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Wellness Wednesday for April 29, 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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Rotisserie chicken eaters: Science says that diets high in sodium are bad for you. What do you do about this? Or do you disagree with The Science?

It is funny to me that teammates in high school baseball would insist on drinking Gatorade and getting others to drink Gatorade on the basis that you NEED those electrolytes on hot days or you'd DIE. That's more of a problem for elite athletes, not my dumbass sitting on a bench. Extra electrolytes seem to be something that you should try to get rid of.

Alpha gal gang: Did you know about this site? Apparently in the year of 2026 you can directly order (expensive) alpha-gal-less pork created by The Science now. We're living in the future, bros. https://amaroohills.com/

Drink more water and a high-sodium diet (within reason) is not a problem.

I honestly can’t remember the last time I drank water. I’m a huge milk, apple juice and soda drinker. I can’t drink beverages like Gatorade. I’m a fiend in general for taste and high sugar and salt items.

Whenever I eat at work, I always try to have my hamburger or pizza or whatever it is, drenched in butter all over, or I’ll grab like 29 packets of salt and 5 of ketchup. Just how I’ve always been.

Is the soda diet? I probably drink 4-6 glasses of water a day. Maybe more. You would be running 1k+ calories per day on mostly sugar water if it’s not diet pop. Unless you are 6 years old I can’t see someone have the metabolism to handle that amount of calories from beverages. Sugar water of course tastes phenomenol but that is primarily because it’s dense in calories and humans evolved in often starving conditions. In a world of plentiful food and sedentary lifestyle we just aren’t designed for abundant sugary drinks.

No, it’s regular. I can’t drink diet anything. I desire intense flavor in food and drinks. I kill on average between 4-10 bottles of regular soda a day at work, and then continue drinking cans of it outside of work, and then milk usually during dinner time and dessert.

My weight hovers between 160lbs and 170lb. I’ve eaten so much I’ve gone over 170 very slightly and then the next morning I go right back down to 165 or so; and I’m a tall man. It just felt like my metabolism would instantly crush it. But the weight doesn’t stay no matter how hard I try to gain it. I can’t stay feeling full longer than 15-30 minutes at a time usually before I feel hungry again.

Some things I just can’t eat because like I’ve said, I’ll feel anemic and fatigued the whole day. Salads are one of them. I hate salads. If I’d already eaten the meat and potatoes and everything else out of the fridge, I remember I’d go into the cupboards, dig out an unopened container of chocolate frosting, scoop all of it into a bowl, put it in the microwave and eat all of it with a spoon. Yeah, empty calories but gave me a momentary energy boost.

When my mother would go grocery shopping for our family as kids, she’d do regular grocery shopping for all of us, and then she’d do grocery shopping just for me, so we always spent more than the average family. My friends always said I had the diet of a 10 year old kid. A lot of times though I skip out on meals here and there just to stay more in line with everyone else but I’m starving inside when I do that.

… that is primarily because it’s dense in calories and humans evolved in often starving conditions. In a world of plentiful food and sedentary lifestyle we just aren’t designed for abundant sugary drinks.

My father made this point to me once. He argued back in hunter-gatherer times nature would select ‘against’ people like me from existing because I’d be the guy who ends up killing the whole tribe by starving them of all their food to satisfy my own hunger and would wind up being exiled to die in isolation. And if I survived that I’d probably end up getting killed from raiding all the neighboring tribes for their food. Thats why there isn’t many people like us. But every now and then I suppose nature as a hiccup from its evolutionary past.