Sorry in advance: another post on my diet. But I lost 30 kg over 5 years, so I think I’m on to something. And I suffered a bit doing it, so I seem to think it’s fair to make other people suffer by talking about it.
basically, caloric intake must go down, exercise must go up; but one-sided diets can damage your health.
loosing or gaining weight happens at the supermarket. Once I have tasty stuff in the fridge and upboard, I will eat it. So I have to lever my laziness, miserliness and habitualness against my gluttony: by buying food only once or twice a week, sticking to my regular list, and avoiding restaurants and street food.
avoid ready-made, engineered foods. Chips, crackers, ice cream, sugary cereal, frozen pizza… the basic rule here seems to be: if it has a large picture of smiling people on the box, it’s really bad for you.
prefer food that fills up the stomach and gives a sense of satiation without having too much calories. For me, that’s mostly green salad, tomatoes, joghurt, copious amounts of a peculiar no-fat cheese, some whole wheat bread and fruit. But your tastes are important here, it has to be something you can stand to eat every day.
Some exercise will be necessary, ideally integrated in to your daily routine. Like trying to take the bicycle everywhere except in the most foul weather.
In the weekend, pick some sport you like and exert yourself. For me, it’s swimming. Once I’ve completed that, I treat myself to some home cooking, breaking most of the weekday diet rules, except for the shopping one.
Of course if you have a social dinner or something like that, you want to join in and not alienate your friends and family by lecturing them about diets.
A friend’s dad lived on potatoes for a year while he was researching the famine - AFAIK, he grew the kind of potatoes that a peasant family would have had at the time. He also researched his own family line, and found that there were Irish landowners in it at the time - who had exported their grain rather than using it to feed Irish people. He also found records showing how aid that had been raised in England, India and elsewhere (often through the Anglican church) was often funnelled through Catholic agencies which sometimes denied this fact in order to increase nationalist sentiment. Souperism was a thing, but was also often exaggerated by Catholic churches and there was a lot of relief work by Anglicans, Quakers and others that did not include proselytism (souperism was mainly associated with Evangelical churches). The famine was the first national disaster to attract international fundraising activities, and support came from as far as Russia, Turkey, Venezuela, Australia, South Africa, Mexico, Russia and Italy. It’s not that it wasn’t an example of British misrule (the relief efforts were voluntary rather than from the government, which chose not to use its own resources to prevent starvation), but the history I grew up with was far from objective.
Trypophobia makes perfect sense unless you expand it to normal things like lotus pods &c. There’s no aspect of human health that… that gross biz indicates any good outcome for. If you got a bunch of little holes like that in your whatevs, you got a fucken problem. There’s a reason why when you go into an emergency room they ask you Have you been in some crazy-ass African jungle or something recently? Because get the fuck away from us, go die behind the dumpster please.
