eos_nyxia

That certainly does not help.

I read that as wilting, lol. Testosterone? I read that somewhere too. I'm wondering why he looks more feminine in the face compared to when he was younger though.

I've juiced fresh cranberries myself, but I don't own a juicer (I have too many appliances and I HATE cleaning juicers) so I blend it up with water and then press it through a fine-mesh strainer and it's good enough for me. Often you can get it super cheap if you buy it right after Thanksgiving and then you can freeze the extra. I usually also juice it in combination with other fruits, roots, and vegetables. My standard thing is usually fresh ginger juice and lemon, which is super easy to strain, and then maybe fresh turmeric and celery or cucumber. For me, ginger is one of my panacea herbs, especially someone who has had lifelong digestive sensitivities.

I mostly go on there (and similar places) to lurk and get a temperature reading of whatever the issues of the day are for a specific community. In this case, mostly I tend to focus on issues relating to female physical health (especially news that I might have missed from other sources), the current state of reproductive rights (mostly in the States), marital issues and issues interacting with the opposite sex (e.g. the uneven distribution of physical and emotional labour in relationships). (Though there is a ton of selection bias that skews toward the negative -- it makes it seem like everyone has a shitty husband and male friends, which I have trouble believing is the result of issues that SUDDENLY APPEARED with no red flags beforehand. People aren't that crafty, even when they try to be, haha.) Maybe there is an occasional post about human rights issues for women worldwide, but most of it is very US-centric and it shows. I mean... any kind of place where people repeatedly go to consolidate their bitterness isn't good for anyone emotionally. After a while, the collective attitude tends to automatically rub off. Even I feel it and I'm not one to automatically identify with the agendas and ideologies of specific communities, even if I'm in the demographic group. This is what happens when people go to a specific place to bond with people over a shared lack or wound though. Bonding through perceived shared trials and hardships. It offers a very strong bonding potential.

He's an almost 50 year old guy with not a lot of melanin. I'm not sure what sort of cosmetic procedures he has had done as well. He also has really low body fat, doesn't he? None of these factors really help with aging. For cosmetic work, the result can be a wildcard even with "good" work, especially with new procedures seemingly being implemented at least every 5-10 years. The long term result isn't always known (e.g. the migration of fillers, undissolvable fillers). Very low body fat makes everyone look older. East Asians tend to have more face fat by default which helps with the appearance of aging even if we also lack the melanin. I think he looks fine enough, though I guess you could ask if that amount of effort is worth the reward (looks wise). IDK. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ People really think that diet or controlling external lifestyle factors fixes everything, don't they? The obsession with the visual aspect of aging has gotten completely out of hand.

There is a certain kind of sadness and desperation (like a kind of existential emptiness and not being at peace with that) which tends to follow around the formerly religious like a scent. As if they are trying to fill the void with some new kind of religion, whether it's New Age spirituality, another religion, a food-based "religion" (like veganism, specifically if they're dogmatic and evangelizing in an extremely aggressive way), or turning some other niche into a whole-ass ideology. It could be fitness, it could be intellectualism or anti-intellectualism, techno-utopianism, or something else entirely. Food-based "religions" (particularly as a Western phenomenon) is an obsession with foods as a sort of moral marker of purity, and the obsession with remaining pure or worthy in this way, which in turn calls for demonizing others. There might be a point to reducing the load placed on your body, there is a point to ethical concerns, but I'm simply referring to the emotional and thought processes attached to it and the attachment to specific identity markers. What you demonize in others you reject in yourself, and that always has a cost. He was raised as a hardcore Mormon, wasn't he? If he doesn't believe that he's going to get a Mormon afterlife, then he at least wants to live forever? (Which I get, but I still find sad. Who wants to live entirely like themselves as they know themselves..... forever.... just because they are afraid?)

Why the negative framing by default? What invisible benchmark are you comparing everything to?

This is so goofy, why would you think this is onesided when people are left to their own devices? I was a tween (probably even younger) when I realized that "smart" or "nice" doesn't matter if you're not cute as a girl either, and "weird" is only ok too if it's offset by people thinking your attractive, but that also has its limits.

Personally I think the difference between him and many who would envy being in such a position is that he is truly committed to a service mindset, so it's like a vocational or even sacred calling, Not just the idea of it.

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Have you gone out of your way to find people who share similar enough niche interests to commune with? Or can you honestly say that there isn't some part of you that takes pleasure in feeling like you're the best person in every room?

BEING A HEAT FREAK IS A WAY OF LIFE: No problems of any sort exist in this place. No fixations on anyone or anything, and nothing to resolve about the future or past. Literally nothing to concern myself with. And it makes me feel amazing to be existing in a body in a way that few things do. Why would I not love it? In my experience, the dry sauna is just slightly better overall, though it's quite a different experience both emotionally and physically. The steam room is better for your respiratory system, especially your lungs and sinuses, and also your skin. The sauna is better for deep tissue, including the muscles, joints, and fascia (and by extension, general flexibility, thus hot yoga). Personally, I also find that the dry sauna is better for deep emotional release. Along with affecting the deeper tissues of the body, this also might have something to do with preferring to be in there for an hour, sometimes longer, sometimes a bit less. While in the steam room, it feels physically oppressive to be there for more than 15-20 minutes. This might have something to do with the amount of swimming cardio I do these days, and that supposedly the steam room I go to is the hottest one in the city. The steam room is part of my regular 4-6 day a week swimming habit, but the dry sauna is not (sadly). The rec centre I swim at doesn't have a dry sauna, or I'd be in there as much as humanly possible. ONE THING I DON'T GET: People who get super social as they're clearly melting to death, haha. To each their own though!

GOD'S GIFT TO SALADS: SHIRAZI SALAD: Finally, I discovered a salad that has everything that makes the base flavours of a Greek salad amazing (chopped tomatoes, cucumbers, onions + sour citrus vinaigrette), but with a texture that makes it infinitely more delicious: It's that perfectly uniform fine dice! About once a week, I fantasize about eating a very large amount of this salad. (Sometimes I wonder if I'm known as the lady who ALWAYS orders a Shirazi salad at my local Persian food place... often I go there and literally just order that.) TABBOULEH: Now it's competing with my classic favourite salad, which is Lebanese-style Tabbouleh. Usually, when I make it myself, I sub out the cracked wheat with either cooked quinoa or hemp hearts. I love this salad SO much that I googled if it was possible to give myself kidney stones by consuming too much of this stuff. (Parsley, while a super healthy vegetable, has a lot of oxalates, as do many other uncooked dark leafy green vegetables.) Because if it were up to me, I'd eat it all day, every day. ALAS, the other major deterrence with both of these dishes: one either pays the price (buying it premade) or you're chopping your life away. HONOURABLE MENTION -- SEAWEED SALAD: I've always found that the servings that they give you at sushi restaurants are pitifully small. But then again, maybe the serving size is for the best! I love this type of salad so much that I recently googled "...can I get iodine poisoning from eating too much seaweed salad?" The answer is -- Yes. Yes you can. A couple days ago, I was at a Chinese banquet and almost no one at my table wanted to eat the seaweed salad. Haha, their loss! (Wait... is this actually safe?) I'm pretty sure all the East Asian countries have some version of this type of crisp, chewy seaweed salad with a vinegar/ sesame oil-based vinaigrette. HONOURABLE MENTION AND UNDERRATED -- PANAGO PIZZA: For some reason, I've never heard anyone talk about these salads locally ever. But for 8-12 CAD, you can get a fresher, better-quality salad than you can get anywhere else, including ones of a much higher price point for a similar quality. I've had moderately to much worse salads in restaurants, salad bars, supermarkets (including posh ones), etc. (Which either means that the bar for salad quality is in hell or I am super picky haha.) One thing that I really appreciate is that there are a ton of ingredients you can choose from and a lot of them are free to add on. It makes it really easy to order online, check off a bunch of boxes for each ingredient (and uncheck a few), walk there in 10-15 minutes, and everything's already done. If I'm feeling texturally ok with it, I really enjoy these with a ton of extra veggies, as many as I can get, with a protein. (Panago product placement, lol.)

Interesting, thanks for sharing! Are you generally sensitive with sleep or was this routine unusually overstimulating? Also, how close to sleep do you finish your last set? I've been curious about this sort of routine for the last 10ish years, but I didn't have the time, energy levels, or persistence for it back then. I have actually heard of people doing this type of thing for pistol squats or other callisthenics, but also sometimes for kettlebell and other weight lifting exercises, though it's usually more like 3-6 sets spread out throughout the day. I've heard that it's a good way to build strength very quickly because you rarely get fatigued enough to have to take whole days off for muscle recovery and DOMs, though I imagine long-term fatigue must build up anyway, just at a slower rate.

So it's been a month; how did this experiment go?