Sometimes I wonder how my life would have turned out had I gone with my original plan to move to Japan right after college for about a year. My aunt offered her place in Tokyo, and said she could hook me up with employment teaching English. I was deep into a relationship that seemed promising, though, and I didn’t want to screw it up by making it super long distance. Instead I got a job that turned into a career, continued the relationship that fulfilled the promise (still married, and it’ll be 40 years in a couple of weeks) and produced a couple of kids I wouldn’t trade for anything. Yet I sometimes wonder. I’m sure it would have been different. But how different?
Well, there’s more to everything.
But what you describe still touches on mental health, as passive grazing, cravings, and emotional eating are all under that umbrella, at least how I was meaning it.
The left one.
That’s not the right answer.
I’ve done it for 15 straight years now and kept it off, 243 to 173. I’ll still sneak the crap in here and there, but will then do penance by eating small meals for the next few days, double my workouts.
I was once trained in general fitness by a really tough military type. (Really tough.) He was full of pithy comments. One he often said was, “You can have only one number one priority.”
I think about it a lot.
I fully understand why fitness is the number one priority of many people. It’s as close to a panacea as you can get when it comes to helping with a wide variety of physical and mental health problems. I also understand why people hyperfixate on weight. The idealization of thinness permeates our culture and it is a very lucrative industry.
The reality is that other people have other number one priorities. Or multiple other priorities. In my case, it’s a combination of having other priorities and also probably some kind of eating disorder rooted in childhood trauma. Not something that can be resolved with a little elbow grease.
As far as things I currently prioritize above being thin:
- Providing intensive support to my son now so that he can be an independent adult some day. There is a real possibility that he will require some support for the rest of his life. Right now he needs extra support across pretty much every domain. This absorbs most of my time and energy.
- Keeping my job. I have a good one but we are in an almost impossible funding situation right now with regard to federal grants so I am simultaneously trying to solve big strategic problems while also managing the expectations of leadership.
- Pretty much anything to do with intellectual development or creativity. Reading fiction and non-fiction, staying caught up on important news, and of course writing fiction, which is my favorite thing to do and I don’t even have the mental space to prioritize writing right now. A life without those things is no life at all for me.
(One really unfortunate thing for my health is that the highest-value activities I have in my life are completely sedentary.)
I’m not asking for sympathy or approval of my priority list. This isn’t even a declaration that my priorities will never change, because I’m about to move house and intend to make a lot of positive changes for my health. Living in a townhouse will keep me on my feet! And I can literally see the community pool from my new condo. There’s nothing like a completely new environment to start some good habits.
While I do care about my health, fitting someone else’s physical ideal of thinness is at the bottom of my priority list. Maybe this is something thin people don’t understand. It’s possible to be fat and enjoy your life and not spend every waking moment wishing you were thin. I have so many more interesting things going on.
I just wish some people would knock off the holier-than-thou moral posturing (not you Guano.) I often wonder why some people are so obsessed with other people’s weight.
Phew!
Here’s something I wonder about. When you hear about business contracts worth tens of millions of dollars, and yet it seems like that’s way more than it should be. Where is the money really going? Is someone skimming most of it into their own pockets?
Good for you!
As I’m sure you know, the vast majority of dieters gain it back, plus a few pounds, within two years. The problem is they don’t change their eating habits and go back to eating the way they did that lead them to being overweight in the first place. As the saying goes, losing the weight is easy, keeping if off is the hard part. You’ve figured out what you needed to do to maintain your weight where you wanted it.
The key things for me were eliminating snacks, avoiding added sugar, refined carbs, and UPFs. I’m on a three meal, 17/7 TRE which limits my eating to a 7-hour period, and that works really well for me. I’m not exercising as much as I did when I lost the weight, but I still burn on average 700 kcals daily just moving around. I lift weights daily and attend a fitness class twice a week. Most of those kcals come from hiking in the woods with my dog. Finding the right mix of strategies that works for you is the key, and it sounds like you’ve done that.
I often wonder what other people’s day to day lives are like. Like passing a random business or apartment complex in some town in NJ or wherever. Like what do they do for work? How did they find that particular job? What do they do for fun in their spare time? What made them pick that house vs the one three towns over?
Yes! What are they doing, watching tv? Mad at their spouse? All happy?
Dang it, I knew something was missing but was too lazy to look up the lyrics.
I recently vacationed in Chicago and my FIL does this house-swap thing so we were staying in a complete stranger’s lovely four-bedroom townhouse. It really got the imagination going. They lived in a $1.3m home, four kids, all of whom were apparently accomplished academically and in sports, given the rows of swimming medals hanging in each room - I mean this place was really designed to give the appearance of a perfect family.
Are they happy? Are these kids feeling smothered in their private Catholic school and cracking under all that pressure?
If they are rich as they seem, why do they need to rent their home out to complete strangers when they go on vacation?
Why isn’t the Dad in most of the photos?
Is there domestic violence? (It’s my job, sorry.)
My Aunt was so freaked out by the disorganization of the kitchen, we concluded that they must order in every night.
They had forty plates! Forty! Why?
Most important: where did they get that cool circular leather seating arrangement including the most comfortable chaise ever, that I can’t find anywhere online?!
Given all the wondering I did about the lives of these complete strangers, I think I’m firmly on the side of never swapping my own house. I couldn’t stand the idea of people poring over the intimate details of my life like that.
Who said Achilles could dance. He may have had two left feet. 
As you seem to, I wonder about the mysteriousness of the universe. I find it somewhat…distressing to think that all life on Earth is just due to vast amounts time, trillions of chemical reactions, and add to it all the layers of physics (I am not a scientist, be patient with me if I am explaining poorly)… and all that mix of slush, heat and cold, movement, etc…created life. Somehow little pieces of things that lived to the big pieces that are us…animals, plants, even rocks. Ok, so rocks aren’t alive, but they contain parts of stuff that was maybe …alive??? Oh, well, I am breaking my brain, better get back to finishing up an art piece for a friend…
And that’s another thing I wonder about: what part of my mind is able to make my hands draw lovely things, accurately…“how do you do that?”, I am asked. It is like any other kind of skill, such as talking. I can feel the mental action as I do it, a kind of connection…and it happens. But why not every human??? Some cannot do this…but I cannot do what others can, either. How did I acquire it? I was drawing, realistically, as a young child. My parents could not do this, and they could not determine why I could. However, my sister can also draw and she is a talented musician. Perhaps it is just an accident of…the mysteriousness of the universe!
I’ve been waiting for AI to show up for 20 years, and I’m glad its finally starting to break into the mainstream. its like learning about the internet in the 1970s, and now its 1995 and the internet is finally starting to break into public consciousness.
What I wonder is what happens when intelligence is no longer the bottleneck to problem solving and goal oriented behavior. I know there are other bottlenecks that will still be there, but I wonder how society will change. For all of human history, biological brains were the bottleneck and within a few decades they won’t be the bottleneck anymore. So what happens after?
Oh, I wonder, wonder who . . . who wrote the book of love.
42 is the number of dots on a pair of dice.
Pair-o-dice->->paradise!
I uset to wonder about that, but then I remembered Occam’s razor. Yes, it’s going
into someone’s own pockets. Simple.
I wonder why God creates sociopaths.
If you’re interested, here’s a video I posted recently (along with some comments) about hypotheses related to the origin of life, the probability thereof, and therefore the likelihood of alien life even if conditions are optimal. In fact the whole thread is a pretty good read. The formation of life from inorganic chemicals, a process called abiogenesis, might possibly involve some extremely improbable processes that just happened to occur here by sheer accident. I personally don’t believe that, but it’s one of the hypotheses that’s been proposed to explain the Fermi paradox.
It only feels good if you’re predisposed that way. But not everyone is, or we wouldn’t have evil in the world. Some people are just selfish, others indifferent to the plight of others, and some are actually motivated by cruelty, being marginal or perhaps all-out sociopaths.