Reminder that BetterHelp doesn't give a fuck about their patients and is actually a fucking terrible way to get therapy.
Please find other alternatives for BH because they're ATROCIOUS.
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.
"You're fat because your body wants you to live" rewired my brain, thank you
i have to share with you all my favorite totk video ever
That’s actually a brilliant idea, even from a strict effectiveness standpoint.
Pity they got shut down.
Some examples:
Just goes to show how much data facebook/insta collect about you that gets sent to advertisers. Also facebook responded by effectively saying ‘yes we collect the data but we dont allow advertisers to say that they’re using this data’ after trying to accuse Signal of pulling a ‘PR stunt’. Facebook is so scummy.
Lord of the rings
I present to you: this blessed group.
ARROW CAPACITY KILLED ME
“Imagine what it would look like if ChatGPT were a lossless algorithm. If that were the case, it would always answer questions by providing a verbatim quote from a relevant Web page. We would probably regard the software as only a slight improvement over a conventional search engine, and be less impressed by it. The fact that ChatGPT rephrases material from the Web instead of quoting it word for word makes it seem like a student expressing ideas in her own words, rather than simply regurgitating what she’s read; it creates the illusion that ChatGPT understands the material. In human students, rote memorization isn’t an indicator of genuine learning, so ChatGPT’s inability to produce exact quotes from Web pages is precisely what makes us think that it has learned something. When we’re dealing with sequences of words, lossy compression looks smarter than lossless compression.”
Um.
i don't think "flex" is a strong enough word for whatever the last three minutes of my life was
That was one of the most beautiful sequences I have ever seen.
I was probably 4 or 5 years old when I saw this, and it is a core memory for me. The expressions of the eagle in the first sequence, the blink, the reaction to the glint of the knife, the suffering from being tied down, formed a permanent emotional and moral basis for my understanding of what an animal is and how I want to relate to them. I don't know how to explain it. Deep, mysterious, and sacred.
I'm a deeply unreligious person who sees god in a bird's gestures. It's unbelievable that that was captured here.
Throughout this pandemic, Passage has been publishing articles and courses documenting how Canadians are suffering due to the housing crisis.
Houses are too expensive for most of us to buy. Skyrocketing rents are forcing us out of our communities or into smaller and worse living spaces at higher costs. Some of us are even ending up on the streets, as homelessness is on the rise.
Of course, though, not everyone has been suffering. People who own property have been watching the value of their investments surge, and maybe even scooping up more of it to the detriment of those in need. Landlords have recently been able to jack up rents with little resistance. And the financialization of housing, where corporations that view it as a tradeable stock or asset as opposed to a human right and treat it accordingly, has been able to spread unimpeded.
So where do our political representatives fit into all of this? Do our members of parliament have more in common with us, or the landlord class?
According to recently released research I’ve put together over the past few months, nearly 40 per cent of MPs are landlords and/or invested in real estate in some way. [...]
Tagging: @politicsofcanada, @vague-humanoid
This explains the lack of action on the glaringly obvious housing crisis in Canada. Isn’t this called conflict of interest?
criminal profiling is just astrology for cops
taking a forensics class and watching the professor explain one by one how criminal profiling, hair microscopy, and bite mark analysis are all pseudoscience responsible for ruining innocent lives, and how on top of that, fingerprint analysis, despite being significantly more reliable, is subjective and prone to contextual bias. and also bullet striation analysis has the same issues. and also bullet lead analysis doesn’t work. and also handwriting analysis has an error rate high enough to render it useless
damn i'm almost starting to think the entire criminal justice system only exists to provide the illusion of protection while justifying state violence idk
Wait tell you hear about judges using witnesses' physical demeanor to help assess their credibility
in star wars fandom how is everything about anakin's fall always everyone else's fault except the guy who personally designed it to be a no hit run of Sith Apprentice Generator IV
in legends palpatine wrote this book of monsters about sith creations and included an entry for darth vader, and described the amount of joy he got from turning a nine year old into a war machine. the entry ends with maybe the most chilling line in anything even star wars adjacent, where palpatine says, "given the opportunity to create vader again, i would, and with glee," or thereabouts. the entire entry is haunting, but that final line is completely fucking chilling; palpatine is the ultimate, insidious force, and no matter how long it took, how difficult it was, or what anakin did to him, palpatine wouldn't have stopped. even after being killed by vader, palpatine would still go back and do it all over again, even if it ended in vader killing him. palpatine - famous for the ways he's attempted to cheat death - would risk it all just for the joy of curbstomping a nine year old's soul into hell one more time. and this is just something that exists that we can all read
what you all thought i was joking? you all thought i was joshin? i was crafting joshuas? you thought i was fucking around?
Star Wars is not usually my scene, but "A monster is most effective when it is hungry and in some degree of pain" sure is something.
Kid Cudi dancing on stage at Coachella durng MGMT’s set to “Electric Feel”
fakejournals
Will always reblog. Makes me so happy to see others enjoying life.
Okay, you need to make sure you play this game at some point. Maybe not today or anything, because you’ll need about thirty minutes and a serious willingness to understand how it works, but - it’s so worth it. It’s basically an answer to our occasional frustration - why do assholes always come out on top? - and the beautiful thing about it is that not only does it explain how that happens, but also how we can change it.
“In the short run, the game defines the players. But in the long run, it’s us players who define the game.”
This is fascinating if you’re into math or sociology or computer programming or all of the above.
Everyone, everywhere, without exception, should play this thing through.
dumgold
Don’t check just this - check out all of Nicky Case’s work. They’re a brilliant creator and I heavily recommend checking out at least one of their projects. Their website can be found here.
Parable of the Polygons - an interactive experiment that shows how tiny individual biases can collectively cause segregation on a massive scale.
To Build a Better Ballot - an interactive experiment that shows the alternatives to the voting systems we currently use and how they can be more representative and democratic, along with their faults.
Coming Out Simulator - a short interactive story/novel about coming out, based off of Case’s own experiences. Not one I’ve played myself but still one I can recommend.
Loopy - a very simple but useful tool to show how systems interact with each other and how things can self-propagate.
We Become What We Behold - “ a game about news cycles, vicious cycles, infinite cycles.“ A short five-minute game about news and media. Warnings for violence, blood, death and stress.
OH MY GOD THIS IS FRICKING AMAIZNG WOW WOW WOW WOW YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS YES INTELLECT
Unlearning How White People Ask Personal Questions
Holy shit. I have ALWAYS thought the people around me were being unconscionably intrusive and power-playing in their starter conversations and they told me I was antisocial and oblivious to culture norms. Turns out, maybe I’m just from a different culture.
****new link****
by Keith Humphreys - May 5, 2014
When I met my fiance’s African-American stepfather, things did not start well. Stumbling for some way to start a conversation with a man whose life was unlike mine in almost every respect, I asked “So, what do you do for a living?”.
He looked down at his shoes and said quietly “Well, I’m unemployed”.
At the time I cringed inwardly and recognized that I had committed a terrible social gaffe which seemed to scream “Hey prospective in-law, since I am probably going to be a member of your family real soon, I thought I would let you know up front that I am a completely insensitive jackass”. But I felt even worse years later when I came to appreciate the racial dimension of how I had humiliated my stepfather-in-law to be.
For that painful but necessary bit of knowledge I owe a white friend who throughout her childhood attended Chicago schools in a majority Black district. She passed along a marvelous book that helped her make sense of her own inter-racial experiences. It was Kochman’s Black and White Styles in Conflict, and it had a lasting effect on me. One of the many things I learned from this anthropological treasure trove of a book is how race affects the personal questions we feel entitled to ask and the answers we receive in response.
My question to my stepfather was at the level of content a simple conversation starter (albeit a completely failed one). But at the level of process, it was an expression of power. Kochman’s book sensitized me to middle class whites’ tendency to ask personal questions without first considering whether they have a right to know the personal details of someone else’s life. When we ask someone what they do for a living for example, we are also asking for at least partial information on their income, their status in the class hierarchy and their perceived importance in the world. Unbidden, that question can be quite an invasion. The presumption that one is entitled to such information is rarely made explicit, but that doesn’t prevent it from forcing other people to make a painful choice: Disclose something they want to keep secret or flatly refuse to answer (which oddly enough usually makes them, rather than the questioner, look rude).
Kochman’s book taught me a new word, which describes an indirect conversational technique he studied in urban Black communities: “signifying”. He gives the example (as I recall it, 25 years on) of a marriage-minded black woman who is dating a man who pays for everything on their very nice dates. She wonders if he has a good job. But instead of grilling him with “So what do you do for a living?”, she signifies “Whatever oil well you own, I hope it keeps pumping!”.
Her signifying in this way is a sensitive, respectful method to raise the issue she wants to know about because unlike my entitled direct question it keeps the control under the person whose personal information is of interest. Her comment could be reasonably responded to by her date as a funny joke, a bit of flirtation, or a wish for good luck. But of course it also shows that if the man freely chooses to reveal something like “Things look good for me financially: I’m a certified public accountant at a big, stable firm”, he can do so and know she will be interested.
Since reading Kochman’s book, I have never again directly asked anyone what they do for a living. Instead my line is “So how do you spend your time?”. Some people (particularly middle class white people) choose to answer that question in the bog standard way by describing their job. But other people choose to tell me about the compelling novel they are reading, what they enjoy about being a parent, the medical treatment they are getting for their bad back, whatever. Any of those answers flow just as smoothly from the signification in a way they wouldn’t from a direct question about their vocation.
From the perspective of ameliorating all the racial pain in the world, this change in my behavior is a grain of sand in the Sahara. But I pass this experience along nonetheless, for two reasons. First, very generally, if any of us human beings can easily engage in small kindnesses, we should. Second, specific to race, if those of us who have more power can learn to refrain from using it to harm people in any way – major or minor — we should do that too.
This is really useful stuff – as someone who’s on disability and knows a ton of people in the same boat, “What do you do for a living?” can be such a loaded question. “How do you spend your time?” is a much more compassionate thing to ask, because you can just enthuse about what you’re writing or how great your cats are or whatever.
worst thing a video game can do is give me a bad reason to kill guys. either give me a very good reason or just say 'there's no good reason, you're playing as a sicko'. don't be like, 'uhhh they are Raiders so you can kill them en masse with unlimited brutality but during our sidequests we will inexplicably provide incongruous moral choices about whether or not it's okay to kill Namedcharacter van der Warcrime'
'do you want to Spare babymunch the evil wizard... or Kill him... or perhaps join him and turn against the village folk 😈 ? this is a world of complex morality......' — a game in which you've killed a triple digit number of human beings
Well, you know, some bathroom graffiti offers insight.
Red marker handwriting on a bathroom wall. Text reads:
“Boss made a dollar Granddad made a dime But that was a poem From a simpler time.
Boss made a thousand Gave pa a cent But that penny paid the mortgage Or at least it paid the rent
Now Boss makes a million And gives us jack Smugly blames the workers For the labor that he lacks.”
And the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls.
Nothing I’ve read has changed me more than “you do people a favor by accepting their help” like I repeat this constantly to so many people because it’s true!!! People like to feel useful, they like to feel kind, they like to feel like they have an ability to impact people’s lives so just let them!! Not everything is a thing to be owed back — accept people’s kindness without making a competition out of it
I figured out too late in life that refusing random help will more often make the person feel unwanted or not trusted : (
This is true on the interpersonal level and on the community level. Your friendsgroup/family/house/affinity-group/street will thrive so much better when people accept each others help. When there is a regular back and forth of people helping each other and people accepting that help, you get a generous community where needing help is not stigmatized. Accepting help is an essential component of that. You literally can’t have a functioning community without it.
I always make a point to tell my partners “thank you for letting me help you,” because I know it’s difficult, and even more difficult to not feel guilty afterwards.
