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  2. Joe Pera Talks With You was a funny show on Adult Swim with an almost supernaturally relaxed tone.

    He had one bit about his test for what he bought in grocery stores, which is actually pretty good.

  3. I learned to ignore the one voice that sounds like mom and it’s “you can’t succeed so don’t try” tone.

    The drill sgt voice kicked me out of bed yesterday when I still groggy from the late night out and got me moving. I took dad to visit mom at the clinic yesterday and we got out of the downtown area before the afternoon crowds (sans Jays game) arrived. Dad was happy to see mom despite mom trying to take her clothes off and put them on again during the visit.

    I still listen to the drill sgt voice.

  4. Given how many Americans fall into the category, it’s kind of remarkable how fat shaming remains one of the last prejudices that is socially acceptable (if not outright encouraged.)

    Anyway, the voice in my head is mostly nice to me because I’ve spent a lot of time trying to make it that way, but mostly I try to give it something else to do if it starts nagging me too much.

    • Yep, people who would never use racial or ethnic slurs will openly fat shame others. I think it’s often projection from their own nagging voices. Glad you’ve been mostly successful in taming yours. I’m doing better but still a work in progress.

  5. I take solace in this sentiment widely misattributed to Gore Vidal:

    “It is not enough to succeed, others must fail”

    So true. I will hear bad news and sometimes catastrophic news about people I find distasteful. And I felt nothing.

     

  6. I really flirted with an eating disorder in college and what stopped it was that I managed to plateau on the weight loss at 800-1000 calories a day while doing at least an hour at the gym everyday. Oh, and I was still fat – I’m 40 and I can still remember the plateau weight was 183.4 lbs. The hate and shame spiral of that “failure” was vicious (variations of wow you’re such a  fucking failure that you couldn’t even succeed at starving yourself) and hard to get out of.

    However. It very weirdly did prevent me from falling into the obsession with good and bad foods that so many people get stuck with. Because if I couldn’t lose weight when lunch was raw broccoli and breakfast was plain yogurt and dinner was a salad with no dressing, etc etc etc. — then really there’s no such thing as good foods like the diet industry pretends.

    So good foods for me are ones that don’t upset my stomach and that taste good. Bad foods are things I’ll regret later – things I know will cause digestive issues or things like having a fuckton of sugar at breakfast and feeling crummy from that all day.

    • I’ve been in treatment for EDs for most of my life. And probably need to get back into it as I find myself falling back into old bad habits. I’m going to try to use today as a reset. And start using my recovery app again. The good foods bad foods narrative is hard to ignore. I’m glad you’re able to.

  7. When I’m losing weight (and I’m about to climb back on that wagon now that I’m back from vacation) I count calories + avoid carbs (I exercise regularly, of course). That’s what works for me — I lost 60 lbs. once that way, and have largely kept it off. I mostly just skip carbs to maintain a pretty decent weight. Not fanatical, mind you, but I do limit them.

    One of the big revelations to me was counting calories. Phone apps make that super easy, and they’ll tell you how many calories are in dishes at various chain restaurants, which was utterly horrifying. I found out a salad at a restaurant I liked (the Elephant Bar, now defunct, at least here) was over 2,000 calories. For comparison, a Big Mac is like 500. I still don’t know how that worked except the salad dressing had to be 95% high fructose corn syrup.

    • I think being conscious of calories is okay as long as you’re able to do it without going to extremes. It’s dangerous for me because my brain says if 1200 is good 1000 must be better. Then if 1000 is good 800 is great! At my worst I lived on 500 calories a day. If you can call that living. I was pretty much a zombie, no energy, brain fog, anxious, and grouchy as hell. I thought I looked great but at the bar I worked at then people started asking when I last ate. And trying to buy me food when ordering for themselves. 😬

      • As someone who has a very strong obsessive compulsive streak, plus a lot of impatience, I understand that urge. Honestly, my wife is the one who keeps me from falling into that again.

      • This! Right! Here!

        Also the whole weird success feelings of the self abuse and deprivation.

        Do you got a lot of stressors in your life right now? Part of why the disordered eating was so enjoyable for me (and yes I mean that seriously, I felt good at it and like I was the one in control) was due to that time in my life being a dumpster fire of me feeling otherwise pretty powerless.

        • Stress is a part of it. A lot of people stress eat. I stress restrict. I completely understand that weird deprivation success thing. It’s hard to explain to people who have never experienced it. I usually tell them it’s like beating your own time in swimming or track.

  8. I’ve never been on a diet & never really had weight issues until the pandemic (other than sympathy pregnancy weight when the wife was pregnant).  Now I am about 10-15 lbs above where I would like to be but trying to get back on my bike more with weather getting better and back to lifting weights a few times a week.  Having my eldest back home for awhile helps me cook healthier with her pescatarian diet, my wife would like me to do that all the time but I love chicken/turkey and occasional beef too much.

    • Same, put on an extra 15 when I started working from home and not leaving the house + lost my work-walking buddy and office gym. They say it takes several months to build up a good habit and approx 0.0003 seconds to create a bad one. And boy not going anywhere and doing anything is my new habit.

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