Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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I didn't expect a banana to give me trypophobia today. Out of a desire to upgrade my diet from becoming 100% junk food to merely 90%, I bought a bunch of them.
They arrived at a non-ideal level of ripeness, and then I let them sit for a few days. Now they're nice and yellow, but have a pattern of spots on them makes my skin crawl. Just about the only image on earth that otherwise does that is a photoshopped pic of someone's tits with holes added on, purportedly from worms.
Riddle me this, Doc Wonder: If you want to keep trim and build muscle, why rely on Ozempic and why not eat clean or at least eat something besides junk food 90% of the time?
Use the bananas for banana bread.
Just because I give out good advice doesn't mean I take it myself. Besides, my diet isn't literally >90% junk. A more realistic figure would be ~50%.
Work sucks, so I usually come home sapped of the will or energy to cook, and I'm not very good at it in the first place. I just tried figuring out my new place's oven, and the markings have worn off the dials. There are so many dials! I can't even tell what they do! I even tried all sorts of searching on Google, and asking my friendly neighborhood AI, to no avail. I just about managed to make some roast chicken without killing myself, so I'm not sure banana bread is in the cards. There's only one banana left, and no bread.
I can easily afford semaglutide (Ozempic, while a convenient and borderline generic name by now, actually implies the injectable form. I take tablets). It's remarkably safe. I probably save around 30% of the price of purchase via simply eating less.
I have, in the past, lost far more weight via a combination of a strict diet and working out. I happen to find the experience unpleasant. Some people enjoy going to the gym, alas, that's not me. I do it because I'm single, and need to up my market value unless I end up being sold as a lemon.
This time around, if I can't meet both my goals of losing weight and gaining muscle at the same time, I'm content settling for the former. When I'm at a more ideal BMI, I can stop the semaglutide and focus on musclar hypertrophy über alles. I'm aware of the fact that taking semaglutide causes me to lose muscle as well as fat (but not any more than simply dieting would do, that's just how the body reacts to a caloric deficit).
And last, but certainly not least: I have a realistic enough model of my own self that I know that if I didn't have the option of Ozempic, I would likely neither lose weight nor go to the gym as much as I should. The bottleneck in most of my life has been a lack of executive function/willpower. I can either hide behind a diagnosis of ADHD, or just accept that I'm lazy. Both might be true! Semaglutide simply short-circuits that dilemma.
I find this and the discussion below rather fascinating. It's pretty clear from multiple responses, including some of your own, that you don't simply lack willpower. And it's not at all like some folks would have you believe these conversations go down, where there's a bunch of folks (made of straw or something) telling you that you just lack willpower or are a stupid failure or something. Instead, you're trying to self-proclaim a lack of willpower, which is mostly contradicted by all available evidence.
And further, instead, you've not described almost any challenges that in any way really resemble any sort of lack of willpower. Most of the actual challenges you've described are just problems with a variety of known solutions that actually work... and, well, you've also proclaimed that you have an urge to find those sorts of things.
Frankly, as I put it:
I don't think you've quite hit the nail on the head yet for why you don't do it, but I think it's pretty clear that it's not a matter of willpower, and it's probably not really a matter of a couple minor challenges that have a variety of pretty well known solutions, either.
?
I'm not sure anyone on this forum is in a better position to judge my willpower than I am. Just about the only people I would defer to in that regard would be family or close friends. My family, as much as they love me, still regularly sigh and tell me they wish I was less lazy or had more willpower.
Firstly, why would I lie about my willpower? What do I have to gain out of downplaying it? I can be accused of many things, but excessive humility isn't one of them. I don't like my relative lack of willpower, it's a curse.
One that I manage to work around, and still have a reasonably productive life and successful career. I'd be much more successful if I didn't have ADHD or laziness.
(One of the core criteria for ADHD is a lack of executive function, and trust me, my diagnosis is quite clear)
The things that George was kind enough to say were impressive about me are largely things that I am naturally inclined to do. I do them for free, as a hobby. Except medicine, which I kinda drifted into because I wasn't sure what else I'd do with my life, before eventually finding a passion for psychiatry.
There are many things which are far more important, which I don't do or put off till I can't anymore, which have major impacts on my life and wellbeing.
I'm not saying I've got literally zero willpower. I'm just saying that I probably have <25th percentile conscientiousness, which is an unfortunate failing. Every time I hear about people who made nothing of their lives, or the self-proclaimed "gifted but lazy", I shudder, because there but for the grace of God go I. That's while acknowledging that I have other strengths and talents.
In what contexts?
I would not claim that you are lying.
I think these are probably nonidentical concepts, though I would likely have to spend some additional time thinking about it to be able to write on it eloquently.
Whence your urge to find solutions to problems that actually work? When it comes, how does it manifest?
"Clean your room. Take more driving lessons instead of lazing around. Start studying for the exams you've got ahead of you (this one is rather unjustified these days), don't skip the gym, learn to cook."
Or, in more specific contexts, things like applying for a visa earlier instead of nearly at the last minute.
I don't think they're identical either. But all 3 have a lot of overlap, the core being something like "doing unpleasant or boring yet necessary things, in a timely manner without prompting".
You mean professionally or personally? In the former, I do what any doctor does, defer to guidelines unless I am sufficiently confident in an alternative interpretation or treatment regimen.
The latter? What everyone else does, just later and more half-heartedly. I just told myself I'd go to the gym every other day, and in practise, it's been closer to every 4th day. I just skipped going this weekend despite promises to my dad I wouldn't, and plan to make it up tomorrow.
I also tend to do things at the last minute, and thus rushed as a consequence. Fortunately, I rarely actually let major deadlines slip and then face disaster. But it's stressful to live that way, and I know, on an intellectual level, that I'd be better off not procrastinating.
Thanks for the other context above, too. Combined with this, I'm not really sure this is really a matter of willpower/executive function/conscientiousness. It seems a bit more like just the human condition that some things are unpleasant, and different folks make different tradeoffs. I think there are a variety of reasons why folks make different tradeoffs here, too.
I'm not quite sure I've worded this in a way to get at what I'm looking for. The way you made it sound originally, it's like you have some excitement or something for certain types of problems. I was kind of getting Lottery of Fascinations vibes, and wanted to see if it was that sorta thing. I'm not really sure your response gets at that, because I probably didn't word the question well. Things like deferring to guidelines doesn't really seem to fit, unless the idea is that you sometimes rabbit hole down an alternative interpretation that hit the lottery. Or personally, do you just get tweaked by some types of problems or whatever.
I think, big picture, and going back to your earlier comment, you mention that you've lost more weight with diet/exercise in the past. That doesn't really seem to me to be describing someone who just lacks willpower, especially given the assumption (that I am not solidly making) that willpower is the necessary ingredient for such a thing.
Instead, it feels to me to be more of just the typical things of choices and tradeoffs. Like, you said that you'll plan on going hypertrophy über alles post-semaglutide, but hypertrophy sucks, man. I mean, yeah, some people enjoy dreamer bulking (which never really accomplishes the dream) on the diet side, but you still have to lift lots of heavy weights a bunch. Seems a bit weird, since you say that you just don't like the gym. But then, I guess you maybe say you'll do it because you feel like you kind of have to, but that gets back to feeling like a willpower-limited thing again (in the model where willpower is the necessary ingredient). So I don't know. Is there something that makes 'hypertrophy über alles' trip your fascination for finding solutions to problems (because yeah, those exist, and they involve lifting a lot of heavy weights), but that fixing your diet doesn't? Perhaps you could introspect some more on some of the differences and see if you could find relatable components to the problems, see if you could trick your lottery into finding at least something relevant in there to grab your attention.
Maybe I'll start with one little thing. Hypertrophy doesn't work great with a terrible, junky, dreamer bulky diet. I mean, it works okay, but if you're fascinated with the idea of hypertrophy über alles, you might want to consider the problems that it poses... problems which do happen to have solutions which actually work.
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