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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   1206 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for April 1, 2026

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).

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I took an OCEAN quiz recently and scored low on agreeableness. This was bit shocking to me because as a child and young adult I was always very agreeable, sometimes almost a doormat. After reflecting a bit I concluded that the quiz was right and I really have become a less agreeable person. I think that the weight of responsibility and the limited amount of time I have now has just reduced my patience for pleasantries and circumlocution. I'm not an "asshole" (I think), I'm just direct and to the point.

My neuroticism also dropped from moderate to low. But everything else stayed the same.

How has your personality changed over your life?

Don't think my personality has changed at all or if it has, hardly so. People aren't very good when it comes to their own self-conceptualization and how they imagine themselves to be. Circumstance and local conditions modulate how the different aspects of your psychology express themselves so where you place the emphasis on the spectrum is never going to seem completely accurate because it's always shifting around a bit before you run into regression to the mean.

I would say my disagreeableness has reduced ever since I was a young adult in a somewhat complex way, but at my core I have always been a curmudgeonly contrarian fuck with a massive chip on my shoulder that has only matured as I age. This hasn't changed - my best quality is that I hate a lot and hate intensely. What has changed though is my reaction to this cynicism. Earlier in life I would attempt to try and reason or argue with people in an attempt to debate, both online and off in an attempt at dealing with conflict or disagreement, basically "I can fix them" epitomised, lately I have been finding it to be a Sisyphean task. Increasingly I find my reaction to be this muted thought process of "well the thing you said or did is bloody stupid" and then I move on.

(It's part of why I've been losing interest in the CW threads here too and just increasingly declining to read them - as distinct as this forum's discussion norms are, many of the comments on topics I can actually give input on cover ground that's ancient to me, and too many compulsively make posts along the lines of "I found [single case study] here is my extrapolation" or "here is my vibes-based diatribe/just-so story/anecdote" and I have zero interest in dragging out a hundred and one sources I've posted previously to rehash a discussion I've had for what seems like the thousandth time when someone is directionally incorrect enough to ruffle my feathers. I increasingly understand why effortposters seemingly go into flame-outs out of nowhere.)

In my case, I think this is also partially down to increased responsibility and being time-poor that makes the cost-benefit of being argumentative look awful. My takes themselves have barely changed, but my position regarding argumentativeness has shifted from "Someone is wrong" to "What does it matter, it's not like anything will change much anyway, it's like pissing in the ocean". I guess this means I've become less disagreeable, at least outwardly, though it also reflects an increasing jadedness and hopelessness.

Regarding neuroticism, I'm not sure. If anything, that has increased overtime from when I was a kid. In the intervening period I experienced what I would have previously considered as a worst-case scenario for a good few long years, and this has hammered an attitude into me where I'm constantly mindful that things can always get worse, even when they get better. That one probably isn't too healthy.

Our neighbor has intentionally altered his car's engine and muffler to emit a loud rumble, more than much larger trucks. He likes turn it on early in the morning and warm it up (when it's about 50f out) for ten minutes, to "go exercise." We have talked with his mother and the sheriff about this, but he hides from us, and will not talk. It bothers my husband more than it does me, I'm a heavier sleeper in general, but waking up to a pissed off husband does bother me a lot.

The internet says we could try playing the rumble all night long from a noise machine, but in addition to not wanting to spend the money, that seems like it would be worse. I don't want to spend the money, then have it be worse.

We could just wake up at that time in general (usually the alarm is set to an hour later), but would continue to feel angry about having to make that change for someone we dislike, so wouldn't help that much.

Any suggestions? Would a cinderblock wall help?

I’m sorry about your situation, I’m a very light sleeper as well and my new neighborhoods have shitty dogs that go and bark at absurd hours of the night. Since they absolutely refuse to do anything about I have just started wearing earplugs at night. It took a little getting used to, but I’m mostly adjusted to them now. Might be a good option for you if nothing else pans out.

This is infuriating on so many levels. Perhaps the most galling part is that the "leave the truck running" part of this with modern engine systems is potentially causing a small amount of damage to the truck.

This guy may be the worst person alive. Aggressively stupid and inconsiderate. I think putting an airpod on the truck and then knifing the tires at least once will be the only way to keep your husband sane.

If you choose to build a cinderblock wall, ensure you make it a rudimentary Acoustic Mirror.

Sometimes the good ol’ “flatten the tires” treatment does the trick. Or you could try putting a potato in his exhaust pipe. Or stand on top of the hood of the car and piss all over his windshield (I actually have a friend that did this once). Not that I would ever advocate anything like this, it is highly illegal. Unless you ‘want’ to go to jail.

This guy may be the worst person alive.

There's a massive amount of competition for that title. A lot of people seem to think that being totally inconsiderate or actively annoying their closest neighbors is okay or even good somehow.

Lol. I lived in an apartment once with a neighbor like this, and our walls were practically paper thin. What I did was find a playlist for all of the loudest, most annoying, longest music on YouTube, download the files, wrote a script to automate the playback, and ran it on my JBL speaker at the maximum volume and placed it at the wall ‘right’ by their bedroom when they went to sleep. They stopped shortly thereafter. It’s unfortunate that people respond to pettiness, I’d already asked them nicely if they could just lower the volume. I wasn’t asking them to turn anything off. Then they started blasting it. Sometimes you got to take matters into your own hands.

I don't have any advice but I fucking hate people like this, having lived next door to a cunt who also liked to idle his car fifteen feet away from my bedroom window for twenty minutes on weekend mornings so that he doesn't damage his precious 2020 camaro. Fortunately I made enough money that I was able to upgrade to a mildly richer and more exclusive neighborhood with fewer antisocial personalities.

I guess that's my advice - make more money and leave. That's the only way to deal with noise ordinance violations in the USA in my experience.

Yes, I think in the long term we'll just have to move (and kind of wanted to anyway).

In the meantime, we are extra annoyed that they built a house, and then an unpermitted tiny house (the county apparently doesn't care, we did tell them), and then invited their dysfunctional son into the tiny house with his loud engine, while pregnant with our third child, which has a way of trapping people for a while, and not getting the best sleep to begin with.

I guess now I have something to add to the list of things to look out for when buying a house in the future, anyway.

The following sequence of events might be funny.

(1) Antagonist starts truck and goes back inside his house.

(2) Protagonist walks outside, sets up a folding chair on the government-owned grassy verge between the sidewalk and the street-parked truck (or on the government-owned grassy verge near the driveway-parked truck), and sits down.

(3) Antagonist hides inside his house.

(4) Protagonist remains comfortably seated, and summons a police officer to come and listen to the noise.

(5) Either antagonist emerges to be confronted by the protagonist and the officer, or his truck runs out of gasoline.

We are exurban, and the houses have moats, in the form of fenced yards with dogs that go all the way around their house, such that there isn't a way to do neighborly things like knock on the person's door and yell at them.

I suppose someone could try sitting in the road, and then they couldn't leave while the person's there without talking to them, but if the sheriff came, it would probably be the the person sitting the road who would be in trouble for it, and the neighbor would just continue their behavior thereafter, nobody's got time to sit in the road each morning even if it's allowed. It's unclear whether the early morning revving is technically illegal or not, since acquiring this neighbor, I have noticed that these vehicles are A Thing, and I hear them every now and again, here and there.

We are exurban, and the houses have moats, in the form of fenced yards with dogs that go all the way around their house, such that there isn't a way to do neighborly things like knock on the person's door and yell at them.

There still should be a government-owned grassy verge right next to the driveway where it meets the road, so that there is no need to sit in the road. Even if there's no government-owned sidewalk to mark an obvious boundary, you presumably can check your county's GIS website (or the county's tax map in conjunction with Google Maps) to determine the exact spot where the neighbor's land ends and the government's land begins.

It's unclear whether the early morning revving is technically illegal or not

You presumably can check your municipality's noise ordinance. (Though I vaguely remember hearing somewhere that many municipal noise ordinances have been found unenforceably vague in recent years. If you feel like taking a long shot, you could nag your municipal government to enact an enforceable noise ordinance.)

There is an irrigation ditch, owned by the water association, and I could certainly stand in the ditch as he drives past, or in my own driveway, which merges with his, it just doesn't seem very useful. He already knows we don't like it.

Yeah, the sheriff department said that we could try calling their help line each morning, and maybe they'll come check it out. It just seems annoying for both us and them when nothing will probably come of it. They said they can, if they come when he's still here, pull out a decibel counter, if he doesn't notice them and turn it off or something. One time they came to check on him, and he went completely dark and silent for three days, which surprised me and seemed disproportionate.

Following up a few days after my pharmacologically-induced fist fight with the divine:

I think the changes to my mood seem robust so far. I am notably calmer and more euthymic. I didn't want to say it explicitly until I collected more of my own observations, but I feel less emotionally reactive, more stable.

That isn't a drastic change, mind you, I've always been a pretty even-tempered person. But I did get some moderately hurtful news (even if, in objective terms, it means nothing) and I took it with far more equanimity than I'd expect. If I was more anxious and insecure (and I have been) it would have had a very real chance of making me turn to drink, at least for a night. I just felt a mental note of disappointment, a little irritated, but then back to myself.

Being calmer is, still, a directional improvement. It's not like it's affected my ability to feel emotions, that's very much there. But let's say a rock has an emotional lability score of 0, and a woman with BPD a 10, the average person 5. I'd say I was a 4 before, but a 6-7 when already depressed and anxious. It's down to a 3, I think. That is as much fake precision as I'm willing to deploy.

I think the default tinnitus I gave myself my playing loud milsim games at 21 has gone away. But I have specific tinnitus that comes in for reasons I do not wish to discuss. That's still there, but it has a known cause that it would be overly optimistic to expect a psychedelic to fix entirely.

After almost a decade of poor sleeping habits, I'm on a 2 months streak of, what I would consider, perfect sleep. I've been trying to fix my sleep for years by following best practices and methods. I've tried every supplement from ashwagandha to even peptides like epitalon. Nothing worked consistently. I would be able to string together 2-3 nights of 'proper' sleep but then it would get derailed by a restless night and I'd be back at square one. But few months ago I stumbled upon research claiming that optimal melatonin dose is under 500mcg (most melatonin supplements are 1000mcg+) and should be taken 3-5 hours before bed. I've already tried 1000mcg+ melatonin supplements before and they had the complete opposite effect on me, but I decided to try low dosage out anyway. And it actually worked! I was able to fall asleep within 1hr of getting into bed every night. I've improved my routine over time, so now I'm asleep in 20-30 minutes. Routine: last food 4 hours before bed, last water 3 hours before bed, 300mcg melatonin 3-3.5hrs before bed, when in bed put on boring podcast with 20-30 minute sleep timer, usually I'm knocked out before the timer runs out. That 20-30 minutes of podcast is like hypnotization for my hyperactive brain, it's completely overpowered by an external sound that prevents it from wandering off and thinking about random things. I now consistently get 7.5+ hours of sleep. Alarm is set for exactly 8 hours, but I naturally started to wake up 30 minutes before my alarm every single day after about 2 weeks of this routine. Next step is tackling 1 hour of staring at my phone when I wake up and I'll be at my peak performance.

Thanks for this. I'm going to give that a try.

Out of interest, do you have a specific podcast quality / genre you prefer to sleep to? I've found I have to find something not too interesting or work related as to keep me awake and not too boring to loose interest.

Good luck, update us if it works for you as well as it does for me.

I've found I have to find something not too interesting or work related as to keep me awake and not too boring to loose interest.

Same with me and as long as narrator's voice is not annoying. I did classic literature (short stories) audiobooks for a bit, then hopped to true crime podcast/narration ('Rotten Mango' on youtube)

Advice on how to "cool down" from a session with my therapist where she really pissed me off?

Same as any sort of cool down. Light exercise, even just walking, something to get your body moving and out in the world and take your mind off internal monologues.

Umm ... admit that when your society provides malcontent like you with free therapy instead of gulag or bullet to the head, maybe you are not as repressed and persecuted as you imagine yourself to be, maybe your perma blackpill doom visions of the future are not so certain as you wish them to be?

The fuck, man? How is this useful? You don't have to encourage or validate people posting in the Wellness Thread, but it's also not an appropriate place to take a knife to someone asking for advice just because you have a bone to pick with them.

I don't think it's unreasonable advice for a depressed person.

If it's good advice, framing it as "put aside your prideful ways and grovel, peasant" is even more unreasonable. Hard to think of a less convincing approach.

I have been cautioned in the past that the Wellness thread is not a hugfest and I am aware of my own tendencies toward agreeability, even to a negative degree, but fucking hell man.

Mind my asking what she said to piss you off?

Basically, in discussing my anxiety, politics came up. The specific things she said:

  • That there's no such thing as left-wing political violence because "they're the side who all hate guns"

and (when I gave counterexamples):

  • "Everyone knows Charlie Kirk was shot by a fellow Republican" and any reports to the contrary are "right-wing disinformation" from "internet conspiracy theorists."

If you're getting into arguments about politics with your therapist, you need a different therapist.

I think you should stop seeing this therapist.

Is regular attendance to therapy sessions (that look more like interrogation by political comissar than like anything helpful) condition for receiving these meager Alaskan gibs?

I think you meant to ask the OP this, not me.

I am worried about my heart.

I'm in a well compensated but demanding phase of my career. A promotion is on the cards, but hours are long. I have a chip on my shoulder, so the promotion is as much about career advancement as much as proving something to myself. It has taken a toll on my body. My weight has gone past 200 lbs and stayed above 200. Workouts, sleep and diet are all suffering. I don't like it.

I have a benign heart condition (Mitral valve prolapse) and South-Asian fat distribution puts me at elevated risk of heart disease. Then last year, my cholesterol went past the normal range. I've ignored(with her knowledge) my doctor's precautionary recommendation to use statins. The idea of a 30 yr. old being on permanent medication scares me.

For a bit, I put health first, and it worked. I lost 10 pounds and reached solid conditioning. Since then, my weight & conditioning have suffered as work has piled up. I have delayed my most recent blood test because I am worried the numbers spell disaster for me. Not a good look.

That brings me to last week. I have felt some tightness in my chest. Now, the location switches between the left and right side, so I'm sure it's some combination anxiety (too much coffee) and bad sleep & diet induced digestion issues.

But it scared the living shit out of me. Man, what am I doing ? I'm a grown man. I worked this hard to get to enjoy life and escape my 3rd world hell hole. I have my whole life in front of me. Need to get my priorities straight.

Oof. For what it's worth, I wouldn't jump from "twinges of pain in my chest" to "oh god I've got a cardiac problem" given your background and age, and it's a very good thing you know it's most likely due to anxiety and stress.

That out of the way, I do not think there is anything wrong with being a 30 yo on permanent medication. You need to eat food and drink water anyway, a small pill or two has... negligible effects on your QOL, and the main reason you end up wanting/needing to take one is to improve or at least maintain your health. If you live long enough, you'll acquire a list of mandatory medication, though at that point it's more likely to be your doctors headache than yours.

Statins are not bad drugs. I am not a cardiologist, but I strongly suspect you'd benefit from taking them, and apparently your doctor agrees too. You shouldn't expect side effects more significant than muscle aches for a few days, and they're cheap. Go for them. They have my endorsement, and you can stop if you can't tolerate them.

Ffs, I'm getting a migraine while typing this. There's a hole in my vision. It's not fair to blame you, so I'm joking when I say that you've made this more of my headache than your own. I'm not sure which one of us has it worse, what I'd give to be 25 and free of anything but ADHD and depression (sad haha).

Then there's the GLP-1 stuff. Wrangle yourself some semaglutide or the new stuff, they'll keep your weight down, help with the cholesterol too indirectly, and just keep you in better health overall.

I quickly looked up statin side effects, and I know they tend to exaggerate in a lawsuit-happy society, but liver damage, muscle damage and type 2 diabetes do not sound like nothing. Most of currently available medicine are kind of blunt tools, which mess with many extremely complex chemical processes in the body, some of which may be beneficial for us, but other may be not. So I think being careful about messing with one's body chemistry is a prudent approach. Sometimes you don't have a choice - if somebody has cancer, mediterranean diet and exercise is not going to save them, but modern drugs might. But there are costs to that. I think we should not be dismissing those costs lightly.

I am not saying they are nothing. But statins are the annoying kind of drug where the benefits are hard to perceive on an individual basis, but we have strong evidence does help at a population level. And the harms are even more rare, barring the more common transient stuff like muscle aches.

In more formal terms, the NNT is high, and so is the NNH. But the former is still significantly smaller than the latter, almost by an OOM. Both are diminished by his age and reasonably good health, at least on the basis of information provided, but I would be rather surprised if it came out to a complete wash or net harm (however small).

(I have neglected to specify that NNT and NNH require specific metrics or endpoints to assess, but I'm talking about the serious stuff, like number of cardiovascular events avoided in expectation or new onset T2DM/rhabdomyolysis)

As it stands, I think that @DirtyWaterHotDog is an intelligent sensible individual, and that their doctor has done due diligence before making the recommendation. I'd love to see an explicit QALY calculation, but let's be honest and admit that those are desirable but not strictly necessary, assuming a competent doctor exercising clinical judgement. I'm sure he's going to do his own research instead of deferring entirely to an argument I made while suffering from a serious migraine (even if I think that my advice is fine). I see no significant risk from initiating them, since they're easy to start and easy to stop if the most likely side-effects become annoying. The benefits are also probably small, but I think his actual doctor has a better picture than I do, and I see no real reason to disagree with them.

(If I was his actual doctor instead of a friendly stranger on the internet, I would be poring over the reports and calculating QRISK scores.)

I agree that trusting one's doctor, by default, makes a lot of sense, at least where data and empirical knowledge is concerned. However, there is one more methodological problem that is often missed - the unknown unknowns. Let's consider the following scenario - and I am making it completely ridiculous on purpose, to emphasize the point and not get bogged in the details. Let's assume we have a miracle drug that reduces your cholesterol with no noticeable side effects. Except in 10 years after you start taking it, your dick falls off. Obviously, no reasonable test can detect it - who runs 10 years of tests before putting the drug on the market? There's no way to know it, until people start noticing a suspicious increase in dicks falling off, try to make various statistical correlations and hopefully after several years of vigorous bickering zero in on the miracle drug and remove it from the market. In the meantime, people who took it in those 10+X years are preparing lawsuits and regretting their choices.

There's no reasonable way to prevent it - nobody can run enough tests to predict every effect and every drug+patient+environment combination. And nobody tries to, because trying to do it would paralyze any innovation way beyond the best efforts of FDA to do it. No doctor, no matter how diligent and educated, can know everything and predict everything. So there's always a risk. Often it's worth it, and I am not arguing against any intervention. I am just arguing for remembering there's always this unquantifiable risk component lurking in the background, and one has to remember it too.

If the doctor says "you have to do it, or you're going to be in serious trouble, the pills are the only way" - fine, do it. But if they say "you may try to change your lifestyle, or if it sounds too hard there are pills, your choice" I'd personally choose to try the non-pills way first.

The whole point of the drug development pipeline is to minimize the unknown unknowns. Sure, it's not perfect, but there is no good reason to spend very much time worrying about Knightian uncertainty in a clinic. While your claims are true, I genuinely don't think it changes anything in practice. Statins have been around for ages, and even semaglutide has had its safety established to a degree where I am more than comfortable putting my mom on it and taking myself, sometimes.

If the doctor says "you have to do it, or you're going to be in serious trouble, the pills are the only way" - fine, do it. But if they say "you may try to change your lifestyle, or if it sounds too hard there are pills, your choice" I'd personally choose to try the non-pills way first.

And that's fine, no issues there. But when the pills are pretty close to a free lunch? I'm not advocating for him starting warfarin or anything that would make me sit up and think thrice before the recommendation.

Thanks for information btw.

As it stands, I have updated by priors. Reduced my apprehension towards them and calibrated the urgency to get on them.

I am setting a concrete deadline for end-of-year to get my cholesterol & weight in control. If it doesn't work, I'll take my doctors advice on statins.

I'm skipping GLP-drugs because I want to solve the root cause, not just the symptoms. Sleep, diet and work outs first. Rest will follow.

Note that I'm not strongly endorsing the statins. But your actual doctor probably knows your situation better than I do, and I trust them by default. More importantly, in a way, you can just quit if the side effects are more nuisance than the (small) benefits are worth.

I'm skipping GLP-drugs because I want to solve the root cause, not just the symptoms. Sleep, diet and work outs first. Rest will follow.

Why not both? Seriously, even if you don't "need" them like someone with someone who is outright obese and diabetic, they'll help. There is no reason to think that you can't also make lifestyle modifications alongside them, and those are laudable goals anyway. You'll almost certainly lose weight, and it'll help the cardiovascular stuff. If your sleep is hampered by something like sleep apnea (which I do not know you have, but is not unlikely), then the weight loss will help with that too. It's easier to exercise and diet if you've already lost some weight and don't feel as hungry. The drugs should be easily affordable for you, you make a lot more money than I do.

If you had to choose between statins and semaglutide on my recommendation, then I would rather you pick the latter. Just talk about it with your doctor, as and when you see them again. If they advise against it, eh, that's fine by me.

'Never waste a good crisis' ?

The weight creates shame. The shame motivates effort. Helps my system hit terminal velocity willpower. Thankfully, my mental health is a good place, so I use shame productively.

I like the point about GLPs. I'm lucky to easy access to cheap GLP drugs. Then there is story about when the CEO of one of the largest GLP startups tried to sleep with a thinner me, but that's for another day.

There are many types of statin. Japan certifies I believe six, one of which is rosuvastatin, which I have been taking (one small pill a night) for about three years, due to elevated serum cholesterol. The standard dose in the US is about 5-10mg.

My pill is 2mg, well on the low side. But the lowered serum cholesterol levels are clear. I have never had any side effects that I noticed. Zero. My HbA1c is and has always been within healthy zones. My liver values (AST/ALT, bilirubin, albumin) are within healthy zones and haven't changed in any significant way since I began keeping close records of yearly health checks (about 12 years).

I have also started drinking 5mg of psyllium husk dissolved in water twice a day, though only for about a month and that's not long enough to see the possible effects (at least in terms of cholesterol levels, the digestive effects were pretty clear almost immediately.)

I get that people are wary of drugs. I personally have doubts about semaglutide, which has not had the long-term testing of statins. (roughly forty years for statins with hundreds of randomized controlled trials and meta analyses. Less than 10 years for GLP 1 receptor agonists like semaglutide). But statins are among the most studied of drugs. This doesn't guarantee complete safety for everyone, but then neither is aspirin safe for everyone.

The good news is that low doses to begin with can do a lot of work toward detection of side effects, if they're going to occur.

I am not a medical doctor.

Disclaimer: I am not a doctor.

Getting on statins, ironically, might be the worst thing possible for you, as there have been some indication that statins actually surpress GLP-1.

...which, if that's the case, explains atleast one possible factor regarding the obesity epidemic.

...also ironically enough, there's some indication that semaglutide helps with cardiovascular health.

Do with that information what you will.

The idea of a 30 yr. old being on permanent medication scares me.

I don't understand this fear. Statins are an incredibly low risk medication, and can be started at a low dose with later increases (as needed and as your body tolerates). No one frets about the various other things one needs to permanently do ("the idea of having to permanently ensure sufficient b12 intake scares me"), why be so concerned about a very low cost medication?

I'm sorry. I've had serious tachycardia and having trouble with the ticker can be very frightening. The good news is that the heart is a much simpler and easier-to-fix organ than many others.

The two things I would recommend AS A NON-DOCTOR are:

  • Ask your doctor what specifically to look out for in terms of serious problems. I had a recurring pain in my upper chest and along my arm, which combined with the tachycardia frightened me terribly until I went to the doctor and he kindly pointed out the actual location of the heart for me. In reality it was mild DOMS from wanking weightlifting.
  • I am told that soluble fibre, often in the form of phyllium husk, can be very good for attaching to cholesterol and rendering it non-dangerous. Look into it properly but I believe this is recommended and produces good effects.

So I ordered a Ninja Creami. I have always wanted a pacojet, but when I was making the money, didn't bother, and now programmers are not that well compensated.

Unfortunately the creami community seems to be invaded by people that just want to eat frozen anal lube (water + thickeners), sweetened by aspartame. If they are feeling glutenous - with a pinch of protein powder thrown in. Does anyone has experience with the creami and knows a watering hole where there are normal recipes?

I just YOLO what sounds good, or use normal ice cream recipes if I want something rich.

Claire Saffitz has several regular ice cream recipes that are crème anglaise base on her YouTube and books. If you want to go to the trouble of a proper custard base. I've never gone wrong making one of her desserts, but they are absolutely not macro friendly.

My go to, but not as rich is very regularly having, chocolate fairlife (with yes it's worth the hassle of mixing in for the texture) the smallest amount of xanthan gum I can scoop with a spoon. One cup would be 140/13g/13g/4.5g kcal/p/c/f. But in practice I split one 52oz jug across four Creami containers, then split that with the wife, so the real macros are on average like 81% of that. Take out of freezer to soften the perimeter 10 minutes before shaving (I know the manual says not to do it, but it reduces the ice left on the edge). Light ice cream setting. Scrape sides. Light ice cream again for soft serve, or if powdery and wanting a firmer texture a splash of anything (reserve fairlife if the macros matter) and re-spin.

It's only 1.5 ingredients, so it's not really a proper recipe, but super super easy.

My "personal" recipe is Halo-halo inspired.

  • Base is 8-10oz of steamed peeled ube. No need for added gums with ube.
  • 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
  • Sweetener of choice. I use a squirt of monk-fruit and stevia, but yes sugar or evaporated milk would have a better texture and flavor.
  • Pinch of salt
  • Fill to pint line with coconut milk. (like the unsweetened silk brand that's 45 kcal/cup)

Hand blend everything before freezing. I did calculate the macros at one point, but at this point only remember, not a protein source, but not crazy on the calories for "ice cream." Obviously much more delicious but more on the calorie front if using evaporated milk and coconut cream rather than non-nutritive sweetener and "coconut milk."

Make regular ice cream. I make protein powder garbage but my daughter makes small batch ice cream. Get a chocolate and a vanilla base you like (the recipe book should have a starting point) and go to town. It's great because she can experiment with a bunch of different flavors.

Frozen Keto Chow might be an option for you; My brother used it as a frozen treat via a Ninja Creami, and from personal experience, Keto Chow itself tends to taste pretty good.

I'd advise heavy cream as opposed to melted butter when making said Keto Chow, however, as I don't think melted butter freezes that well.

I finally got some good news.

Last Monday, my father asked for me to come with him to an appointment about some scan results. He's halfway through his chemotherapy treatment, and we've all been hoping that it would be effective.

The oncologist started the appointment by making it very clear that the results won't be official until the radiologist looks over the results, but as soon as he finished his disclaimer, he started going through each slice of the CT scan and giving my father the good news. Compared to the scan from last December, almost all the tumors are gone. The one that is still visible is less than half the size that it was (maybe a quarter). The hope is that with six more weeks of chemo, that remaining tumor will shrink even more.

He's not out of the woods yet - he still has stage four cancer. The tumor could start rapidly growing again after the doctors discontinue the chemo. There are a thousand other things that could go wrong. But for now, we're taking the win.

To all of you who have offered prayers and other messages of hope, I genuinely thank you. It's not my place to judge matters of faith, but I like to think we live in a world where the hopes of good people matter in some small way. Once again, thank you.

Awesome! I'm glad to hear you guys got some positive news!

That is wonderful. I am glad you could be there with him.

That's great! :D

I kind of want to join the military. I feel like my job sucks and gives me no skills to go anywhere, though it's not entirely bad money. I have a factor that likely precludes me from joining, though. How likely is there to be a troop surge?

A friend of a friend works Rhythm health, which does mail-in blood tests, and I got a free test last week from her. Despite nearly passing out while collecting blood from myself (this is the #1 reason I am not a medical doctor), I managed to do the collection successfully, and got my results back on Sunday. Everything looked fine or even good except for two things.

1). Low HDL. This has been a problem for the past few years, and I think it is because I don't eat any dietary cholesterol because I'm basically vegan other than eating a small amount of fish and shellfish. I had a long discussion with my boss about this, and our conclusion is that this isn't really a problem. HDL is a cholesterol scavenger that brings back extra cholesterol from tissues to the liver. My tissues probably need all the cholesterol they have (/synthesize it through the squalene pathway) so that would explain why my HDL is low.

2). High estrogen. This one was more concerning to me. My estrogen was 38 pg/dL (normal is 20-30). I have two theories about this. Firstly, I eat quite a bit of soy, so the test could be picking up phytoestrogens from that, artificially inflating the reading. The second is that I unfortunately have gained a bit of fat since 2023, which could also be increasing the amount of estrogen in my body. In either case, I'm going to bring it up with my PCP during my visit next Friday.

I mean defer to your pct, but that isn’t particularly high estrogen even if out of range. Your hypothesis that you are overweight is probably correct and that number will almost certainly fall if you get your body fat percentage down.

N=1, but I've been a vegan for 27 years and my HDL has been around 90 mg/dl for as long as I have records for it.

Are you exposed to unhealthy plastics, such as those used in a lot of headphones? They get into the body when the body sweats and promote estrogen.

I don't run with my phone or headphones at all. There could be exposure to plastics from my dry-fit shirts.

Re #2, I am not a doctor, but aren't you still doing sub-6 min/mi for distance runs? I'd be surprised if you gained enough fat to cause that kind of a reading change while being capable of that pace.

Yea I can run a full marathon in Sub 2:35, so fat gain probably isn't the culprit.

I woke up with an oppressive amount of anxiety yesterday. The kind where it was hard to breathe and my chest felt tight all day. Doom felt around the corner for most of the day.

No clue what caused it. I'm not usually an anxious person. If I'm stressed, nervous, or excited, I can usually pinpoint the cause and take some steps to alleviate whatever is causing the emotion. I make no attempt to suppress those emotions, which seems to be effective at eliminating anxiety (procrastinators not working, getting stressed, still refusing to work, then getting anxious about it instead of just sitting down and doing some work is the kind of avoidance/suppression that seems to me to be a prime cause of anxiety).

Seems to be gone today. Weird.

This could be any of a million medical or psychiatric things or nothing at all. Good reminder to keep up with your routine health maintenance with your primary care doctor.

You probably didn't mean it this way but a true feeling of imminent doom is an actual thing and requires urgent medical attention (can signal things like a heart attack, and one specific medicine causes it as a side effect).

You may have dodged a bullet with something, or you just might have had some excess anxiety and not been super familiar with it.

For the purposes of this being a comment on the internet I can't really ethically recommend anything other than urgent presentation to the ED, especially if it reoccurs or if anything else seems to be going wrong with your body.

That said spontaneous anxiety happens - people get sleep apnea, or panic attacks start (they have to start sometime).

one specific medicine causes it as a side effect

Quite the side effect. What medicine?

Adenosine!

Not the doctor but epinephrine is known to have this side effect (think Epipen). I'm not sure what Throwaway05 had in mind.

New year's resolutions check-in:

  • Posted my eighth blog post of the year on Sunday, a review of the worst book I read last year, Nell Zink's Doxology. Expanded from a comment I posted here.
  • Went to the gym three times last week. Came down with a cold on Sunday which I'm only just getting over, so haven't been to the gym yet this week. Can deadlift 1.8x my bodyweight for 3 reps, squat 1.05x for 8 reps and bench press .85x for 6 reps.
  • Have not consumed any pornography since waking up on January 1st.

How goes it, @thejdizzler, @birb_cromble, @falling-star, @Tollund_Man4 and @self_made_human? (For the latter – any progress on that task you were completing for me?)

Nicotine pouches are now banned in France so that's one vice down, even if I try to order some online (not sure if that's legal anymore) I'll be over the worst of the withdrawals by the time the delivery comes. The timing isn't bad - the restaurant I work in is closing and they may not even open this weekend so I've got a few days off work to get over the nicotine before I start working at a new place on Monday.

I did drink a lot more in the past week, but I made some friends and I worked out the details of the new job over some whiskey. A Moroccan guy is getting fired to get me the job, he recently refused to take orders from women or anyone younger than him (he's 38) because he has 2 wives (to paraphrase). French law makes it hard to fire people but the head chef says he knows how to get rid of people quickly.

Gaming, I did stay up late two nights playing Menace but once I start the new job I won't have time for that.

  1. Work: Need to get some projects off my plate, as I feel like I'm juggling too many balls right now. Still on track to graduate next May, if not sooner.
  2. Fitness: 11 hours last week again. Amazing workout again this morning: 40 min tempo at 5:40 pace, which is around 15-20 sec/mile faster than my planned Boston pace! Nearly bonked at the end, which means that I'm not fueling as well as I could be.
  3. Intellectual Stuff: Pacific trilogy is done, and working on finishing Italian book. After this is done I'll be working through Game of Thrones (in Spanish) and trying to finish Indigenous continent. Also starting After Virtue by MacIntyre for philosophy book club, which should make for some good discussion.
  4. Finances: Over spending targets last month by about $220, but still had a 7% savings rate because it was an excellent month for dividends. First part of parents' transfer(120k) came through and I liquidated it a few days ago and am keeping it in a 3.5% MM fund until I decide what to do with it. Have already put ~8k of it into my IRA. This coming month expenses should be under 3.2k, even if I do end up signing up for a 70.3 in Madison in September.
  5. Dating: Had a date with the Saudi girl on Saturday, which was fun for about 2 hours, but not so much for the other 3! Will not be seeing her again.
  6. Tarot: No session this week.
  7. Socializing: Went back to Spanish happy hour and silent book club this week. Also stopped by a furry convention in downtown Baltimore and had a good laugh.
  8. Screen time: 1.2 hours again.
  9. Mental health: think anxiety is probably screen time and nutrition related! The anxiety is often accompanied by hunger. Will continue to observe and hopefully get to the bottom of this.

Had a date with the Saudi girl on Saturday, which was fun for about 2 hours, but not so much for the other 3!

So you enjoyed the first two hours, then stuck around for three hours even though you were no longer enjoying yourself?

We went to an art activity (really fun) and then dinner (not as fun) and then I walked her home. Art activity was 2 hours, we had an hour before dinner reservation, then dinner was like 80 min, then walked her home.

The dental work has erased all of my progress so far. Spending is now $531.14 higher than it was at the same time last year. Time to get back on the horse and resume the effort, I guess.

I did got to the gym twice last week, so I breathe a sigh of relief.

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