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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Notes -
What are your thoughts on dopamine fasting?
Since the mechanisms of neurochemistry are highly nonlinear and piecewise, I am not even going to pretend I have a working understanding of whether the idea of dopamine fasting is dubious or not.
There are reasonable prescriptions, such as not masturbating twice daily, not scrolling Instagram reels for hours before sleeping, etc. But I have seen people avoiding screen time altogether or not even limiting how much music they listen to, which seems absurd to me. Well past the point of diminishing returns.
Tangentially, what are your thoughts on "eating good"?
Recently I have invested in multiple new kitchen equipment and many high-quality ingredients. Mainly because eating out is becoming less attractive with rising prices, and I have plenty of free time because of WFH so cooking is a good time pass.
This might sound like a weird "problem," but the food I have been cooking and eating recently is too good. With the help of youtube and serious eats, I am pumping out restaurant-quality food daily. I also got a large cabinet freezer so I can buy meat and seafood in bulk at the market for cheap.
This feels kind of "wrong", I am indulging, and I know it. I don't eat like a glutton and exercise a lot (walking 3-4 miles daily and lifting), so I am not concerned about getting fat, but I fell like I have pushed myself up the hedonic treadmill by getting good at cooking. More and more, I wake up and think, "what will I cook for dinner tonight?"
Thoughts?
Re: eating well all the time, it sounds like you've accidentally reinvented French food culture. I don't think it's a problem, but it may certainly be a shock to the system if you have an Anglophone background
I'm not Anglophone, and the food culture of my country is miles better than England's. I used to be a lazy cook and skip a few ingredients here and there, and now I have a full stocked pantry full of niche ingredients like obscure Indian spices, Chinese sauces, etc. And I spend the time required to make everything from scratch and well.
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I'm not sure I understand - why eating good is bad? I think unless you eat bad food - like junk food made specifically to fool your taste receptors into signaling it's valuable while it's in fact garbage - which I understand you don't do, there's nothing bad in eating tasty food at every meal.
Going faster on the hedonic treadmill is bad. Getting used to a more expensive and time-consuming QOL that is.
As I said, there is nothing mechanistically bad about eating more spices and seasonings and food that is cooked with better technique, it just feels like cheating that you can have something so good for just a little bit more work, it feels "wrong".
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Don't feel weird, it's a problem I've been having too; normal meals are so good now that it's sometimes difficult to find something for special occasions. Fortunately(?) I'm poorfag enough that a ribsteak is still an expensive treat for birthdays, etc.
Speaking of steaks. Steaks are one of the top examples of food that is made better and significantly cheaper at home (Unless you want something VERY high-end).
It is ridiculous how much steakhouses overcharge for mediocre steaks. The cheapest steakhouse around me is Texas Roadhouse. And I can make a much much superior steak for 1/3 the cost.
Texas Roadhouse isn't a steakhouse. They are simply a restaurant which serves steak. A steakhouse is something like Ocean Prime or Del Frisco's. Which, while they do charge a hell of a lot for steak you could do at home, they also aren't serving mediocre steak.
I suppose so.
But its still not too difficult to beat a steakhouse if you are starting with the same piece of meat.
Depends on what you're looking for I guess. Price-wise, sure you can easily beat them. Quality-wise, not so much imo. You can equal them, but there's only so good a steak can get.
But the reason I go to a steakhouse isn't to get food I couldn't prepare myself. Really I can replicate the food at any restaurant with some practice, they aren't doing magic or anything. But when I go to a nice restaurant it's to get a nice meal made for me, and to have service which attends to my needs while I eat. Those are things I can't get at home - at least not unless I convince my wife to cook and serve me dinner, haha.
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Not only have restaurants gotten more expensive, the service has gotten worse - and it seems like that's a permanent thing. Places have discovered they can close randomly and have 2 servers for 20 tables and the general public just keeps putting up with it.
"Eating good" is a totally reasonable hobby to pick up. Why hang out with friends who proved they're spineless cowards during COVID? Instead, you can sink an hour or two into killer meals. By cooking it you're reducing its appeal to yourself anyway, so that's generally the minimum you'd eat from a meal of that quality. Hopefully you're also cooking for someone else at least. The effort I put into my top tier (honestly, some of the most flabbergastingly good) burgers is wasted even when it's just for 2 people.
The thing I've started doing which I think is the big mistake is sweet baking (belgian waffles, blueberry muffins, oatmeal cookies....). The good news is I've hit my skill ceiling, the bad news is I can now slam these things together very quickly and set myself up for a terrible calorie dense day. An additional workout or skipping lunch helps.
What's your burger recipe? I can hardly think of a burger recipe that takes much effort.
I make some pretty good burgers too. But it's just making a plain beef patty (starting with good meat), seasoning it with salt and pepper on the outside, and then blasting it on the cast iron or charcoal grill; the fire does the work.
It's not a complicated recipe, but orchestrating everything to line up correctly is annoying with the charcoal, because bun toasting doesn't work as well on it. I have a separate nonstick or flat top running for that.
It is amazing that most people don't know how to patty properly, select beef, or order toppings on the correct buns. I'm generally making a custom variant of "Big Mac Sauce" and grilling onions for one set, and a custom chipotle sauce and grilled peppers for another.
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Man, I used to experiment with making hobnob biscuits, and eating the home made equivalent of a pack a week was really bad. It's a dangerous skill to learn.
And yeah, restaurants are off the table for me now, after the last $30 clearly frozen and microwaved dinner. But surely there's still good ones out there? Maybe just the ones out of my price range.
Around me, the only restaurants that are not committing daylight robbery post-covid are places where firemen, construction workers, and other manual laborers eat. And I eat out at these places 90% of the time, mainly to save time. I go to a "good" restaurant maybe 3-4 times a year.
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Dopamine fasting doesn't have anything to do with dopamine, and there isn't good evidence that 'scrolling instagram reels' has 'more dopamine' than playing a board game or going for a run or something. The problem with instagram reels isn't that they're addicting, it's that they're stupid - I sometimes "scroll HN" for an hour, but e.g. yesterday I was reading some exploit writeups for various apple vulnerabilities, from for instance here. This is both more useful and more interesting than instagram (i.e. with no "my desires are broken and I need to engage in talmudic ritual psychoanalysis to fix it")
There's a difference between eating a particularly tasty piece of meat, where it may signal the meat is nutritionally valuable in a selective sense, and eating a well seasoned piece of meat, where the spices probably lack nutritional value and are just confusing taste's selective purpose. But at least in the former case, things tasting good is uniformly valuable, eating complex-flavored salmon and pork is more useful than eating tasteless white bread over and over, and it 'tasting good' is just understanding that!
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