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:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I grew up in the South, land of biscuits and gravy, chicken fried steak, and hushpuppies. To say nothing of deep fried (insert food), and of the ubiquitous "Meat & Three" diners which served (and still serve, if you can find them) a meat and three sides, most of which were either vegetables boiled in oily broth or fried in grease, or the perennial favorite of macaroni and cheese which apparently the cool kids call "Mac & Cheese." If, as I was growing up, my mother served us fish it was either in the form of fried catfish or something she called salmon croquettes which I somehow think was a 70s thing. I did not really understand in my heart that seafood of any sort could be served in any way other than deep, deep fried until my 20s, after I left to go very far away indeed. At this time I also learned it was bizarre to most other Americans to hear me use the terms "I might could," to mean "I might be able to," "I'm fixin' to," to mean "I am about to," and of course the first time, when driving, I was faced with a sudden burst of traffic headlights coming in the other direction at night and I asked, rhetorically, "Who opened the barn door?" my girlfriend at the time erupted into hysterics and asked me to please say more southern phrases. (I think she was a fetishist.) I of course had no answer to this.
Why do I say any of this? Because let us be frank: I grew up in the heart of Fatville. I was raised among the obese. "Bigun" where I am from is a term of endearment. I can recall not too many years ago on a trip home sitting among my aunts, who were all worried about the dangerous heft of my uncle. They spent many minutes fretting over this as we ate pecan pie and drank iced tea. Then this same uncle appeared at the door, and he had barely sat down on the sofa (with considerable effort) before these same aunts were insisting they be allowed to "fix him a plate," though he said he was fine. He eventually did receive a plate, of course, and a large one. Which I am sure he consumed. (Edit: not the actual plate. The food on it. Of course.)
All this as even further prelude to the point that my whole life I have been skinny. Even now, nearing the age when if I were to die, as Louis CK or someone made the joke: no one would mourn that I "died too young," but that "I had a full life." And yet thin I am. My sons are thin. My Japanese wife is thin, though that is no great rarity. I am 5'11" and weigh about 70kg. This is close to the most I have ever weighed.
Why? I do not know. I drink beer. I eat the carbs @2rafa scorns and has scorned all of her life. I heap the pasta onto my plate.
I had a dear friend who was overweight most of his life. He went through a weight-loss phase in his freshman year and I remember him telling me that he was suddenly getting a lot of attention from people (he was also rich, but I suppose rich and slovenly still weigh more on the side of slovenly, no pun intended). Once he became rich and relatively normal-weighted, his new girlfriend (who also appeared with the weight loss) began dressing him (madras shirts, argyle socks, woven leather belts, and even gold bracelets--this was the late 80s.) He told me once that he appreciated me being his friend, and that should anyone from the old days come up to him and want to be his friend now, he was going to tell them "Fuck you." I have no idea if he ever got to do that. He probably wouldn't have, anyway, but it was a funny thing to hear.
That friend is now dead, mostly from excesses of every kind (he gained most of his weight back, drank and drugged himself into an early grave, bless his soul). And I am still here. Some of us are just not meant to be fat. Probably I could put on the pounds if I set my mind to it--for a few years I started drinking protein shakes and going to the gym and tracking calories, and in the reddit days I was a member of /r/gainit. But here I still am.
This is not me bragging. Just, as always, another voice.
People are born different. My MIL drinks tea with pastries between meals and isn't someone who's always up and about. She isn't overweight. Her main meals aren't large, though, but I doubt that alone can explain her total lack of extra weight. Her furnace just runs hotter or less efficiently.
I don't deny it. I cling to the idea that people are born different, I adhere to it, I embrace it, and it's not always HBD or some similar rallying cry. Vive la difference, and not just between the sexes (though very much that.) Thank you for your comment.
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What year did you move to Japan? Pre-1993?
1998, August. Why?
Just curious if you saw it before the crash.
Ah. No, I was here well past bubble years, or the babburu jidai バブル時代 as it is remembered here, though one read much about those days even when I was first here. I can't imagine, from reading and hearing about it, how much the world must have seemed like a playground in those days. The wild excesses strain credulity. Nothing gold can stay, I suppose.
I have a friend who was working there at the time. If you were walking through the financial district (and were a reasonably well turned-out foreigner) strangers would literally grab you and pull you over so they could buy you dinner.
Fortunately a lot of the money got put into building programs. Museums, bridges and so on. Not all of which were necessary, or great value for money, but at least there was a legacy that outlasted the bubble.
I have been to places even now where it is very likely that I am the first real-life white dude anyone has ever seen. The foreign population here is still only about 2 something %, and caucasians are not the majority (that would be Chinese.) No one's ever randomly bought me dinner, though. Ou sont les neiges d'antan?
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