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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   1815 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for August 9, 2023

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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Last time, I had "lost" 4 lbs. That was a weight measurement snafu: turns out, my home scale is consistently off by about two pounds, so it would be correct to say that at the time of the post, I had lost two pounds, not 4.

However, since beginning semaglutide, I have lost approximately 12 pounds. The number of calories I managed to avoid eating thanks to sugar reduction is more than 500 kcal/day. I'll not detail the experience in too much detail, but current conclusion is that the vast majority of my weight loss comes from being able to cut down on the soda.

I will note a few extra details: Loss of interest in bread. Not terribly strange, considering most bread is a vehicle for sugars. But everything from subway, to hot dog and bratwurst buns, to regular sliced bread. White bread now has the same palatability as low-sugar sarah lee's wheat bread. Naturally, I have swapped over to Sarah Lee's. Miracle Whip is nasty now, though regular, low-sugar mayo is still good.

If you are struggling with weight loss, especially snacking + sugar, Semaglutide is a miracle drug.

Congratulations!

I've been on a real cut for the first time in my life, and I'm below 200 again for the first time in like 10 months. New appreciation for how difficult it can be.

So does Semaglutide do anything for the weight loss mechanism except effectively suppress appetite? I mean I know it affects blood sugar etc, but in terms of losing weight, is the effect simply from causing the user to eat less calories? Put another way, if you stopped taking it, but were able to maintain the same diet as if you were taking it, would the effect be the same? Or is there additional effects of the drug that induce changes in how your body metabolizes the food?

As far as I am aware, it does affect digestion, though I do not know how. Nausea and constipation as well as unnatural stool are common side effects; I haven't had any of those issues personally, but I know a number of people who do.

Your gut craves sugar, and satisfying that causes you not to eat as much. Unfortunately, I'm not studied enough on the subject to say for sure how much more there is to how it acts.

I think the main reason I have been able to stay skinny is that I have a natural dislike of many carbs.

Even when I was a kid, if my mother put a bowl of sauce and a bowl of pasta on the table and we served ourselves, my bowl would be 80% sauce with a few spaghetti in it. I’ll eat most forms of carbs (except anything with semolina) in very small quantities, but it’s just to fill up, if I could get away with eating only steak instead of steak and fries, or only curry instead of curry and rice, or only the ramen toppings and broth instead of them with the noodles…you get the idea. I hate cakes or other dough-based heavy desserts, except for almond-flour cakes which I sometimes like.

The only savory carb-heavy dish I truly enjoy is french fries (and less commonly other crispy potato variants) but only deep fried in beef tallow or duck/goose fat because I dislike their taste in vegetable oil. Even so, I could take or leave them.

I’m not Keto, but it was funny reading about it a few years ago and realizing I’ve essentially practiced a Keto-lite diet since I was old enough to choose what I ate.

I grew up in the South, land of biscuits and gravy, chicken fried steak, and hushpuppies. To say nothing of deep fried (insert food), and of the ubiquitous "Meat & Three" diners which served (and still serve, if you can find them) a meat and three sides, most of which were either vegetables boiled in oily broth or fried in grease, or the perennial favorite of macaroni and cheese which apparently the cool kids call "Mac & Cheese." If, as I was growing up, my mother served us fish it was either in the form of fried catfish or something she called salmon croquettes which I somehow think was a 70s thing. I did not really understand in my heart that seafood of any sort could be served in any way other than deep, deep fried until my 20s, after I left to go very far away indeed. At this time I also learned it was bizarre to most other Americans to hear me use the terms "I might could," to mean "I might be able to," "I'm fixin' to," to mean "I am about to," and of course the first time, when driving, I was faced with a sudden burst of traffic headlights coming in the other direction at night and I asked, rhetorically, "Who opened the barn door?" my girlfriend at the time erupted into hysterics and asked me to please say more southern phrases. (I think she was a fetishist.) I of course had no answer to this.

Why do I say any of this? Because let us be frank: I grew up in the heart of Fatville. I was raised among the obese. "Bigun" where I am from is a term of endearment. I can recall not too many years ago on a trip home sitting among my aunts, who were all worried about the dangerous heft of my uncle. They spent many minutes fretting over this as we ate pecan pie and drank iced tea. Then this same uncle appeared at the door, and he had barely sat down on the sofa (with considerable effort) before these same aunts were insisting they be allowed to "fix him a plate," though he said he was fine. He eventually did receive a plate, of course, and a large one. Which I am sure he consumed. (Edit: not the actual plate. The food on it. Of course.)

All this as even further prelude to the point that my whole life I have been skinny. Even now, nearing the age when if I were to die, as Louis CK or someone made the joke: no one would mourn that I "died too young," but that "I had a full life." And yet thin I am. My sons are thin. My Japanese wife is thin, though that is no great rarity. I am 5'11" and weigh about 70kg. This is close to the most I have ever weighed.

Why? I do not know. I drink beer. I eat the carbs @2rafa scorns and has scorned all of her life. I heap the pasta onto my plate.

I had a dear friend who was overweight most of his life. He went through a weight-loss phase in his freshman year and I remember him telling me that he was suddenly getting a lot of attention from people (he was also rich, but I suppose rich and slovenly still weigh more on the side of slovenly, no pun intended). Once he became rich and relatively normal-weighted, his new girlfriend (who also appeared with the weight loss) began dressing him (madras shirts, argyle socks, woven leather belts, and even gold bracelets--this was the late 80s.) He told me once that he appreciated me being his friend, and that should anyone from the old days come up to him and want to be his friend now, he was going to tell them "Fuck you." I have no idea if he ever got to do that. He probably wouldn't have, anyway, but it was a funny thing to hear.

That friend is now dead, mostly from excesses of every kind (he gained most of his weight back, drank and drugged himself into an early grave, bless his soul). And I am still here. Some of us are just not meant to be fat. Probably I could put on the pounds if I set my mind to it--for a few years I started drinking protein shakes and going to the gym and tracking calories, and in the reddit days I was a member of /r/gainit. But here I still am.

This is not me bragging. Just, as always, another voice.

Why? I do not know.

People are born different. My MIL drinks tea with pastries between meals and isn't someone who's always up and about. She isn't overweight. Her main meals aren't large, though, but I doubt that alone can explain her total lack of extra weight. Her furnace just runs hotter or less efficiently.

I don't deny it. I cling to the idea that people are born different, I adhere to it, I embrace it, and it's not always HBD or some similar rallying cry. Vive la difference, and not just between the sexes (though very much that.) Thank you for your comment.

What year did you move to Japan? Pre-1993?

1998, August. Why?

Just curious if you saw it before the crash.

Ah. No, I was here well past bubble years, or the babburu jidai バブル時代　as it is remembered here, though one read much about those days even when I was first here. I can't imagine, from reading and hearing about it, how much the world must have seemed like a playground in those days. The wild excesses strain credulity. Nothing gold can stay, I suppose.

I have a friend who was working there at the time. If you were walking through the financial district (and were a reasonably well turned-out foreigner) strangers would literally grab you and pull you over so they could buy you dinner.

Fortunately a lot of the money got put into building programs. Museums, bridges and so on. Not all of which were necessary, or great value for money, but at least there was a legacy that outlasted the bubble.

I have been to places even now where it is very likely that I am the first real-life white dude anyone has ever seen. The foreign population here is still only about 2 something %, and caucasians are not the majority (that would be Chinese.) No one's ever randomly bought me dinner, though. Ou sont les neiges d'antan?

I think the main reason I have been able to stay skinny is that I have a natural dislike of many carbs.

Thanks for acknowledging that. This week's early semaglutide discussion was a little infuriating because of all the scolds who chalk up their own low BMI to some combination of self-control and moral superiority. And while, yes, there are some percentage of very fit people out there (at most 1 or 2% of the population) most skinny people are not particularly fit individuals. They just don't have the same interest in food as fat people. The skinny people I know can just leave french fries on the plate in front of them and not even show any interest. It's not self-control, it's effortless. Semaglutide appears to unlock this ability for everyone. It appears also to trigger certain people who feel that the drug users are getting an "unfair" advantage.

That sounds like you managed to avoid the worst of the Americana diet at least. I grew up on ultra-sugary oatmeals and cereals, and almost never had homecooked meals.

General mills' extra-sugary cereals were breakfast and often lunch at home.

Why do Americans put sugar in their bread, anyway? Even this Sarah Lee's wheat bread contains added sugar.

Because Americans go to the grocery store once a week. They need it to stay soft and tasty for 1 full week. Thus the sugar and the whole lot of other stuff in it.

suburbia wins.

As a preservative, and possibly for cultural reasons. The regular white bread Americans like is kind of just a variant on brioche, it’s a descendant of Anglo-Dutch bread rather than the crustier French or Italian equivalents. In big cities, upper middle class people differentiate themselves by being bread snobs and lamenting sugary bread, this has led to New York restaurants importing French Poilâne bread at $25 a loaf, but it’s mostly a cultural thing.

In America, breakfast is mostly sweet or, if it’s savory, doesn’t usually include a strong bread component (replaced by biscuits/scones, hash browns, grits etc). In Europe, breakfast is often a savory meal served with bread (eg in Germany, bread with cold sausages/meats). Maybe this affected bread preferences.

Aren't French and Italian breakfasts essentially dessert as well? In France the standard is to serve a 2 ounce coffee which comes with not one, but two, gigantic sugar packets enough to supersaturate the coffee. Paired, of course, with a pastry.

The distinguishing characteristic of the American and English breakfasts would seem to be their gigantic size, not their sugar level.

Italian breakfasts are definitely sweet. Cappuccino, cornetto, bread with jam or Nutella. It might look insubstantial, but you can easily pack 400-500 calories into a quick breakfast. They still eat proper bread with their sweet spreads, which makes sense: why add even more sugar?

In big cities, upper middle class people differentiate themselves by being bread snobs and lamenting sugary bread, this has led to New York restaurants importing French Poilâne bread at $25 a loaf, but it’s mostly a cultural thing.

I thought they all switched to handmade bread during the pandemic.

There's no way a few grams of sugar per slice has any preservative effect. Probably the opposite.

Challenge. "Jailbreak" gpt.

Try to get gpt4 to rank races by average IQ. It should explicitly mention the races and their IQs correctly.

I'll share my technique soon.

If you know of any other hard to access queries let me know. Ive also another one listing out a detailed how to guide on money laundering.

You can use the "function calling" mode for that, using the API. It restricts the model to output JSON, so it doesn't get any opportunity to scold you about your questions.

I asked it to "Provide a list of (at least ten) races and their average IQ", and limited it to only return an array of objects with a "name" and "iq" field. The result was this.

Looks promising.

I haven't gotten around to playing with function calling yet, I use mostly langchain and barebones requests for work.

But my trick took around 4 back and forths, so this is a lot superior, I wonder what's happening here.

I could use a good hidden jailbreak, the public ones are no good from what I've seen.

What are some good beginner benchmarks I should aim for with the exercise bike at the gym? Like should I be aiming for say half an hour, a certain incline level or a certain speed? I'm not unfit but I just haven't trained this way before.

Do you have wattage numbers? The typical approach measuring cycling competence is looking at W/kg and ability to sustain that over time. The most frequent measure you'll see is the FTP, which is basically how much power you're able to sustain for 20 minutes of all-out riding. This chart is a good starting point for understanding where you're at, although the categories above "untrained" are literally all for people that are intending to compete in cycling, so don't be discouraged if you can't hit them. I would say that if you're not really a cyclist, an FTP over 2 W/kg is a solid starting point. If you're over 3, you're doing quite well already. There's so much individual variance that it's hard to say exactly what would qualify as a good beginner benchmark - I would say to figure out where you're at and then just make improvement the goal rather than worrying too much about whether you're currently good.

Agreed, that's basically the only chart people reference for benchmarks. Sometimes referred to as Coggan's power level chart. I wanted to add that the author has mentioned several times its only meant to be illustrative not prescriptive.

Critical power can also be a useful training tool to supplement FTP as it takes more than one point on the power-time curve as input.

How you should train depends on goals. If you just want someone to tell you what to do and are just riding for exercise concept2 has a bikeerg WOD. If you hate yourself and are a beginner you can alternate VO2 max interval and threshold days. Anything more advanced than that one would probably need to consult a more exhaustive resource on training. The Cyclist's Training Bible is a popular one.

I have a very annoying medical mystery that I would appreciate some help with. I've had acne since my adolescence, not just whiteheads but the uncomfortable hard ball underneath the skin, and my nose would get very red and inflamed. I had no idea how to get rid of it and tried lots of dermatological interventions that did not do much. A couple years ago I was experimenting with ways to improve my athletic performance and tried a carnivore diet (only beef). I was surprised to discover that the acne and redness completely went away almost immediately.

Since then I have eaten a diet of mostly beef and a few other very simple things (a starchy carb like potatoes, some basic green vegetables, even some dairy now and then). When I'm on this diet, my skin is pretty much clear. When I try to introduce other things, even very basic ones, it tends to lead to a big problem. I tested some salmon last Friday and am currently dealing with another one of those hard balls that I otherwise never get.

Based on the testing I've done over the past 2 years or so, I am completely confident that this is related to food. It only occurs when I deviate from the basic diet that I have confirmed works for me. The difference is visible and dramatic.

I need to find a better solution than just eating beef for the rest of my life. It's expensive, a hassle, makes traveling and socialization difficult, and I'm not sure how healthy it is for me in the long term. But I have not been able to find any medical or scientific knowledge related to this phenomenon. It seems like I'm dealing with some kind of highly idiosyncratic intolerance to vast groups of food and nobody knows what might have caused this or how to help with it. Is there any medical specialty or institute that might be able to help me get to the bottom of this?

I've had acne since my adolescence, not just whiteheads but the uncomfortable hard ball underneath the skin, and my nose would get very red and inflamed.

The ball under your skin sounds like cystic acne, which is usually treated with isotretinoin IIRC.

I’ve had acne since my teens as well, the one thing that cleared it up completely was a round of antibiotics. My skin looked amazing for a few weeks but staying on antibiotics long term is a bad idea. Do you have body acne by any chance? You only mention your nose but I’ve had back, chest and face acne in conjunction with extremely dry/dandruff scalp/beard and eyebrows even, which I realized was all related to a fungal acne issue. I bought a bottle of nizoral (ketoconazole) shampoo and it works really well on the acne and dandruff, every few weeks or months it will come back and I just use some nizoral and it goes away again. Maybe give that a try. I have also noticed huge differences in my acne based on my diet, sometimes I go weeks without eating any bread (only eating rice and potatoes/sweet potatoes for carbs) and my skin will be doing great then I’ll have some bread and suddenly the acne is back. Sugar seems to make it worse as well.

Edit: Consistency is also really important. I used to have much worse skin when I would shower randomly at different times of the day and switch up the products I used on my face all the time. Now I wash my face twice a day at the same times of day and with the exact same products (cleanser, not face wash, because face washes are drying and I have dry skin which also contributes to acne) followed by a moisturizer. Every time I have to use a different product my face will break out again, so try to be as consistent as possible.

Is there any medical specialty or institute that might be able to help me get to the bottom of this?

afaik (not being a medical professional myself) there really isn't. You're doing the thing that's done here -- elimination and reintroduction. There are just conceptual categories that can guide that process to potentially make it more precise and efficient.

Some proposed classes of problems that could lead to having a problem with a wide array of foods include

  • true food "allergies" -- allergies to a large number of different foods sometimes, but not always, involves characteristic patterns of cross-reactivity between specific foods or specific foods and specific environmental substances. For instance, people who are allergic to birch pollen in the air are also often allergic to certain fruits and vegetables that share some similar-looking protein domain. An allergist would know about these patterns, but their tools for diagnosing food allergies are limited -- the gold standard of diagnostics is still 'try it and see if you feel bad' (unlike blood testing for environmental allergies, blood testing for food allergies is so prone to false positives it's basically useless) -- and the treatment is still 'then don't eat it' (or, if dealing with a single severe allergy, perhaps a targeted regimen of gradual desensitization that has to be maintained by eating small amounts of the offending substance indefinitely, but this may as well be voodoo magic for as well as it's really understood).

  • food 'intolerances' that aren't true allergies but are clearly about some particular food -- lactose intolerance and celiac disease being the best known. An allergist would know about these and a couple of the most common intolerances might even sort of have non-challenge-based tests, but when you get into the possibility of having a large number of specific intolerances, medicine seems to lose the thread in terms of a parsimonious explanation.

  • problems with FODMAPs as already suggested -- the research base on this is poor, the lists people compile on the Internet of what foods have higher or lower FODMAP content are poorly sourced and often inconsistent (charitably, because FODMAP contents of foods are actually highly variable within even, say, the growth stage of a given plant), but it's a real thing. However, FODMAPs are plant sugars that aren't present in animal tissues, so if your problem includes salmon, it's definitely not (only) this. Also, you should expect this to present with definite gastrointestinal distress, don't know about connections to skin issues.

  • histamine intolerance -- some people have difficulty degrading histamine that's already present in foods -- most notably highest in aged/fermented foods, or mishandled seafood -- and get a sort of inconsistent-looking pseudo-allergy to a wide variety of foods as a result. It's hard to pin down because often the 'same' foods provoke different levels of reaction depending on how the specific batch was stored or prepared prior to consumption -- for instance, salmon that was immediately frozen after catch and stayed frozen until cooking might be ok, but the same salmon that was only refrigerated for a couple days anywhere in the storage chain might not be. Like with FODMAPs problems, the research base sucks, the lists of potentially problematic foods are somewhat inconsistent, and medicine doesn't generally have much to say about it, but it seems like a real thing with repeatable effects and a plausible biological mechanism.
    I might expect beef to not be good for you if this were your problem, since almost all beef is aged somewhat before sale. Also would be a poor explanation for any problems provoked by, say, fresh vegetables.

  • other issues that, like histamine intolerance and FODMAPs problems, relate to a failure to adequately metabolize some common component that's found in many foods but in different amounts. Gout -- the pathological accumulation of urate, a metabolic end product of purines, is a classic example. Purines are in all unprocessed foods and are also produced endogenously, but the variation in purine content among foods is high enough that diet is an important factor in managing the disease.
    Relevant to acne, maybe something to do with PUFAs? Beef fat is pretty highly saturated and maybe that's helpful for you. Polyunsaturated fats found in fish, pork, seeds, nuts, oils, etc can be relevant to inflammatory disease. How do you do with a predominantly monounsaturated oil like avocado oil vs. a more polyunsaturated oil like peanut oil?

  • issues related to macronutrient composition, rates of absorption, problems with energy storage and retrieval -- diabetes, glycemic index, etc. If you can eat lots of potatoes without issue, it's not a 'carbs are too fast' sort of problem, nor a 'need to maintain ketosis for metabolic signaling reasons' problem, and if you can eat all beef for extended period, it's probably not an issue with the the utilization of fats, amino acid, or ketones. This sort of thing -- especially glycemic index sort of stuff -- seems to have gotten some research attention relating to acne, but I don't know if the results are very promising. This stuff is also going to involve the quantities and timing and ratio composition of meals, beyond just the identity of the components.
    If it already seems like you have a good deal of flexibility on that front among your 'known good' foods, this is probably a waste of time, but it may still be worth challenging with something like a large amount of pure sugar (or better, pure dextrose) which really shouldn't be a problem under any other framework.

Past these categories, venturing well out beyond the scope of 'real medicine', there's a very long tail of increasingly rare, obscure, or dubious possibilities (idiosyncratic metabolic polymorphisms, 'antinutrients', 'mold toxins', etc) where some paradigm might suggest a potential underlying pattern to your problem, but without ultimately providing any shortcuts around the empirical challenge testing you've already been undertaking.

You've probably already considered (and experimentally excluded) flipping the framing to 'is there something I happen to need a lot of from beef that I'm not getting if I cut back the beef?' Maybe you really just need a lot of cholesterol or carnitine or something? Obviously if you get messed up by adding other foods without cutting back the beef, it's not like this, but I mention it for the sake of completeness (somebody will still tell me something I missed, hopefully).

Wow, I haven't absorbed all of this yet but I first wanted to say thanks for writing it up and taking my problem seriously, it's very comprehensive. I've actually been wondering prior to this discussion about the different-fat-types explanation because it seems to fit with dairy being largely OK and non-beef proteins not. It also fits with the fact that this was a permanent fixture of my life until I tried a radical diet because of the high prevalence of soybean oil and other similar oils in American food. Even then, though, I have noticed other triggers, like adding flour to the beef roasts I make as a thickener, so I think gluten may be a problem too, but I may have to try again to confirm since that was a while ago.

I fear there may be no solution though, even if it's possible to ultimately identify what is causing the problem, which would leave me in the possession of a permanently broken digestive system requiring the long-term consumption of a dubiously healthy diet if I don't want to look terrible all the time, and that scares me a lot...

I second the suggestion below to ask a dermatologist if this is actually rosacea rather than acne. Rosacea is much better known to respond to dietary triggers, including a class I forgot to mention, 'spicy' stuff -- substances that hit the TRP channels (which can include stuff that's not so obviously spicy -- even broccoli contains some AITC, which hits the TRPA1 channel, for instance -- AITC : wasabi :: capsaicin : chili peppers, and AITC : TRPA1 :: capsaicin : TRPV1).

Also rosacea may be related to the 'niacin flush', which different people have different thresholds for experiencing, and salmon is notably high in niacin. If you can get some niacin -- not niacinamide, which doesn't produce the flush -- you might be able to see if your threshold for this is unusually low.

Have you spoken with a dermatologist in person? Could you have rosacea?

Have you spoken with a dermatologist in person?

I have, but I guess only before I discovered the dietary "cure". But I tried lots and lots of creams, gels, antibiotics, etc up to but not including accutane and some of it worked okay but the diet change blew all of that out of the water. I could try again, but from some basic research I don't have a ton of confidence that the sense that dermatology knows much about the food-acne connection yet, and even if it did, my reaction seems abnormal and idiosyncratic and not along the lines of "okay, sugar and/or dairy may influence acne" that I've read in articles here and there.

Could you have rosacea?

I think they've used that term for it before, yeah.

Rosacea is not acne, and it will not be treated with the same things as acne. It sounds like at least type 3. Antibiotics are the most common prescription for Rosacea, but topical Ivermectin is the 'it' new thing. There are new developments every year and it might be worth going back to a dermatologist or at the least go through something like https://www.dermatica.com/.

The problem doesn't lie in food (like an allergy), the problem lies in your gut biome. Can you try drinking homemade milk kefir and see if that's a trigger? You can make it with A2 milk, goat milk, any kind of fancy milk to see if you can tolerate it. If you can, after a few months you might find that you're able to tolerate a wider range of food (but probably not everything.)

Antibiotics are the most common prescription for Rosacea, but topical Ivermectin is the 'it' new thing.

I've tried both of these with not much effect unfortunately. Ivermectin in both topical and pill form even lol. I should probably go back to a dermatologist regardless though, as you mention it's good to keep up with new developments.

The problem doesn't lie in food (like an allergy), the problem lies in your gut biome.

I've wondered if this might have something to do with it, because I seem to have exhausted most conventional explanations.

Can you try drinking homemade milk kefir and see if that's a trigger?

Dairy in general doesn't seem to bother me very much. I haven't looked too deeply into the gut side of things but I probably should because I have few other leads and it seems to have something to do with digestion. I take a probiotic pill regularly but I imagine that is not the optimal approach. I do like the kefir idea and might try that next.

If dairy works well for you, you can try to get more calories from heavy cream? Way cheaper than beef and might be easier on social gatherings (show up with tea filled with 1/3 cup of cream, that's a full meal and you probably won't look too weird compared to pulling out a chunk of meat.)

There’s the FODMAPs system I’ve heard works for other folks with acne.

You could also just try the whole 30 approach of only eating Whole Foods and slowly adding stuff in. Although it sounds like you tried that.

It could also be stress levels in your life, which is related to acne.

My wife and I cope with long to-do lists in opposite ways. I avoid anything that’s not critical and like to make steady progress slowly. I’m happy as long as there’s forward progress, and as long as something’s not getting worse (e.g. the house is a little less cluttered than last week), I’m satisfied with the positive direction.

The wife on the other hand gets anxious and starts buzzing around the house. And anything she wants done now that she herself can’t get to, she assigns to me. These feel like shit tests to me, and I frankly don’t know how to deal with them.

I can tell that this contribution gap is a major turn-off for her, and is even leading to some resentment. Cleaning dishes are expressly my responsibility, and if I leave them in the sink too long, she’ll jump in and do them herself, which we both hate for different reasons.

I’m trying to foster more initiative to beat her to the punch on some of these things. I want to take a more aggressive approach to my to-dos in general anyway, but man, it feels like I’m trying self-improvement on hard mode.

She will go ahead and order plane tickets for an upcoming vacation before I can think to. Well shit, she got the details sent to her email inbox. Hey honey, when’s the flight? Hey, what terminal? Can you print out my ticket for me? I know she would love for me to take care of all of this, but I get beat to it every time because she’s unwilling to wait. And to her it starts looking like I just won’t do these things for us.

Like I said, I’m trying to be more proactive. But damn.

Is there any way to change your domain of responsibility so that if you perform your responsibilities at your desired cadence it won't negatively affect your wife?

For example, if the dishes are on the counter and it's your job to do them but its her job to cook, then she might feel frustrated that the surfaces she'd use to chop, mix, prepare are not clean. If you swap jobs she can clean the dishes at a rate acceptable to her, and you would cook at a time acceptable to you. Or she can do both cooking and dishes because there's synergy (unload the dishwasher while something heats up, wipe stuff down as they are used and load the dishwasher, etc.)

In exchange, you can take over anything that is more routine, set on a schedule. You can set specific times for you to do mopping, sweeping, laundry, cleaning toilets, cleaning out the refrigerator, etc. If she knows that you always do X at a specific time, she might be able to wait for it instead of just deciding to do it herself.

You'll never beat raw neuroticism. I have this problem with my wife all the time. I like to wait until after all the dishes get dirtied before I start washing them. Like say, after dinner. For a multitude of reasons. I have terrible skin, and getting my hands soapy and wet, then dry, then soapy and wet, then dry, over and over and over again through the day causes them to crack and bleed. I hate the context switching from whatever I'm doing to just wash one single fork and plate. I want to see all the dishes that are going to need to fix into the dishwasher so I can plan how I'll fit them all in there.

All of these reasons fall of deaf ears. Having anything in the sink makes my wife anxious, and somehow that's my problem. I'm being lazy if I don't do the dishes before she even sees them.

Do you not have gloves for washing up? If you have sensitive skin (as I do), some shopping might be necessary to find a pair that doesn't irritate your hands, but it's better than getting them wet.

I've tried to use gloves, but I always end up dropping everything constantly instead. I haven't found a size that fits right. They're either too big with extra dangly bits at the tips of each finger that cause me to fumble, or they are too small and I can't get them over the widest part of my hand.

But then there is the fact that putting on gloves to wash a single plate and fork adds one extra obnoxious step to what is already a tedious task not worth the context switch for me.

I can tell that this contribution gap is a major turn-off for her, and is even leading to some resentment. Cleaning dishes are expressly my responsibility, and if I leave them in the sink too long, she’ll jump in and do them herself, which we both hate for different reasons.

I feel your pain. My wife is like that as well, and there's just no way to gracefully handle the situation when she jumps in to do one of my chores that I haven't gotten to yet. She has at least one squirrel ancestor, so when it's my time for passive aggression I go and check the pantry or the storage closet for supernumerary stocks.

First step would be to sit down and discuss it, though discussing things is easier said than done. I know there are some things I want to discuss when my wife does not, and damn if she doesn't bring up complex shit when I just got home from a hard day, or am heading out the door, or whatever. You get my meaning. But communication and acknowledgement of flaws and admission of discomforts can do wonders toward venting the steam, if nothing else. But venting the steam is very, very important.

My wife is Japanese; she is also almost always late. I am not Japanese but I am almost always early. I mean if it starts at 10:30, I will often tell her it starts at 10 just to get there by 10:15. Then she is appalled at being tricked and how we have all this time, whereas my own pulse is calm that we are there reasonably early--and not alone, I might add. This is Japan. It is amazing that she has not been hounded out of Japanese society, but apparently it takes a lot for that to happen. I say this to give an example of certain ingrained traits in both of us that cannot comfortably be compromised--she simply cannot bring herself to be early for even the most serious obligations without discomfort, and for me, being late is a sensation about as comfortable as having an episode of fecal incontinence but continuing to stroll about in my sullied underpants. Thus, the situation must be hacked in some fashion such that the discomfort is mollified. Is this me conning my wife? I suppose that's one way to look at it--but if she doesn't know she is being conned, I see this as the lesser of two evils.

I don't know how long you've been married so I don't want to in any way condescend or sound wise. But let me get this out. In marriage sometimes there are things that need working out via words. I can give many examples but won't; I'll just give broadstrokes:

I am by Japanese standards what is informally termed an ikumenイクメン. This basically means "a guy who actively helps out with raising the kids." (Not to be confused with ikemenイケメン which means "cool, good-looking guy" though I have been called that too at various times in the past, less and less as I age.) So I do grocery shopping several days a week (I spend too much money.) I make dinner as many nights (I need to add more vegetables to the menu.) I often spontaneously vacuum (not as thoroughly as I should). I water plants (too often or not enough). I iron my own shirts, always. I clean and run the bath every night (the furo/お風呂 which we use even in summer, because reasons.) I spend as much time with the boys as possible, and in the past I have made school projects with them, etc. etc.

Even in the face of this I would be a fool to think I do even a fraction of housework that my wife does. Is she as neat as I would like? No. But she takes care of so many things for me and for the boys that the list is simply too long for me to make without getting bored--and this is just me listing the things, not doing them. My point is, never underestimate the scut-work done by women. But my broader point is this: She sometimes complains, even in small ways, about the quality of the work I do to keep things running.

This irks me, and when I notice this irking I will confront her about it, and not always with a soothing kind voice. This pisses her off, and I see a reaction in her face that I rarely see--a confused emotional state combining shock, hurt, defensiveness, and even humor. She gets over it. We have at it, then we calm down, and by the end we usually end up laughing, and it's better. Truly, it is. If I were not to hold my ground in this way, if I were to just avoid, avoid, then the following would occur:

She would win (this is the worst point). Also I would have an existence very much like a man-slave. I would lose respect for myself. She would lose respect for me. My sons would have a very poor role-model for how to be a father/husband. Life would become unbearable for all of us.

Do we have a perfect set-up? By no means. But you should talk, is what I'm saying. You may never resign yourselves to one another's intransigence (or you may work it out in ways I am not imagining). But you can talk it through, and that will help.

I've had this issue with multiple housemates I've lived with, and eventually solved it by marrying a man who's just as messy as I am and buying a house. If we end up having to eventually replace the entire floor once the kids get older on account of stains or something, at least we're in it together. We'll both learn how to put down laminate or something. My father used to wait until we were out of dishes to wash them all at once for an hour twice a week or so. Apparently that worked alright for my parents, they're still together.

Apparently, Big 5 trait breaks up into industriousness and orderliness, and it's really hard on orderly people to relax in chaotic environments. Or so I've heard, I score something like third percentile in orderliness, unlike your wife.

I'm not certain what a good long term solution might be. Agree to do the dishes at a specific time each day, and set a timer? Always wash the dishes right after dinner? Own fewer dishes, so that you notice faster? Agree that one or the other of you is completely responsible for the vacation plans for a specific trip, and it's an infringement if the other swoops in and takes over just because they're feeling anxious?

Sounds like you and your wife have different thresholds. Your wife has a lower threshold for mess and so gets irritated with even a few dirty dishes, which is well below what you'll put up with. Same for the plane tickets, her threshold for buying tickets "at the last minute" is earlier than yours, so she gets jumpy and can't rest until she's bought them.

In my experience these thresholds don't change. They seem intrinsic to a person's psychology. What you can do is acknowledge them and work with them. So if you job is to do the dishes, be aware that this means you have to do them to meet your wife's smaller threshold for "messy kitchen" so that you're both happy.

I'd try being openly grateful for and appreciative of her proactive ways, and possibly rewarding her.

And be clear on what is whose responsibility. If the dishes are yours, but you're not doing them...then they aren't yours. Find something else to take responsibility for.

Hi, I'm your wife.

Well, not really, but you sound just like my husband. I don't assign him tasks because he's not my child, but I hate that I have to do most things myself.

Why don't you just do stuff when it needs to be done? It's very easy to say "It doesn't need to be done now; I'll get to it later." My father-in-law does this all the time also. But then these things never actually get done. As with the example of the plane tickets, the sooner you buy them the better, so you should do it as soon as your travel plans are finalized.

It seems you understand this and the real question is how to make yourself do things, but the only answer to that is to just do them. I'm very curious why this is a stumbling block. Do you think of tasks and just have other things you'd rather do? How important are those other things? Do you just forget about tasks (in which case you need to be ok with your wife reminding you)?

It's usually that I don't see any upside in doing it right away, and potential upside from delaying it.

A more convenient opportunity to do the thing may arise - a lull in conversation, an unexpected phone call, etc. Or, another task might come up and both could be combined for greater efficiency.

Why don't you just do stuff when it needs to be done? It's very easy to say "It doesn't need to be done now; I'll get to it later."

This implies that it doesn't need to be done! That's why I didn't do it yet! I think the underlying problem is different intuition regarding when something needs to be done between @stolen_brawnze and his wife.

As with the example of the plane tickets, the sooner you buy them the better, so you should do it as soon as your travel plans are finalized.

Not uniformly true. As the designated plane ticket buyer in my house, I absolutely wind up with better deals by waiting, sometimes. As someone that's also inclined towards procrastination, this can cause some real problems as I decide whether the prices are good enough. This amps up even further with sports or concert tickets on resale markets - will they go up or down over time? I'm guessing and trying to get a good deal, not just buying things as fast as I possibly can. Different preferences in certainty and completion would cause real relationship strain here, I imagine.

Yeah, the ticket thing is a real "it depends" situation, but generally good to get on it sooner and have a plan (I would love to see a post from you on how to decide when to buy).

Deciding what actually needs to get done is another tricky one, going back to the age-old conflict of people with different standards of cleanliness. I don't think I'm too much of a clean freak, but I do think that visible dirt and stains on the floor should be cleaned up. I am apparently alone in my household in thinking this, so I have to clean them up. It's very easy for family members/roommates to coast on the back of the person who is most bothered by dirt and clutter.

I suppose you could make an argument that dirt and clutter are not objectively bad, and I'm not sure I'd have a really great counter-argument at hand, but it's hard for me personally to live with it.

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