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Wellness Wednesday for June 12, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Well I'd be happy to talk to you about it, given that I've suffered from this sort of thing for a while and don't see myself as having any of those traits. Of course I may be wrong.

That being said, you really think over 25% of the U.S. population has those characteristics? And even if they did, why would this still not be a problem?

Much more than 25% of the US population is obese, yes.

I mostly just don't look for alternate explanations for people's poor health when I can look at them and easily observe that their poor health is a product of eating too much and moving around too little. I've never met someone that was a cross-country runner or hobby cyclist or Crossfit enthusiast or powerlifter or mixed-martial artist that informs me that they got laid up after they moved into the wrong building. I'm sure there are genuine sufferers of idiosyncratic illnesses of autoimmunity, post-viral syndromes, and fungal infections, but as sweeping explanations for the poor health of Americans, I think these add little to the story. I wouldn't dismiss an individual, stuff happens, but I am pretty skeptical of these oddball diseases having more explanatory power.