tasty synthetic orange

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
scientia-rex
scientia-rex

I gave my soapbox speech about how weight loss is mostly bullshit to two different patients in a row yesterday and so help me I’m pretty sure one of these days someone is going to say “but SURELY you agree I’d be HEALTHIER if I lost weight!” bc you can see the disbelief in their eyes. And like. Sure, maybe! You might see some improvement in biomarkers like LDL and A1c, and your knees would probably feel better. But you would be amazed at how much more good you can do for yourself by focusing on things you can actually meaningfully change without resorting to making yourself miserable. Eat more fresh fruits and vegetables—it’s hard bc they’re more difficult to prepare and more expensive per calorie and go bad faster than other foods, but they’re what we evolved eating the most of so they’re what our bodies need the most of. And walk around more; sure, cardio is great for you, but if it sucks so bad you don’t do it, it isn’t doing shit for you. And we evolved to walk very very long distances, a little bit at a time, so our bodies respond actually very well to adding walks into our schedules, which is vastly easier than adding workouts that are frankly designed to be punishing when the definition of punishing is “makes you less likely to do it again in the future.”

You get one life. It is shorter than you can begin to imagine. Don’t waste it hating yourself because somebody is going to make money off that self-hatred. You deserve better than to be a cash cow for billionaires who pay aestheticians and dermatologists to make them (or at least their trophy wives) look thin and beautiful no matter what they actually do.

scientia-rex

And ONE MORE THING—listen. We are NOT evolved to lose weight, we are evolved to hoard it. We came about in a world of famines. Not only does your brain have MULTIPLE failsafes built in SPECIFICALLY TO PREVENT WEIGHT LOSS, but there are epigenetic factors—factors that are not DNA but travel with it and affect how it is expressed. So if your parents or grandparents lived through a famine, like, oh, say, the Great Depression, YOU are more likely to gain weight and more likely to have difficulty losing it. AND! We live in a world highly affected by industrial pollution—there is no corner of the world free from it, micro plastics and industrial chemical pollution have been found literally everywhere ever studied—and many of those pollutants affect our endocrine systems. Looking at records of lab animals going back to the 1960s, where we have excellent records of what genetically essentially identical animals ate, we know that LAB ANIMALS FED THE SAME AMOUNT OF THE SAME CHOW WEIGH MORE NOW THAN THEY DID THE IN SIXTIES. So no. You’re not fat because your willpower is somehow busted. (Willpower, fun fact, can be depleted! By DEPLETING BLOOD SUGAR! Baumeister’s work in the 2000s demonstrated that.) You’re fat because your body wants you to live, and because the ultra rich have knowingly poured poison into the world because they don’t care if you die.

So YOU need to care if you live. And how you live. Please love yourself, because the billionaires will never give a shit about you. Weight Watchers has a 96-99% failure rate. Weight loss is a scam that makes billions of dollars every year. Love yourself too much to fall for that. Don’t wait until you’re thin to love yourself or to start living, because a) that day may never come and b) it’s okay if that day never comes. You are worthwhile and enough right now. I promise you that.

scientia-rex

Did I mention that all studies on the subject are very clear--like, we do not need more studies on this, which is a bananas thing for a scientist to say--exercise does not lead to weight loss. It just doesn't. Anyone who tells you it does is wrong. It's good for you because it's good for you, not because it makes you thin. It improves your blood vessel health; it improves your heart health; it improves your body's ability to manage blood sugar; it improves your muscular health. It does not make you thin.

Reducing calories can reduce weight, but your body, as previously mentioned, is trying REAL HARD not to lose weight. I see a lot of recommendations for 1200 calorie a day diets. Google "starvation study" and look at how much the men in that study were given. It was over 1500 calories a day, and they were miserable. They became skeletal. They felt awful, depressed, foggy--because your brain is the single biggest user of calories in your body. It is so metabolically active that your brain uses around 30% of all the calories your body uses. Guess what happens when you starve your brain? You feel like shit. You feel stupid and depressed. Don't starve yourself. It doesn't work and it makes you feel awful and you will get rebound weight gain above whatever you lost, guaranteed, and then you'll blame yourself for "letting yourself go" because our society is built on lies.

scientia-rex

We also cannot and should not ever suggest that anyone can lose more than 5-10% of their body weight and keep that off. It's just not possible. Bariatric surgery is a WHOLE other can of worms, I don't have the energy to explain why I almost never recommend it to my patients, but just know that if anyone has ever suggested you lose more than 10% of your body weight through behavioral changes, they are bullshitting you.

scientia-rex

Getting a lot of notes on this post! Many of them are people going "oh thank God" and then there are people going "but SURELY you agree I'd be healthier if I lost weight!" and people going "well I lost weight so it IS possible!" and like. Buddy. That's like two people out of the 10,000 notes on that. You are that rare statistical exception. Feel morally superior if you want to. (Right up until you hit that health problem that leads you to gain weight and suddenly realize, with great shock, that it WASN'T immorality that led you to be sick and fat.)

Lotta people asking me medical questions! No! Ask your doctor. Real professionals need a lot more details than you're going to send me in an ask. Giving you medical advice without knowing your chart and being your doctor puts me at actual legal risk.

Also people going "cite your sources!" No! I spent 10 years working in research before I went back to med school. You know how I find papers on stuff? Google! Learn to fucking Google! If you can find research that convincingly demonstrates that exercise leads to weight loss, shoot it my way, because on my way in to work last week I was listening to a national conference board prep lecture and the speaker very specifically told thousands of family physicians, out loud in words, "Exercise does not lead to weight loss," so you can either assume you know more than me and go prove it, or shut the fuck up.

Also people saying, "Wait, I thought I could lose weight, and now you're telling me I can't?" No. I'm telling you that weight is not the benchmark for how healthy you are, and if you let your eating disorder tell you that thinness is the only thing that makes you valuable as a person, that is a very different disorder--that you can recover from--than being fat.

Also people with just no reading comprehension going "you're saying there are ZERO benefits to weight loss?" to which I say go re-read the first two paragraphs of my first post.

I am literally an expert--on the brain, on bodily health--and if what I'm saying is unsettling, you need to think real hard about why. Examine your attitudes towards fatness. Ask yourself whether you'd still like yourself if you were fat. Ask yourself what you have to offer the world besides thinness. Why do fat people being happy threaten you? Why would you be happier in a world where fat people deserved the things fatphobia does to them? How much of your self-esteem is based on being thinner than someone else?

scientia-rex

Okay, I am ADDING THE BARIATRIC SURGERY POST HERE. You can STOP ASKING ME FOR IT.

Scientia Rex
Hallo!! I really appreciate your blog and how open and invested you are in wellbeing outside of medical fatphobia and other ways medicine as
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scientia-rex

You know what, while I'm at it, my post about Ozempic/Wegovy:

Scientia Rex
Because my most popular post is about weight loss and how it's a crock, I get a lot of questions about various things, including bariatric s
scientia-rex.tumblr.com

And let's address the only two meaningful criticism of my original post series:

  1. The Baumeister research on willpower as a depletable resource is probably BS. People have tried to replicate it and they can't. In my defense, I didn't know that because I finished my master's in 2010 and that conference where I watched his presentation was in like 2009, so I'm out of the loop. However, this criticism is valid. And kind of a bummer? I liked feeling like I was accomplishing something with a little treat. Ah, well.
  2. The men in the Minnesota starvation study were given over 1500 calories a day in a setting where they were burning substantially more than that. Yeah! Grown men do! I have a patient who literally walked into my clinic room and was like "I don't know WHY I'm so tired" and it turns out he's working and also working out while on an 800 calorie a day diet, so it's worth talking about how much grown men should be eating, because they deserve to feel like human beings too--but if you want to get into whether 1500 calories a day is a reasonable amount for a human woman to eat, it's fucking not! ALSO, calorie science is a load of horseshit in the first place. Bomb calorimeters are still, as far as I know, the standard, and the question of "how much energy does this put out when literally burned" has VIRTUALLY NOTHING to do with "is this good for me to eat."

So, now no one can complain I didn't address those issues. I am actually grateful to the people who pointed out the Baumeister thing. I'm just annoyed at people going "he was BARELY hungry enough that he CUT HIS OWN FINGERS OFF AND DIDN'T KNOW WHY" as if that is, you know, in any way a defense for why we continually hear advice to go on a 1200 calorie a day diet.

whetstonefires

Anonymous asked:

If none of them married, how desperate would the Bennett girls actually have been?

janeaustentextposts answered:

Well the only dowry they have is £50 apiece from their mother’s small inheritance, per year; so that’s a total of £250 generated by Mrs. Bennet’s inherited investments per annum.

The Dashwoods (four women) are living on £500 a year when they are forced to live in Barton Cottage (with good-will making the rent presumably ridiculously low thanks to Sir John Middleton’s good nature, to say nothing of all the dinners and outings he invites the ladies to, which will help them economize on housekeeping costs for heavier meals.)

So there would be six Bennet women left to live on half as much as the Dashwoods are barely scraping by on. £250 is roughly considered enough to keep ONE gentleman at a barely-genteel level of leisure (presuming he does not keep a horse or estate or have any major expenses beyond securing his own lodgings/clothes/meals at a level becoming of a gentleman.)

None of the Bennet girls have been educated well enough for them to be governesses to support themselves, so…yes, their situation would heavily rely on mega-charity from others to just help them survive, much less maintain them in the lifestyle they’ve been accustomed to. The Dashwood women have NO social life beyond the outings provided by Sir John and the offer of Mrs. Jennings to host the older girls in London–otherwise they’d be stuck in their cottage, meeting absolutely no eligible men, creating a cycle of being poor and unmarried and too poor to meet anyone with money they could marry.

If the Bennet girls don’t at least have ONE of them marry well enough to help the rest before their father dies, they are really, truly, deeply fucked.

They may joke about beautiful Jane being the saviour of the family, but…it’s true. Mr. Bennet failed his daughters several times over in A) presuming he’d have a son, B) not saving money independently from his income to support his family after his death when it became clear he wasn’t going to have a son, C) not educating them well enough to enable them to support themselves in even in the disagreeable way of being a governess, D) not making any effort to escort his daughters to London or even local assemblies to help their matrimonial chances because he just doesn’t feel like it, E) throwing up his hands and shrugging when faced with the crises of Mr. Collins and Wickham.

Much as we are relieved on a romantic level that Mr. Bennet’s support of Elizabeth saves her from parental pressure to accept Mr. Collins, Mrs. Bennet is NOT A DICK for pushing for the match, because on a material level it very much means they get to KEEP THEIR HOUSE and gain a connection to the powerful patron Lady Catherine de Bourgh, which could be VERY advantageous for the other unmarried girls.

And the scandal of Wickham very nearly scuppers the chances of ANY of the other girls, and Wickham is a further DRAIN on the family finances, not a man who is going to substantially be able to support them. It is SUCH a disaster, and of course there’s not much Mr. Bennet can do until they are found, but he’s away in London and doing…what, exactly? Mr. Gardiner takes over and manages everything and Mr. Bennet seems happy to just let him.

Mr. Bennet does the ABSOLUTE LEAST, and actively damages his children’s futures by his inaction AND by his one action to support Lizzie’s individual needs being prioritized over the collective gain, which…I mean, Lizzie is going to be JUST as homeless and destitute as her sisters when he dies, so much good being Dad’s Favourite is going to do her. :/

hillnerd

£50 is around £4200 now, so about £21,000 for 6 women to live on today for the Bennets.

The Dashwoods at £500/year are at about £42,000 for 4 women to live on today.

Mr bennet definitely messed up, and mrs b deserves way more respect for the immense amount of pressure she’s under

mythologicalmango

I wrote an entire essay about this my last year of school, and my teacher thought I had lost the plot.

He was my most hated teacher for other reasons, and this did not help his case.

randomsquirrel42

I am Here for the Mrs. Bennet Defense Squad. Yes, she can be unsubtle in a major way, but she is also terrified of the alternative outcome. However, for all her lack of tact, she is also hella strategic, as demonstrated by setting up an “oh no I’m stuck in your house” romance trope situation for Jane and Bingley. She’s a clever lady, and she sees exactly what kind of shitty situation they’re in, and she can’t get her husband to do anything.

It’s really easy to read Mrs. Bennet’s inability to be subtle about anything as a sign of stupidity or inability to understand “society” (and the Bingley sisters are inclined to do this and link it to her very middle-class family because of classism) but she is literally panicking at all times about a very real concern, and everyone is just rolling their eyes. No compassion for her poor nerves indeed!

fairy-anon-godmother

Ok so I started to scroll by. But the problem with the Mrs. Bennet discourse is that it can too quickly swing too far in the wrong direction. Yes, everything about this is (mostly) true. The Bennet women are in a really delicate position. Their safety and continued financial security hangs on Mr. Bennet’s faintest breath. It is in fact a conversation point several times that the girls are not educated enough to serve as governesses, but are of too high a social status to expect marriage to a tradesman. 

The problem is that while Mrs. Bennet is certainly the only one in the Bennet household taking this issue seriously, she’s also gone too far in the opposite direction. The point of the Bennet marriage is that it’s bad for both of them. Mr. Bennet married a beautiful, foolish woman and then didn’t live according to the economy he would have had to in order to leave her a tidy sum once he died. Mrs. Bennet held herself safe under the happy expectation that she would produce a son, who would inherit the estate and provide for her in her own age.

Once it became clear that wouldn’t happen (and remember Lydia is only fifteen when the book opens, so Mrs. Bennet might only have given up the idea that she would have a son possibly a decade before, when Jane was about twelve) Mrs. Bennet had to focus on her daughters’ marriages in order to ensure the family’s well-being. The problem is that she overcompensated beyond what the society she lives in found good form. 

Mrs. Bennet is a foolish, vain, nervous woman who is often called out in the narrative as an older woman with Lydia’s naturally foolish and selfish character. Her husband long ago realized he’d someone for looks who he was incompatible with personality-wise. The readers (especially modern readers) see his neglect of family affairs readily, and his gentle (and at times less than gentle) mockery of his family (particularly his wife and his three youngest daughters). But importantly, Mrs. Bennet also is meant to come across as a lesson to the reader. A silly woman who married above her station (it’s mentioned several times she secured the better marriage compared to her own sister) Mrs. Bennet doesn’t have the social graces she should have been expected to, as her husband’s wife.

This is an important plot point. Raising Mrs. Bennet up as the only Bennet aware of their impending doom as Mr. Bennet ages is important and adds depth to her matrimonial scheming on her daughters’ behalves. But vitally the way she goes about her work causes Mr. Darcy to hold the greatest of disdain for her and her family. It’s that disdain that helps induce him to persuade Mr. Bingley to leave Netherfield Park. This isn’t truly questioned by Elizabeth, who understands that her mother’s over-eager grasping immediately raised Mr. Darcy’s concerns. Remember, at this time there was an abundance of women who were deliberately setting out to marry men of good fortune, and desperate to make themselves amiable enough to secure that marriage, regardless of their true feelings. Mr. Darcy (and honestly Mr. Bingley too should have known better) would have spent his entire later youth and then adulthood on the alert for women whose intentions were only for his wealth, and not for his happiness. That’s important, especially after we see the great care Mr. Darcy takes with Pemberly and his dependents. 

Mrs. Bennet’s desperation is understandable. Her character (grasping, foolish, too needy and nervous to understand the social graces she must display to appear acceptable to men of the station she wants her daughters to marry) isn’t virtuous. Mr. and Mrs. Bennet are intended by the narrative to stand as examples for what happens when people who are not of similar or compatible characters marry. Mr. Bennet grew so disillusioned with his wife that his reaction to his family’s financial insecurity is to make jokes and wave his wife’s concerns away as foolishness. He’s not really concerned with the future of his female family members. Mrs. Bennet on the other hand, doted on for her beauty then ignored and trivialized after that beauty lost it’s attraction, is left to indulge her worst impulses as she tries to snap up eligible young men for her daughters. Importantly, Mr. Wickham easily fools her as to his true character, even after he runs off with her daughter. 

While we look at Mrs. Bennet’s desperation and find it both pitiable and understandable, that doesn’t mean that she’s the better person in the marriage.  These two people could have been better than who they became as they aged. The problem is that in their youth they found a spouse who wasn’t compatible with them, and their own character deficiencies were magnified in the marriage. Mr. and Mrs. Bennet are intended as a warning to the reader over marrying for shallow reasons (beauty for him, money for her). Character matters in a marriage, as does mutual compatibility. 

beatrice-otter

None of this is wrong, but there are a couple of nuances to add:

1) In looking at their respective financial positions, this analysis leaves out the support that they can expect from Mr. Gardiner and Mr. Philips (Mrs Bennet’s brothers.) If Mr. Bennet dies and his heir throws them out, they have relatives who can and almost certainly will take them in. This is something the Dashwood ladies do not have, by the way, or at least not to the same degree; Sir John Middleton may have let them take Barton Cottage on very easy terms, but they are still renting it from them, and they do still have all the rest of the household expenses to bear.

Mr. and Mrs. Philips don’t seem to have any kids (no cousins are mentioned) and we know Mrs. Philips loves Mrs. Bennet and the Miss Bennets. Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner do have kids, but also, Mr. Gardiner’s business is apparently quite successful: he has the time and money to take long vacations, and he and his wife dress in such a style that people who don’t know them (i.e. Mr. Darcy when they meet at Netherfield) take them for “people of fashion” i.e. members of the gentry class who have wealth but not land and hang around going to lots of parties. Between the Gardiners and the Philipses, they can afford to support the Bennet women. Most likely, Mrs. Bennet and Lydia (and maybe Kitty) would stay in Meryton with the Philipses, and the Gardiners would take the rest of the girls. (Mrs. Bennet and Mrs. Philips are close, and Lydia is a favorite of both Mrs. Bennet and Mrs. Philips.) In London, the older girls would help out around the Gardiner house and attend social events with them; they would be exposed to a lot of men ‘in trade’ and would have a better chance of marrying than in Meryton (where there are only four-and-twenty families they have social contact with, and if there were any young men in that group they were willing to marry who were willing to marry them, we would have met them in the book).

The Miss Bennets would probably marry either professional men or men ‘in trade’ and sink back into the middle classes their mother came from; they would not be poor. They would be dependent relatives until that point, but they have good family who love them who will allow them to be dependent and not treat them badly for it. It’s not ideal, but it’s pretty far from the “starving in the hedgerows” that Mrs. Bennet wails about. So when evaluating “is Mrs. Bennet right or not” that is something we need to keep in mind.

2) One of Austen’s main concerns is not just for her heroines to marry but to marry men who will treat them well. There’s always a jerk/rake who looks awesome on the surface but is actually awful. In P&P it’s Wickham; in S&S it’s Willoughby. Austen didn’t think love necessary for a good marriage (consider Charlotte and Mr. Collins, and Charlotte being quite content). But she did think that “knowing his character and knowing he’s a decent human being” was critical. That’s why the ‘boring/stodgy’ guy you’ve known all your life is a better catch than the handsome charmer you’ve only just met. That’s why Elizabeth begins to fall in love with Darcy when she sees Pemberly–not how wealthy he is, but how well he treats the people in his power, his servants and his sister. Austen never dwells on this, which is why so many people miss it, but it’s a constant undercurrent. Then, even more than now, there were a lot of women who were deeply unhappy–and often suffering–because their husbands treated them badly and they have no escape. Austen expects her readers to know this, when they’re evaluating the potential love interests in her books.

Mrs. Bennet, crucially, does not know this. Mrs. Bennet wants her daughters married, and she doesn’t care to whom. She does not care about the character of any prospective son-in-law. She does not care about whether it is possible for her daughter to live with him without hating him. She doesn’t even really care about whether or not he can afford to support a wife, or she wouldn’t be so thrilled with Wickham (who has no money and no prospect of getting any–army officers, whether in the militia or in the regulars, were deliberately not paid enough to support the lifestyle of the gentlemen they were supposed to be, because it would keep people who weren’t independently wealthy out of the officer corps).

Marriage to a rich man would save the family financially, but it’s not worth it if the woman so married is miserable for the rest of her life. And, given the family support that they can expect, this is extremely short-sighted of Mrs. Bennet.

whetstonefires

All of that, and additionally for these reasons Mrs. Bennet absolutely is being an ass about Collins. Because the only thing she’s really thinking about there is that she will get to keep her house and comforts, just as she always planned.

A decent, sensible mother making the calculation that it would be for the best for everyone if the cousin on whom the estate is entailed does marry one of the Bennett daughters would 1) approach it as the business proposition it is with the daughter in question 2) recognize that Lizzy is wildly ill-suited to Mr. Collins.

The version of Mrs. Bennett who’s on top of the situation would have steered Mr. Collins toward Mary, and they could have been mortifying and pretentious together ad infinitum. But that Mrs. Bennett would also have attended to concerns such as thrift and education for the past 20 years, and the family wouldn’t be under as much pressure.

otatma
mariacallous

Whoever is President from 2025-2028 could likely fill two Supreme Court seats that belong to far right Justices. Currently, it’s a 6-3 conservative majority. Don’t play with your vote. — Vincent ⚖️ (@VtheEsquire) March 1, 2024ALT
amaditalks

The far right justices in question are Clarence Thomas (75) and Samuel Alito (73). The likelihood that both will be able to remain on the bench until 2029, at the earliest, is small, especially with the growing ethics concerns around Thomas’ financial improprieties and his wife’s association with January 6 that may push his retirement even though he is currently (very) resistant. Thomas and Alito are the oldest members of the Court.

Re-electing Biden substantially increases the chances of the loaded 6-3 court shifting to 5-4, moving control away from the far right bloc, by 2029.

But it also has to be considered that Sonia Sotomayor, even though she is only 68, may not be able to remain on the bench through the next presidential term due to health concerns.

The first Trump presidency and Mitch McConnell’s scheming loaded the court with three right wing ideologues who barely qualify to teach law at Regent University, let alone have lifetime appointments to our highest court.

It is crucial to remember that the impact of a presidency on the courts outlasts any other presidential legacy and can change the entire course of American life for decades.