Welcome to today’s daily kōrero!
Anyone can make the thread, first in first served. If you are here on a day and there’s no daily thread, feel free to create it!
Anyway, it’s just a chance to talk about your day, what you have planned, what you have done, etc.
So, how’s it going?
It’s quite hard if the existing information is there for solid reasons, but once I have, it’s an amazing feeling and I love it.
Firstly, learning something truly new to me just feels really pleasurable. Not sure why.
Secondly, realising my current belief is wrong may feel disconcerting, so if there’s other better information to replace it with, being able to grasp the new info and be right again is reassuring.
With your weight loss example learning that was a relief, I’m in a situation where I had to lose weight without exercise or fasting, so I read around that quite a bit. As the old saying goes, “you can’t outrun your fork” ( this article is quite useful).
But the counter-intuitive part for me was that all calories are not created equal. That was harder for me to get my head around because it goes against conventional wisdom, and I had to deep dive into liver function. I was very suspicious and had to look at multiple convincing sources before the “calories in = calories out is all there is to it” could be dislodged.
Another example would be arsenic in rice. I eat rice all the time and I so wanted it to either be a myth of be something I didn’t need to care about. But facts are facts, if you want to be right, not knowing you’re wrong doesn’t make it so.
Knowing the truth made the next step possible, finding a scientific paper on better cooking methods to remove arsenic from rice. So now it’s all good.
If you can grab a copy of the book I’m reading.
“Ultra Processed People, the science of food that isn’t food”.
Yes I’m beginning to want to read it.
I eventually lost over 20 kg without exercise or fasting (or surgery obviously) by the way. So I believe in it from an experience point of view as well.
Well done; your achievement must be so satisfying.
As someone who has never struggled with this burden; I realize that it must be very difficult for those that do. The social aspects of being heavy are also addressed in the book, a lot of blaming the person when there are so many factors at play.
Nah it was honestly just a relief. I’d never been overweight before in my life, and suddenly went through a 50% increase in body weight over about 11 months and it was terrifying.
As well as barely recognising yourself (doesn’t help that you can’t fit any of your own clothes) and getting the sudden social stigma and blame of being fat, there’s also a host of health risks.
So I was super motivated to learn about it.
Took me years to get back down below the “obese” threshold because of the methods available to me, and it was such a relief to have all those risk percentages going down again.
It’s crazy to me how mean people are to obese people. Surely no one wants to be at risk for strokes and heart disease and diabetes. There have got to be factors at play, like you say.