throwaway202022

Not laugh, but I do recoil/jerk away.

I can tickle myself anywhere, especially on my back. It feels no different than if someone else were doing it.

> People who spend more time outdoors tend to die younger.

Source for this? Searching for the claim only turned up results saying more time outdoors is associated with better long-term health outcomes.

Also: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/heres-something-unexpect...

I think he made it a point to write like this. Check out his essay "Politics and the English Language".

Because Jews are the primary enemy in Nazi ideology, and the idea of communism being a Jewish plot was an existing antisemitic belief well before Hitler was a known entity in Germany's political scene: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Bolshevism

I was tired (literally) of the side effects, and I simply felt that I didn't need it anymore. I'm a different person than I was when I started, and I know how to manage my anxiety and depression a lot better now.

> I assume the effects of the drug don't last after discontinuing use so your anxieties will theoretically return?

Yeah, in theory, my anxiety could get much worse sometime in the next few months. I've dealt with that before when I discontinued a different SSRI. If it happens though, I'll be much more prepared this time.

I got on 10 mg escitalopram (Lexapro) in 2014 for social anxiety disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, and depression. I just tapered off these last few months.

Pros:

* Legitimate reductions to anxiety - no longer crippling most of the time.

* Made it harder to fall into depressive episodes. So, it did its job, I guess.

* Did not make me a blunted zombie or sterilize my brain.

Cons:

* Increased sleepiness: unable to wake up at "normal" hours without significant effort, frequent urge to take naps during the day. I slept a lot over the past 8 years, more than I would have liked to. My sleep schedule normalized as soon as I quit.

* Extremely hard to quit, even with a taper. You have to take it really, really, really slow. I developed severe appetite loss and nausea as a withdrawal symptom and ended up losing 13-14 lbs and became underweight. I've only just now got it under control.

> I'd almost say lifestyle diseases seem to be, to a large degree, a choice - maybe not directly, but as a society we accept that if we want to enjoy all the privileges of modern technology and food availability etc., then we pay for it with heart disease or diabetes or certain cancers etc.

It's a choice for many, but I think it's not a fully informed one. If I'd known in my teens and early twenties what I know now, there is a zero percent chance I would have eaten and lived the way that I did. These things don't seem to hit people until the point that their personal health is affected, and sometimes not even then.

> We're looking for reasons why we feel sick all the time but the reality is beyond basic things like being too fat and too sedentary, we are healthier than ever, and many many people had wretched miserable lives of chronic pain before modernity. The expectation of health is a modern conceit and this research is just a reflection of the constant anxiety that there is something wrong with us all - a cultural hypochondria.

Aside from things like infectious diseases, we're not healthier than ever. We have better medicine than ever, but disease states that were once rarities have become commonplace in our modern world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifestyle_disease

By the way, these are diseases which cannot all be blamed on "being too fat and too sedentary", as even skinny people can develop type 2 diabetes. Unheard of centuries ago.

This is 100% true. Genetic predisposition to something != inevitability.

> the inflammation from the Omega 6 is what probably caused his ankylosing spondylitis and triple bypass.

How confident are you that this is the case? This is now the second story I've read of someone on a keto/carnivore diet having to get a triple bypass after eating too much red meat. Was his omega-3/omega-6 ratio really that much worse than that of the average person not on such a diet (not that that's a great standard to compare against, but the average person is also not getting triple bypass surgery)?

I know there's a lot of evidence against the notion that saturated fats cause CVD, and omega-6s and inflammation is a compelling case, but I'm worried we're missing something.

Our human ancestors were not nocturnal. Sleep patterns were probably different, sure, but they went out during the day to gather and hunt for food.

> I'll suggest anyone that disbelieves that to spend some 30min into a moderate/high UV intensity day outside without sunscreen. Especially around midday.

30 minutes? I did that today for two hours. My arms, legs, face, and neck were all exposed without sunscreen, and I didn't burn at all. It all depends on your skin type.

I don't mean to argue that people shouldn't have preferences, but do you know many men who have breast and hip size requirements for a partner and wouldn't consider someone under those measurements? I'm sure there are some, but I can't imagine that's true of the vast majority of men. There's something rather different about a man's height.