u/Leeeeeroy-Jenkins

For me it was how I view obesity, given the rise in number of people who are obese and a growing number of medical interventions.

For a long time I believed obesity was some kind of lack of self control or personal choice. This held even with my own weight struggles where I punished myself for overeating or failing to maintain a certain weight.

I am now viewing it as a disease, one that is created by our environment and where the “eat less, move more, weight loss is simple” advice simply doesn’t work unless it’s paired with medical interventions. There’s a huge difference between somebody who can stop drinking as much and lose half a stone and the person who’s been 5+ stone overweight for years and who’s mind and body screams at them with food noise and an inability to feel full or nourished by food when they make any kind of progress.

I suppose at a basic level, I get it, there’s cams and levers that specialised machines use that that take away the limitations of human leverage. You can therefore train much harder and go to failure more easily on machines, whereas barbell or dumbbell lifts are harder to take to failure with load that challenges you.

But what is the limiting factor for free weights? Is it a leverage and gravity disadvantage that needs to be overcome with tons of volume?

On one hand I’m beating myself up about the idea of “how strong does one need to be to keep improving physique?” I know anecdotally that I’ve never made much progress on physique when training predominantly barbell lifts, but I’ve also never taken them far enough (450/275/525) where I can really rule out their ability to improve physique.

There’s strong in the sense that one person can leg press 700lbs for reps, but struggles with 250 for reps on the Squat unless they really dedicate an enormous amount of resources to it. 700lbs for several reps and close to failure is much more of a quad stimuli than a knee buckling set of 3-5 reps on Squat. But then one may do the lifts anyway and have a weak as piss Bench by some standards, but have a huge chest from pushing Dips, Chest Press and Flyes hard. So is that poverty bench serving anybody anything by training it?

So the loss of the larger body of volume you can squeeze out of machines worth trading in for barbell and/or dumbbell lifts at much lower loads and weeks of block training to try and make improvements?

How much should somebody say, be able to Bench or Deadlift before we write-off free weight effectiveness as a builder in people who struggle to progress them?

Thoughts?

I have been a labour voter since I was able to vote. I initially voted labour because most of my family did, but in recent years I voted them because I felt they best represented me, and presented the fairest policy to the most people.

Today I voted for the SNP.

In the past, I have voted No for IndyRef, I also loathed Nicola Sturgeon’s entire premiership, and have continually disagreed with the vast majority of historic SNP policies.

However, I have seen the UK turn into something that barely resembles what I once knew. Leaving Europe and enabling cretins like Farage, Bojo, and co to rise through the ranks has seemingly invited a culture war. We are also seeing regular depraved actions by members of communties, as well as rampant xenophobia.

I want to rejoin Europe, I want no part of the shitfest that Starmer is brewing out of Westminster, and I don’t want my local area to be ran by far right nutcases advocating for impossible economic policy and blaming problems on immigration. If that means voting for the SNP, I’m happy to do so.

A vote for Labour is a wasted vote.

By “opportunity of a lifetime” I’m talking about unconventional paths to fame or fortune.

Growing up in the UK there were always tall stories of people who randomly met millionaire businesspeople that took a liking to them, and decided to fund a loose business idea they had.

Could also class an opportunity of a lifetime as people who’ve landed a prestigious position in an unconventional way such as tracking down the CEO and giving them a firm handshake and a gumption promise.

I’ve been tracking calories with a high degree of precision (always using scales, similar foods day to day, etc) for over a decade, when I’m fairly active (3-4x lifting and 6 hours of dedicated cardio a week) outside of my desk job as a 30s male at 183cm and 80-85kg bodyweight, my maintenance is in the region of 3200-3700kcal a day. This has been ratified with algorithmic tools like MacroFactor demonstrating this.

I don’t think I’m anything special, this is just the reality of being fairly active and slightly above average height. I have also observed that the rate in which many people lose weight when they track calories based on an assumed TDEE is much, much higher than the purported deficit. Again you can see tons of examples with smart apps that show average deficits. This suggests that a good number of people have higher TDEEs than they assume/report.

On the flip side, I’ve also tracked days where it’s all fallen apart or where I’ve eaten whatever I’ve wanted. There have been such days where I’ve eaten very low volumes of nutrient dense food in favour of calorie dense snacks and drank high calorie drinks and maybe had a restaurant meal too - nothing abnormal against the backdrop of the behaviours of others around me - and I’ve tracked upwards of 5000kcal on days like that.

I note a lot of people report that they couldn’t possibly eat that amount of food, but the fact remains that many people do, and those who aren’t tracking aren’t actually seeing how much they do eat.

So I guess my point is that I think many people underreport both their calorie reqirememts and consumption - even on anonymous forums, perhaps to avoid embarrassment or judgement. I know that without any context as to the activity I do that people (especially those who eat way more than me periodically) would raise eyebrows and say stuff like “that’s too much”, etc if I told them my calorie needs.

So could this actually be the case? People feel pressured by societal factors and underreport?

My wife comes across obsessed with how she is perceived at work. She works a remote job and is always getting me to check the messages she sends to people, just in case she sends something that could be misconstrued. It is never the case that she does send anything to that effect, but this is part of a pattern that now concerns me.

A year ago she admitted having had a fleeting crush on her boss (a guy she has never met in person and who keeps all his employees at arms length) and she seems particularly anxious about how he feels about her, whether he considers her up to the job, despite always getting excellent performance reviews.

She has also had rants and gets upset or angry if he doesn’t respond immediately or timely to her queries at work. To me this seems similar to a teenager having a mood swing because a guy won’t text them back.

I am not worried about what this means with regards to our marriage, we have always been open about this stuff, but there are aspects of my wife that I struggle to understand and would like to understand them objectively so I am able to approach conversations more supportively. Any thoughts?

Thanks

TL;DR: My wife is obsessed with how she comes across at work