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Wellness Wednesday for September 13, 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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After spending summer at a lower weight, I've decided to try and bulk and gain again. I have mixed feelings about it because I found bulking in the past to be very stressful and miserable, but then I also hate how small and weak I am.

bulking sounds a lot more fun than dieting...

It depends if you have the time, inclination, and knowledge to cook large quantities of food you enjoy. Trying to dirty bulk on fast food and protein is pretty miserable if you're not spiritually fat, and if you're not a cooking type the sort of diet I bulked on for busy times in college (oats, plain ground beef, protein shake with milk and olive oil) isn't very pleasant either.

Just put some taco seasoning in it and otherwise plain ground beef is pretty good

By the time I got back around to bulking again, my love of hot sauce had progressed too far for me to be satisfied with taco seasoning. I recommend Bertie's Pepper Sauce and other Caribbean sauces in particular if you like real flavour, not just heat and vinegar. Liking hot sauce (and learning how to use Asian spices) is a real cheat code for cutting, too, since it's zero calorie. Sub umami+salt stuff like soy sauce or furikake to change things up.

Ground beef is too hard to digest over multiple meals (which is what bulking is). I suggest pork mince as a substitute for any beef mince recipe (religion/culture allowing). Much lighter on the digestive system.

Is that due to the fat content?

I don't know. Potentially the opposite.

From personal experience, pork and chicken are much easier to digest (particularly in large quantities as needed for protein/bulking) than beef.

I often substitute ground turkey in my chili.