin resistance caused by yo-yo style weight losses and gains. Everyone wants to believe that if you just work a little harder and eat a little less and move a little more that you'll get to a point where you can do it, completely ignoring what side-effects there might be to it or whether these lifestyles are actually even able to be maintained at all.

I didn't ignore anything past the abstract. You, yourself, quoted the part above where the researchers note that people who do manage to lose weight need further study because we don't know how or why it happens like that.

And we've known that this model was wrong since the sixties. That's the most insidious part. That this myth we've created has been so persistent and pervasive this whole time, that we've built entire industries around a concept that we know is flat-out a lie, but we want so badly to believe in it that we'll ignore all evidence to the contrary.

That refusal to believe it's out of anyone's control despite what the science says is very much a part of the stigma problem. If Susan stays fat it's because she's clearly not eating right, or exercising enough. She doesn't care about her health. She's lazy, and undisciplined. And therefore, she is unreliable, and should make less money, get passed over for promotions or employment in general. It's a moral failing on her part, not something out of her control like sex or skin color or genetic conditions or any of the other protected statuses.

Until we know how it works, expecting people to just suffer through a process that we barely understand and actively causes harm is ridiculous, especially when being overweight doesn't automatically mean that you're unhealthy.

@groth said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

In terms of losing weight it works and I can vouch for it working.

And this is another problem: People relying on anecdata. This worked for me, or for someone I know, so it will work for everyone because all bodies must be the same and respond the same.

But again, research data largely doesn't support this. But we're so ingrained in this idea that confronting people with this information causes this knee-jerk, reflexive thing.

It works for some people. But not most people. And the anecdata 'it really works' stuff does more harm than good, in many cases.

@ganymede said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

You can lose the weight!

But that's the problem: the research flat-out suggests that this is mostly untrue.

Most individuals cannot lose more than 30% of their current body weight at an absolute maximum, and almost none of those will ever come close to this number due to a number of internal metabolic regulatory processes. It's not a convenient reality, but it is the reality for the vast majority of people. Most of that weight is regained and then some within 5 years, but brings with it insulin resistance and metabolic damage from the methods used that your biological processes will actively revolt against, resulting in very real biological trauma to your body's processes.

That's what these podcasts are about: looking at the various science and debunking the cultural monomyth that slim is healthy, and that everyone can be slim if they just eat right and exercise, and that pushing people to lose weight is being concerned about their health.

It's just not true. No nation has decreased its obesity rate in decades, despite a number of approaches, and the cultural alienation that this ideology causes for obese people is crushing.

So while, yes, there are certain steps you can take to improve your overall health (and should!), telling people to lose weight is extremely unhealthy for basically the whole world. It does severe biological and psychological damage to people, and pretty much ignores all of the other unhealthy habits that you can't actively see on other people. Thin people are just considered healthy by default, and overweight people considered unhealthy, lazy, and noncompliant despite weight and health not being nearly as correlated as people used to think. Doctors, in particular, are pretty terrible, and receive less than twenty total hours of training on nutrition and metabolic processes, getting just as caught up in the cultural mythos as everyone else, often giving obese patients measurably worse care than thin patients, which leads obese people to avoid doctors and healthcare in general due to the quality of care they receive.

Like -- this is a real thing, and we should talk about it in real terms.

@solstice

The actual somewhat-paraphrased quote is in the podcast episode You're Wrong About - The Obesity Epidemic

But Michael Hobbes has written and researched pretty extensively for this particular issue. Here is his original article in the Huffington Post about it, wherein he talks about personal experiences and all of his sources and such.

But if you really want to do a deep dive on it, he has another You're Wrong About style podcast specifically devoted to diets, diet culture, the truth about obesity science, and some of the ridiculously damaging things the media and diet culture have done over the years. That one is called Maintenance Phase, and it is glorious, and kind of liberating, even if it doesn't exactly give a silver-lining propaganda style picture of Beach Body Perfection that culture would have us believe.

(Spoiler: Oprah has done some questionable shit on numerous occasions, so.)

TIL, slightly paraphrased:

"The calories in, calories out model of weight loss has been almost completely debunked. It has about as much credibility among endocrinologists as climate change denial has among geologists."

As a large person that has been stigmatized about my weight as essentially one of the few minorities that it's both acceptable and encouraged to routinely be shitty to, this makes me smile.

@23quarius said in Drawin' Characters:

Did I make a comment calling this place toxic I have no memory of this but I also don't know what I ate for breakfast

No. It's the general rumor of MSB. Everyone thinks that we're some kind of toxic cesspool. Things can get heated sometimes but it's largely an eye-roll-worthy comment made by people who are entirely deserving of our criticism or ire. They use it as a way to dismiss the basis of the argument without interacting with it.

"Oh you can't trust those people, they're just a bunch of toxic rabid assholes."

@ganymede said in Dabbling, Mastery, Dunning–Kruger etc:

imposter syndrome

Also, alcoholism.

If you stalk your attorney after work and they look stressed as hell with a drink in their hand?

Those are probably the good ones.

Yay!