Seriously those starving children in Africa owe me a little bit of thanks for always finishing my plate. Or something.

The Reynolds Pamphlet.

What’s difficult is keeping with it.

My weight has fluctuated from a low of 180lbs to a high of 450lbs throughout my entire adult life.

I know what to do. I know it’s easy to do it.

The hard part is knowing that the second I stop counting, it all comes piling back on.

It’s incredibly discouraging to know that most people can just…live. They eat when they’re hungry. They don’t constantly have a voice in their head telling them to eat when they aren’t. They don’t use sweets for emotional support or stress relief. They can leave food on a plate when they’re full. And they feel full with reasonable portions of food.

Moreso, they aren’t riddled with anxiety whenever their fat ass is on display out in public doing exercise.

I had an elderly woman at physical therapy tell me I’m the biggest man she’s ever seen. You know how upsetting that is? Like, no shit, I know I’m fat. And sure she likely has no filter because of dementia but man it still burns.

It’s an entire lifetime of learned experiences, eating habits, and psychological trauma. That elderly woman may as well have been one of the bullies in grade school or a douche in a pickup jeering at me on a walk. That’s the hard part.

It’s one thing to cut calories for a few months and lose weight. It’s another to look at the entire rest of your life and know, from experience, that as soon as you fall off the wagon, it’s back to square one. That you now have to change what’s essentially been hard-coding itself into your brain since some of your earliest thoughts. That you will, forever, have to continue counting calories and tracking food.

That’s the daily struggle. Resisting what you’ve known your entire life. And worse, needing it. Because you still have to eat, right? So you’ve got to eat, but you have to control it.

You have to control what, and how much, you eat while the food industry keeps on shoveling chemically-addictive foods in front of your face everywhere you go. Piping delicious smells out their exhaust vents as you drive by.

I don’t expect you to understand. People who never struggled with weight really don’t get it. Good for you.

On paper it’s easy. But our brains and bodies aren’t made of paper.

Imagine telling an alcoholic they need exactly one beer a day for the rest of their life. I would wager that’s harder than completely quitting alcohol, or even developing a healthier relationship with it. It has to be in the house. Eventually they have to go to the bar or the liquor store. And every day, for the rest of their life, they have to maintain that restraint.

That’s what obesity is like.

No, all socks have at least one hole in them.

A potato a day keeps the psychiatrist away.

Latvians hate this one trick.

That’s not courtesy, that’s law. Keep right except to pass.

Done passing? Get right.

Not passing fast enough? Gtfo.

News to me…I pay 20k/yr in premiums and my employer pays an additional 30k.

But Mass drivers do need to get out of the left lane.

We aren’t as bad as Rhode Island in this regard, but at least Rhode Island has a level 1 trauma center within 20 minutes of like 80% of its highways.

Does this mean that tube socks are not, in fact, tubes?

If there is a second hole in the sock, does that change things?

I have a lot to consider now.

That feeling when you finally find someone on your wavelength.

What the fuck is this?

We’ll make our own carbon cycle. With blackjack. And hookers.

In fact, forget about the carbon.

1st Gen iPhone also came out in 2007.

OOP is likely scared of his own shadow.

Plus at least he has a beard.

Oh and facial hair, too.

But why not just make electricity from renewable energy?

Like, I get the benefit of fuel cells, but people need to realize that hydrogen closer to a battery than a fuel source itself. You’re expending energy now to make storage of energy that can be tapped later.

It’s good for places where vehicles can’t tap into the grid and need dense energy storage (i.e. transoceanic freighters), or where long charging times are infeasible (like long-range trucking).

And probably good for grid-level storage, too.

But for a typical family car/commuter? There’s really no point. You’re adding more steps in energy conversion, and losing efficiency at every additional step (thanks to basic physics), and to gain what? A faster refueling time on a long road trip? An experience closer to what we were used to with ICE-cars? An experience that really isn’t that great anywhere that has a winter. Or an excessively hot summer.

Maybe for people who can’t have a charger at home, even an L1, but there are better solutions for that (like…adding an outlet? Making landlords responsible for providing power whenever there is parking? More municipal charging locations?)

Thank you for explaining the process, because the pro-fuel-cell pact doesn’t understand that hydrogen isn’t free and production is still heavily reliant on fossil fuels.

“Oh it comes from ammonia”. Alright, where does the ammonia come from???

You’re just moving the problem around, not fixing anything.

I’m guessing he spent 5 minutes, 10 tops. 15 if thinking about his old geography teacher. 2 if thinking about Aunt Steph, who was formerly Uncle Steve.

This is the zoomer humor I don’t get.

Like, antijokes are cool. But absurd memes like this? I don’t get.

I mean put yourself in my perspective here, suburban white boy in elementary school.

I don’t think there was even one black kid in my own grade until high school.

My only knowledge of prejudice being a bad thing came from an MLK poster in first grade, and my second grade teacher reproducing Jane Elliot’s experiment in class (which in retrospect is kinda fucked up and traumatized me into being a good person, because I wasn’t allowed near my best friend).

Edit: thinking way back, my parents owned a triple-decker and we lived on the bottom floor and rented the other two. When I was maybe 5 or so the third floor tenant was a black family with a kid my age and we were best friends until they moved out the following year.

My point is, as a kid, I had literally no idea what prejudice or racism was until someone told me.