Oof my husband snores. I let him fall asleep first because it's worst when he first falls asleep, when I get in bed I say please stop snoring and he can for long enough I get to sleep, and I guess it's just not as loud after that because I almost never wake up from it. If I snore it wakes me up though, happens rarely but sometimes if I am on my back will snort while asleep and it jerks me awake - I don't understand how my husband can sleep though his own snoring, at all .
I have never struggled with weight. Or not in the direction of overweight anyway. When I am full I don't want food. When emotionally upset, I REALLY don't want food. I don't need willpower or a big bowl of kale before every meal.
If someone can live the life I get to have, with a drug, that is awesome. The GLPs have some good side effects, they have been used long enough now that there's increasing evidence they reduce the risk of dementia, heart attack, and stroke (even in diabetics of normal weight, not using it to lose weight) - not all the side effects are bad, and if it is well tolerated it's a reasonable drug to just stay on.
I do agree that lifestyle comes first. And think most people do enjoy a healthy lifestyle if they try it. But I don't think someone should have to do more than I do, just to get to the same place.
This whole conversation reminds me of getting migraine treatment - the doctors would say oh try avoiding food triggers. What food triggers? Every single food, oh and also fasting. Heat, cold, sex, no sex, stress, relaxation , caffeine , no caffeine. The list of migraine triggers was "life".
I got them with my period though, not something I could avoid, and even though I'm sure the doctor was trying to make me feel empowered to do something about it, it always felt like they were blaming me for getting the migraines.
I have had them managed with emergency med imitrex by injection for 30 years, once a month and now less often with menopause plus estrogen and progesterone daily. Would I rather have had to take extreme lifestyle measures just to avoid crippling headaches? No. The drugs worked so much better.
There is no inherent virtue in avoiding drugs. They are tools, in the same toolkit that holds a good diet and physical activity and meditation.
Are you healthy? I am thin but not as much as I'd like (mental issue) and always have to remind myself that the result of a healthy lifestyle is a healthy body. Not one that necessarily looks like your ideal form. I can walk & dance, stand on my hands & cartwheel, eat healthy, exercise and work on athletic goals not size goals.
If you are happy with your lifestyle and feel like you are nourishing your body and exercising it, weight lands in different places for different people (or as I found, different for same person at different ages.) But you feel good? That seems like a good result.
If you don't feel good, that is when I would push the doctor for more tests to figure out what the heck is going on.
4 miles between pedestrian crossings should be illegal. Here, though it's for sure a car city, the small roads that go under the stupid highway that bisects the city are about 1/2 mile apart. And where there is no sidewalk, on smaller roads, legal to walk in road, off to the side, facing traffic.
One criticism of this analysis (which I think is mostly spot on) those GLP drugs help people change their lifestyle by turning off the 'food noise'. They don't, by themselves, make anyone lose weight. They help people who overeat be not hungry all the time so that they can eat better and work out more - it's the eating better and working out more that is causing the weight loss.
Yes, also walking to the store, walking to work. I don't use my car much - arranged my life so that I can get everywhere I need to, mostly, without driving but that is unusual as fuck where I live, everyone else in my office arrives by car. I am not usually the only bike in the rack at the grocery but maybe 3, 4 bikes and a hundred cars in the lot. No bike rack at my doctors' offices, nor dentist, nor aesthetician. None at restaurants.
Walking a lot or even biking on e-bike everywhere like I do, makes a difference in what you can eat without getting fat. But also I cook at home, from ingredients, do make sweet stuff for the kids & husband but don't like it much myself. Grow some of our food, and lunch biggest meal.
I don't think it's impossible here, to have a reasonable lifestyle, I do it and am not an unusual person, not super rich or super ambitious or determined. I do think it's more difficult and you have to be intentional AND either be lucky (city grew up around me) or flush with money, to create a life that is the "fifteen minute bubble" with everything nearby.
I agree so much with this. We can use math to describe what you are doing when you throw a ball, that doesn't mean you are doing the math calculations when you throw it.
We can use math to calculate all sorts of things, doesn't mean those things themselves are doing math to decide how to do them. Waves, the moon's orbit, all kinds of natural systems we can use math to describe, but they aren't doing math.
Think Sa on inhale and Ha on exhale can work, or I count backwards from 100 in Spanish, starting over when I forget where I am. Yin yoga is good too, forward folds calm the nervous system.
To do something else, when it seems sleep is not possible or desirable? Emotional stress? Get out of bed & go for a night walk, or even a run. Exercise. Get physically exhausted if possible.
Voivod were such a delightful live act when I saw them tour that album. They made the sound effects vocally, like just stepped up to the mike and said woooooooo or whoooosh or beep or whatever. And had almost no English because they were from some little town in the French part of Canada. We saw them open for Soundgarden, but liked them better, they were amazing performers and really nice people.
No. When I was growing up the crime rate was high, schools were much worse, downtown here was abandoned on weekends, gay people were targeted with more violence, there was more racial violence, more domestic violence, it was really rough.
My kids grew up in a better time, but now it is sliding again, the last one did not get education as good as the older ones.
I am not even a little bit nostalgic, you could not pay me to go back to the time I grew up.
This won't be helpful but having kids helped me to feel much more like a competent person. I was so awkward, eating disordered, anxious, and having this one thing my body was so good at, a normal human function that worked normally for me, went a long way towards healing my relationship with my body; and babies are so cute people stop to admire them, so I had a connection to the outside world I was happy about, AND I had to go back to college so I could make enough money so it kick started my career.
I cannot imagine recommending kids as an answer, obviously that's ridiculous. But it was the main factor in my feeling more relaxed and less awkward.
That's only true if gay people don't exist either though. I would love to be bi, how nice it must be to not care what body someone wears. Not closed minded, half my kids are queer, and my mom didn't care or judge either.
But I'm straight, I know, I've tried with women and it doesn't feel like sex, there is nothing. It's men for me, so that makes me straight, yes?
When I was a young woman and alienated teen, the gay bars were so welcoming and safe, it was a safe place for some of us who didn't fit at the keg parties and proms and shit. We didn't bother anyone just danced, drank, enjoyed ourselves. Made friends, watched drag shows. It probably helped me stay sane back then. Not to say that was anybody else's responsibility, just that that's what it did. They liked having stylish punky girls there, were always welcoming.
Of course that was decades ago and we were not like "tourists" there, if that makes sense, there was more overlap between subcultures and back then at least the gay guys were a subculture. We stayed close to some of those guys, but over half our older gay friends died of AIDS, including two who killed themselves when they got HIV.
Yeah I always felt best (highest libido, good appetite, slightly manic but in a pleasant way, just lots of energy) in the days right before my period, and the actual period was a big comedown and usually accompanied by a migraine.
The two nadirs in my cycle were ovulation and menstruation, both are sharp drops in estrogen so that makes sense. Progesterone runs up before the period and that I think is what made me feel good.
"Other than making some sort of vegan statement" is such an oddball exception.
I don't mind the casual conversation. But do mind proselytizing.