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).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The Roommate
Continuing on the previous monster comment, by 2021 I wound up with two non-paying roommates. The first (and subject of this comment) is flat out my fault. I made a drunken promise to move in with this guy (and replace the last sucker that was letting him live more or less for free), felt bound by honor to do so in spite of knowing that it was a terrible idea, and did so. He’s not an awful roommate (lazy and useless, sure, but not all that difficult or disruptive aside from his annoying chihuahua that isn’t housebroken), but the place I moved into was as close to a third world slum as you’re going to find in an American metro area, complete with idiot upstairs neighbors doing laundry in the bathtub upstairs and leaking water everywhere (causing water to leak in and eventually collapse my bathroom ceiling, which took ages to get the slumlord to half-assedly repair), a junkie adjacent neighbor with the nastiest, most roach infested apartment I’ve ever seen (which meant that we all had an unkillable roach infestation), zero sound insulation or insulation at all (This made for obscene electric bills during the winter and I was still cold.), and everything was just so old and rundown that it was impossible to clean/keep clean; even the air perpetually felt dirty and humid (probably because of all the mold and because it was located in a swampy area; I suspect that the whole place and surrounding roachboxes have only been spared from demolition because the owner would have to spend a considerable sum improving the ground before constructing the three over ones favored by developers here), and a non-functioning stove. But hey, at $400/month for a two bedroom in a fairly nice neighborhood close to campus you get what you pay for, and I didn’t spend enough. I left and kept paying the rent rather than keep living there, the roommate inherited some money and paid me for a year up front, and all was fine until that money ran out, at which point I didn’t have the heart to kick him out because he makes basically zero income and has nowhere else to go (His parents are gone, he has no siblings, etc.). It was easier to eat the rent and utilities than to provoke the drama storm that kicking him out would be.
The second roommate (another friend of mine; I’ll never entangle myself financially with a friend again) had just broken up with her boyfriend, I got her a job at University to Go (She really was good and made the most money she’d ever made in her life doing it, but just couldn’t make herself wake up on time and show up when she said she would such that she burned the bridge with dispatch.), and for the first few months she paid her share and everything was great even though the apartment we moved into was a bit spendy for my tastes at the time ($900/month when I’d never paid more than $475 in my life. Three years later, that now $950/month is actually a pretty nice deal relative to what’s out there now such that it isn’t worth the costs of moving to downgrade.) until she just quit working/paying. I was already stuck with the lease so I just dealt with it and let her run up a tab that’s now over $10K in back rent that I’ll never get because she’ll never have it unless she wins the lottery. She did eventually find herself a rich boyfriend (a screwup/slacker whose daddy owns a coal mine) and moved in with him, so it was relatively low effort to kick her out, and now that the lease is ending at the shithole I moved roommate number one into my current place (As annoying as he may be, the marginal cost of moving him into an empty room is basically zero, vastly cheaper than paying for him to live in a shithole and have to hear about it every time something breaks.), so enter the current situation:
Last time I mentioned that he was in bad health (morbidly obese, congestive heart failure, takes more pills than your average 80 year old, etc.) and it hasn’t gotten any better. For reasons I don’t understand he was denied for disability, but the heart failure is probably sufficiently advanced (a high-end stage 2 to low-end stage 3 I would guess) that he really should be getting it (and food stamps, etc.). His condition is his fault (You can be 400lbs or a cocaine addict, but both are not sustainable, and his CHF would be vastly less problematic if he were a compliant patient and heaven forbid drop some weight. I have 70+ year old relatives with CHF, big people at that and one also suffers from COPD, who get around better than he does.), and at times its hard to tell malingering (wearing a fucking CPAP while awake watching TV; for fuck’s sake the oxygen concentrator, aka. smoker machine that he got during covid is less noisy/creepy and if he really can’t breathe sitting still in his gigantic recliner that takes up a third of my living room then he should start looking for nursing homes or call his drug dealers and beg for the strongest hit of fent that they have. Curiously, he doesn’t need that stuff when sitting on a barstool.), but he really is fucked and while I get mad when I see pizza boxes pile up by the trashcan (I guess he makes enough bumming off other friends/selling off his Xannies and whatnot that he can afford fast food and his phone bill.) I don’t have an answer.
My apartment is on the second floor and itself is a two story unit so the stairs (which mutual friends have told me that he bitches about incessantly) may correct this issue in a short time. Either he’ll get fed up and find another friend to crash with or that aortic aneurysm will blow up, he’ll be dead in 30 seconds, and he’ll finally get his wish (I’ve heard more than I care to about his suicidal ideation.). He’s recently developed a mysterious gout-like (but not gout; he has that too and this is allegedly different, some variety of autoimmune disorder he thinks/claims) illness in his knees that renders him nearly bedridden (or, more properly, recliner-ridden; the bedrooms are upstairs). At the rate he’s going he’s going to be immobile soon (One would think that watching his dad die 500lbs and bedridden would dissuade him from following the same path, but I guess not.) and if that happens I swear that I’m gonna call adult protective services or whatever and have him tossed into a nursing home before he can blink because I’m not a nurse and don’t plan on becoming one. I have the local social worker who deals with that stuff’s number saved in my phone.
The only thing I’ll say in my defense (and I really should be defending myself for being so spineless/conflict averse that I let these situations fester, even though the truth is that I don’t have a good enough excuse) is that I don’t hate him; I hate the situation but it can be hard not to conflate the two. I want to toss his stupid fucking yap dog (He does the fake “service dog” thing with it at that.) that he carries to bars to curry attention from women into a woodchipper/off the balcony (I promise that I won’t actually do that because in fact I’m touchy about animal cruelty.) but it’s not the dog’s fault that it was raised by a shitty owner. I swear that he was a much less shitty friend before the heart failure (why I feel obligated to help him, and I’m not the only one) and I remember the man he used to be (a fuckup self-sabotaging train wreck, but he at least worked and would drop anything to help a friend).
Man I feel you, as somebody whose high school best friend kind of turned into a lazy stoner with severe relationship instability who just keeps making bad decision after bad decision, believe me I understand.
But you really need to put some distance between you and your friend. Although we definitely have some responsibility towards our friends and offering them a place to sleep or some financial assistance during a hard time is maybe even an obligation if you are close enough, the key factor there is: “are they earnestly and honestly trying to get themselves out of that position?”
If yes, then help without question. If no, cut them off. Even people who are trying to improve their lot in life or get out of tough circumstances don’t always succeed, to not even try and instead to leech off of other well-meaning people is a recipe for disaster that you want to be as far away as possible from.
Seriously, start eviction proceedings tomorrow. You don’t owe your friend anything anymore. If you were in his shoes, would you expect people to tolerate your bullshit? Would you ever stoop so low as to treat your friend the way he is treating you?
This sounds harsh but I have been in your shoes with my own friend. This guy was like a brother to me but at a certain point I realized I would never have abused the friendship to the extent that he did. I have plenty of other friends who are losers with no financial or romantic prospects, the difference is they don’t take advantage of me and treat the friendship with respect.
You know this already, but the answers to "Is he trying to help himself?", "Would I expect a friend letting me stay at their place to put up with this level of shit?", and "Would I do this to someone I call a friend?" are all no. I've had other friends in bad situations with broken decision making ability and they might've taken forever to repay loans, toed the line of "only calls me when his car breaks down", or whatever but they always did repay me eventually. I at least have the excuse of the first roommate being a woman that I was once very madly in love with. This guy doesn't respect himself enough to quit his slow-motion suicide in spite of a litany of friends who've tried to help him. I've done my damnedest to help, given him an insanely long leash, and he can't even be bothered to hustle and grind for welfare benefits, find some bullshit low-paying remote job, or even try to take care of his health, let alone repay me.
Fresh out of a brutal intervention on this subject from an IRL friend I arrived home and was asked to help make his bed (aka. just do it myself because that's faster) tomorrow because his knee hurts too much to move. Like, holy fuck, if you're that hard up you need to be in a nursing home and your needs are flat out beyond my ability to help, forget questions about deserving. We're reaching "I feel the need to defend myself" territory. If I let this fester I'm going to wind up a live-in caretaker and I'm genuinely afraid of what that would provoke from me in terms of anger and resentment.
He's lived here less than 30 days and isn't on the lease so there shouldn't be any legal issues. He'll be getting an eviction notice within a week. When talking with friends earlier I predicted based on my educated guesses that absent change he'll be bedridden within 6-24 months. If he's asking me to make his bed two weeks in that prediction might've been optimistic. My apartment is not a nursing home, end of story.
I work retail and can't really spare that much, but are you going to have any big expenses you're struggling to meet?
Nah, I'm going to be alright. I'm just going to have to pay my taxes late because the money I had allocated toward that got eaten up by a big car repair (engine replacement due to a cracked block, but the car is fixed and should be reliable for quite some time now with minor to moderate work in the future that I can DIY on weekends). It's not a big deal, as IRS penalties and interest are much lower than, say, credit card interest. I'm just militant/nervy about money as a habit due to growing up in a spendthrift household with perpetual financial crises, and in a temporary crunch while I'm waiting for my belt-tightening to render fruit that I've known was going to suck for awhile.
If worst comes to worst, I can make it with the new job, University to Go dinner shifts once the dog days of summer in a college town are over, and picking up a bartending or door shift here and there, but I was just disappointed because I came into the new job feeling like I was taking a step forward and it's a sidestep at best.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If your roommate is barely mobile, who’s walking the chihuahua? Seems like it might be the most miserable of you three in this situation.
The dog gets walked when he goes to the bar (which is whenever he can afford it/find someone to pay his tab and physically make it there) and lets it wander around, but otherwise rarely to never. Because of this, it isn't housebroken (He just puts down puppy pads even though the dog is 8 years old.). I know it isn't the dog's fault, but I hate that thing (and people who don't take proper care of their dogs, which is a lot of them). At least it can play with my cats now (The last roommate wanted a puppy and I put my foot down and refused, having correctly surmised that I would wind up caring for it. I think her cat has lived with me for two years now. Cats are relatively low-maintenance so long as you sterilize them and don't wind up with a bunch of kittens.).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Fat people.
Not even once.
I really didn't know before I lived with him. Like, I've been average Amerifat on and off (have gained and lost the same 30ish pounds several times since being the fat kid who lost the weight after high school) but morbid obesity is a different game. Like, I've seen him take down a 14 inch stuffed crust pizza with a quart of milk in 20 minutes. I hear obvious bullshit like "I haven't eaten in days". (I have gone days without eating because stressed out me loses all appetite and when that happens I lose weight fast even while guzzling full sugar soda and alcoholic beverages.) or "This pizza is the first bad thing I've eaten in two weeks, so my diet shouldn't be causing my joint problems" (Again, bullshit. You told me that you went to the Chinese buffet last week, I've never seen you cook or eat a vegetable, I see the junk food wrappers/boxes in the trash, and you forgot to mention the full order of cheezy bread that you took down with that pizza.) and don't even have a response. At least every drunk I've known doesn't pretend that their hangover came from nowhere.
One of my siblings is living her 400lb life and it's fucking depressing.
I don't know if addiction causes people to lose their tolerance for discomfort or if the low tolerance for discomfort causes the addiction in the first place, but having been around enough of it you run into ridiculous shit like my roommate complaining about the heat during a power outage 30 minutes after the power went out (Yeah, it got humid and a bit stuffy, but it was during the night, below 80 degrees outside, and dark. It didn't get hot.) or a buddy's pillhead girlfriend requiring controlled substances to treat a headache.
It's about habit. Mind-patterns established by classical conditioning. Everyone feels that they need a way to cope with physical and emotional pains. If you establish the habit of pairing pain with [unhealthy thing], you'll automatically and mindlessly turn to that thing whenever you feel an ow. And because junk food, drugs, alcohol, etc, are addictive by their nature, the threshold for applying it to the ow goes down too. At some point, almost any excuse will be enough hurt to use the 'antidote'.
I noticed this phenomenon after I stopped drinking.
More options
Context Copy link
While the scale that morbidly obese people lie on is insane, I see pretty much the same kind of lying and self-delusion even among people that aren't super heavy. Somehow, people really do become convinced that they're not eating that much, that there's just something different about their metabolism that prevents them from being able to lose weight. The obvious conclusion that you're still eating too much is treated as implausible, because they know they're not eating very much. I also know multiple people that did lose some of the weight but have become convinced that it's only because they found the one true diet, the one way that really works for their bodies (one guy insists that wheat specifically is what ruins him because of this stupid book). For people that have fully settled on these sorts of beliefs, having me stand in front of them and be thin without avoiding any particular "bad foods" isn't evidence of anything other than how cursed their metabolism is.
Food, Sex, and Shelter.
That the three of these things (and water) are so hard wired in as to be non-negotiable (with the exception of sex and a pseudo-exception of shelter) is why I think you see so much dishonesty around them.
Sex, more broadly, relationships, is the easy and obvious one. We all have the friend with the awful boyfriend/girlfriend that they just can't break up with. Many of us (myself included) have been that person at one time or another. Why not just cut and run? It's sex mixed up with emotional sunk-cost fallacy. This stuff has been fueling the music and movie industries since they began.
Shelter is a little weaker and less obvious, but you see it when people get evicted or when people refuse to move from obviously awful situations. I'm not referencing OP here. I have enough Appalachian Relations to know that people will talk a big game about "leaving this one horse town" but will also turn around and start spouting "but our history! is here" just as quickly. The inversion of this is NIMBYism in expensive enclaves in coastal cities. People tie a self-constructed history to land and dwellings. The truly ironic part is that everything material that actually services that "history" is utterly independent from the dwelling itself. No problem to take the pictures of grandma and grandaddy's old revolver. They fit in packing boxes just fine. I don't think anyone is really thinking, "Man those true 4x6 joists above the basement - I just can't go on without them" [^1]. But people invest their emotions in the the idea of a house, apartment, or dwelling of any kind.
Food, and associated weight problems, are almost as obvious as sex. Anyone who's dieted has probably encountered the self-delusion that is "cheat days" or "cheat meals." The sad fact is to really keep off the weight you have to fundamentally alter what and how you eat. Any even minor slip ups can really hold you back. Exercise is just as tainted by self-delusion and people fail to understand the adaptation principle. "I run three miles three times a week, and I've been doing it for three years!" Yep, and your body has become highly adapted to that overly specific and routine aerobic exercise. You're running those three miles incredibly efficiently compared to three years ago and, precisely because of that efficiency, burning nowhere near the calories you think you are.
I think that self-delusion and other cognitive failings occur so frequently with these areas because they have such a core place in human physiology. They're not negotiable. You can't ever put food / eating on hold for more than a few days. You can live outside, sort of, for a while but it gets debilitating. You definitely can remove sex as a component of your life but this is scene as so bizarre that's either (a) a religiously informed decision or (b) a horrible involuntary condition that may or may not make you a serial killer.
[^1]: Okay, seeing untrimmed 2x4s or 4x6s or anything like that would be really fucking cool, but I'm still not hauling them with me when I move to LA from Kentucky and rebranding myself as "Harlan Hazard"
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah, the number of fat people I have known over the years who insisted they have totally eaten less than 800 calories a day while exercising 2 hours every day and could not lose weight is boggling to me. It's a very consistent pattern of claims that are so improbable as to be physically impossible, and 100% of the time I want to say "If I followed you around with a camera, I am absolutely sure I would find out that you are eating way more than that (and probably not exercising nearly as much as you claim either)." The "exercise" claims also frequently amount to "I have a very active child I have to take care of all day, he keeps me sooooo busy!" Like, no, occasionally lunging to stop Junior from drinking dishwasher detergent or picking him up when he cries is not an exercise routine, even if it does leave you breathless because you still have 100+ pounds of "baby weight"....
More options
Context Copy link
You're not wrong. In my experience most people, fat or thin, either lack perspective on what they eat or are sufficiently ignorant of nutrition/serving sizes such that they don't even know what they're eating and drinking (Fun fact: one of my favorite IPAs from back in the day is 250 calories per 12 ounce bottle, so we're talking 1500 calories for a six-pack.). Morbid obesity is just a different magnitude of scale.
With that, the "one true diet" in my experience is something that is sustainable enough to stick to but excludes whatever category of food that the given person is prone to overconsuming. So, keto or low carb diets work not so much due to ketosis or gluten sensitivity or whatever but because their restrictions exclude pretty much any pre-prepared junk/restaurant food (I guess you could get fat on pork rinds from gas stations, but I think that would take work after awhile.) that's calorie-dense and easy to acquire.
One of my favorite quotes on dieting came from a military history professor I had as an undergraduate: "If calorie restriction didn't work to induce weight loss, people wouldn't die of starvation in sieges."
The only thin women I've met who will admit to not eating a lot are the ones complaining about their eating disorders. The one I was thinking of when typing the last sentence breaks my heart.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm not sure I can add much to this beyond musical accompaniment.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link