Michael569

Really good summary by @PsychedelicEagle above. When it comes to salt, there is little evidence that anything other than standard sea salt is really adding benefit and as you said, .... ...it might even be harmful. Tho I'm not familiar with the toxicology research on HPS Iodised salt has some usage in areas with chronically low iodine in diet but overuse can lead to some issues with thyroid gland especially in people prone to thyroiditis or with an ongoing thyroid condition that is not caused by low iodine. Regular non-iodised sea salt from supermarkets is probably the safest and cheapest option. When we say "safe" we have to clarify what safety means. Overuse of salt is linked to hypertension (and hypertension related problems like stroke) and stomach cancer. Many countries notoriously overuse salt and salt rich products like Japanese, Chinese, Koreans but also many western countries which is not good. Salt is also often hidden in products labelled as "healthy" like different budha bowls, sandwiches and even salads. Have a look at processed food you buy and make a habit out of checking their salt content, don't forget to adjust for total weight. So for example if you are eating a sandwich that has 1.2g but the total weight is 250g make sure to multiply 1.2 * 2.5. NHS recommends capping salt intake to 6 grams however some research indicates that this number may still be too high so more like 3-4 would be ideal especially where there is family history of cardiovascular disease, cerebrovascular disease and hypertension. Salt | CVD TLDNR There is no need to invest in expensive salt unless it makes you feel better or gives you a sense of control. Caution with iodised salt. Consider getting into the habit of searching for lowest salt alternatives when buying processed food Try to limit your intake to 4-6 g per day. If unsure, check variations in your blood pressure regularly. Hope that helps

Try sublingual vit D drops. It bypasses gut absorption & portal circulation making it easier to absorb. Just make sure to buy a product that is designed for sublingual absorption

Lately (last 3-4 years) I've been particularly attracted to history books, anything from 5000 BC up to first part of 20th century. I find it really stimulates my imagination and it gives me great perspective on my own life as short as it is in the grand scheme of things. I creates a certain sense of finiteness and makes every day a bit more purposeful. It also helps me appreciate how fortunate I've been throughout my whole life despite all the issue we all continue focusing on. I also love, where I can, visiting sites I read about with a completely transformed story in my head. Couple years ago I took a backpack and a tent and hiked an ancient road built by Romans in Wales for 3 days , crossing a few sites of former Roman forts and cities on the way, spending 2 nights in the middle of Brecon Beacon national park. Was one of the most memorable experiences of my life and it was a particular history book that prompted me to do that. I no longer read books about health because it seems most of them are either biased, filled with delusional quackery or written for a quick profit, hijacking an ongoing fad trend. Similar problem with most new books written on self help, personal finance and mindfulness.

It sounds like you're trying to build your business with integrity rather than just "sell stuff" the way 90% businesses work. So for you many of the original models won't work. Sending out more spam emails in order to attract 1 in 1000 customers is likely to burn you out. Where you should start is trying to understand your customer and your USP. Not just on a surface level but actually build an ideal client avatar and understand them to a depth. Not so much that it gets singled out to one particular person but not so broad that you will try to talk to everyone. AI can help guide you through it. The physical side of business (website, accounting, legal bits) is actually the easier part, the hard part is copy writing, profiling your client, creating your own brand manual etc. There is value in mentoring if you can afford it and there is lots of good content on getting started but it has to start with being able to answer these questions who are you? what do you do? who do you work with? how does it work? why should people care? When you are scoping these things, be specific. No fluffy sentences, no fillers and no place holders. Every sentence on your website needs to hold a value or communicate something.

Yeah, that's a very common side effect of withdrawal. It is going to get better after a while, but a few things you could consider to help you Rather than cold turkey you could go for gradual reduction. Say if your starter was 5 cups a day, you could aim to reduce it by 1 each week and replace that cup with green tea for example. It will take longer but might be more doable. Eventually you may either end up at a very low intake, such as 1 cup per day or completely switch to green tea and then get off that as well. Depends how far you wanna take it. Mix your caf coffee with decaf in about 8/2 ratio and gradually aim to minimise caf while increasing decaf. At some point, you won't even notice that you are drinking decaf.

After years of experiments, my wife and I have niched it all down to morning green afternoon fruit mix evening chamomile I don't even know if any of them works but definitely helps keep us hydrated and gives a sense of routine too.

Good tip. I recall it always took me a few hours to go through each video because i was taking so many notes. One additional tip is, make notes to something to which you'll be able to return later. There is something to writing manually that I don't get from typing so written notes for this particular scenario might work better for that deep cortical retention I've found revisiting my notes even after 7 years helps me refocus and see where I've gone astray.

Sounds like you're at a stage where putting your time into something that transcends the usual 9-5 job would give you the motivation. With your age, financial background and skills you might be uniquely positioned to start working on your life purpose before having kids. Do you feel a deeper sense of passion or calling towards any direction? We all do, given recent events just important not to let it slide you too deep emotionally. I've noticed my day to day mood kinda worsening lately and I've correlated it to exposing myself more to media and news so I'm actively cutting myself away from all of it.

I'm not an expert but maybe you could take this outside of just therapeutic setting. Conflict resolution requires a lot of soft and hard skills like listening, empathy, negotiation, being able to find win win scenarios. I cna imagine stuff like this being important in larger international organisations. Is that something that would be of an interest? Legal firms, procurement organisations, international peacekeeping organisations, government bodies, international relations etc

save to your pc using snipping tool then upload here with the "choose files " link

It's unlikely that their price: earnings ratio will be what it was anytime soon. The investors clearly saw how overrated their stock was and the bubble burst. If you got some leftover cash lying around and want to go for it for the thrill of it, sure why not? But there is always risk in investing in a single company that you don't have when you invest in a fund where individual performance tends to balance out among the index corporations. Otherwise if you wanna play slow and strategic game, nothing beats standard index fund investing with regular monthly contributions. The Tesla case has been repeated over and over across years by many other companies, tech giants and industrial Corps going back to 60s but if one thing is clear is that the index funds have always shaken off radical drops where many companies haven't.

I think what you're describing is sort of a curse of being competent enough that you can organise your life so effectively that working on your life purpose every day is no longer a luxury or a possibility but it becomes a reality. So the rules of usual 9-5 work/life don't apply to you anymore because you have to master your own time and at the end of a day there is nobody there to give you a pat on the back and say "good job today". No boss to celebrate success with and no promotion to be secured. Its just you against you and every day feels like a drag even you are probably achieving more than 80% of your peers clocking at 9-5 job. Tho it may feel like the opposite. What the LP course doesn't fully tell you, I feel, is how miserable working on your LP often is The results are amazing and those moments when you feel like its working and you are on a path towards something greater than yourself is the best feeling ever but the hours and hours and hours of manual grudging work that nobody praises or rewards you for is frustrating and disheartening. I've experienced that more than enough time where I should feel achievement at the end of the day but all there is , is a feeling of incomplete void. Somebody raised a thread about the misery of pursuing the path of self help optimiser and this is basically it. You become so competent that it takes a lot of imagination for someone to actually appreciate what you've achieved. (often including yourself). Not to mention you yourself have to create a system of tracking achievements and milestones otherwise you'll go crazy with feeling of inefficiency. But the opposite is a mid life crisis so savage that some people actually ponder taking their own life. Fathers who have an epiphany in the midst of their 50s realising they have pissed away their most productive years in some corporate job, had kids too early, pushed their dreams aside and no longer have time or energy or mental vigor to go back to school and get re-educated. That sort of misery will outweight any grudging work you put into your LP today by a magnitude of ten thousand. So its suffer now or suffer later but if you are conscientious enough that time will come ad that is as guaranteed as the next day's sun coming on the horizons. So you are on the right path, just need to fine-tune day to day operations. On a practical note, it also sounds like you're simply not giving yourself break and instead are whipping to achieve performance. Could you share a little bit more detail on how your day to day routine looks like from morning to evening? How do you measure progress in your work? How often do you take time to reflect on past period? Do you have a mentor or someone to help you create a structure or navigate path forward? When was the last time you've taken a holiday? How do you celebrate success albeit a small one?

I smell chat GPT all the way to the English channel

This is hard to generalise as different people may have different requirement. Compare a 17-year old teenager who is growing at a rate of 6 centimetres a year who also attends a basketball practice 10 times a week plus leads an active social life with a 52 year old dad who spends 9 hours a day sitting in the office does not exercise and drives car to work. You're looking at a difference of up to 1500 calories of energy requirements easily. But averaging it out using something like a gaussian curve of normal distribution, 80% of people will be somewhere along the average. Meaning average activty, average lifestyle, average amount of deviations (e.g. sunday hike, or saturday bike trip with kids). And so for those, using something like recommended caloric values are actually pretty darn useful and accurate. The remaining 20% may need to do some additional adjustments. But if we were to move away from this completely because it feels hyperrational and needing too much micromanagement, the other option is to use your intuition and observe your body signals losing hair prematurely or graying hair - might need to eat more (but also could be unrelated to diet) losing weight unintentionally - might need to eat more (or an ongoing complication) gaining weight unintentionally - might need to eat less or ongoing health complication like hypothyroidism often constipated - need more fibre, eating too much processed food and processed meat bad skin, too flaky, dry, eczemas - might need to eat more wholefoods and more protein, more healthy fats, less crap low energy - might need to eat more unprocessed food overall or might need to eat more food overall need to sleep after lunch - need to eat more wholefoods and less processed stuff to balance postprandial insulin spikes poor exercise recovery - low protein / low calories not gaining muscle despite training - more protein or more calories total problematic teeth - more wholefoods, less sugar (or poor dental hygiene) Also, all of the above could be completely unrelated to food in some cases or could be completely related to food as well so important to step away from observing just one symptoms and look at the full picture. Not sure if that helps

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yeah that's it. Completely forgot the diagnosis name. , exactly. I initially panicked that I had vitiligo but it was reassuring that it was just a skin infection. I didn't experience any of the dryness or itchiness. It was just worrying. I don't think about it anymore, there's just 3 small spots left Interesting stuff. Vitamin D in general has positive effects in autoimmunity but I'm surprised to see that remission was achieved by some of those participants. It would still be interesting to be sure which one it is but good to hear that you've put it into remission.

Its not necessarily that levels will go up to much but that received in high doses at once, vitamin D can be hepatotoxic (cause damage to liver). More in people who have a pre-existing condition but also in healthy individuals. It also works with your parathyroid hormone and helps balance out the amount of calcium that's being absorbed and removed from the body so interfering with that balance for too long could lead to hypercalcaemia which in itself isn't great. You can imagine what having too much calcium floating around the body will do to your soft tissues (arterial calcification deposits, excessive calcium passing through kidneys increasing stone formation etc). Yeah 10K feels too high as a maintenance dose. Vitamin D - Health Professional Fact Sheet I'd check your levels and if you are already on a good level then maintenance 2K or a gentle push for even higher with 5k seems like a reasonable strategy. If you are very low then 10K for some time is probably a valid, just check it monthly. if you want to go super geeky, you could also run a genetic test for VDR and some of the other relevant polymorphisms (if existing) to fine tune even further but for most people this might not be necessary. I've run a genetic test on myself years ago and my VDR is actually working overtime so my levels tend to go up fairly quickly and I found that taking seasonal 2000 IU about 3 months a year keeps me at lower 90s (nmol/L) throughout. However I eat tons of UV irradiated mushrooms, live in part of UK that has decent amount of sun and am a bit freak about getting enough sunshine since my balcony gets hit directly so I'm like a sunflower catching every sunshine I can get tanning in my shorts on balcony in January @Norbert Somogyi btw really interesting insight about that vitiligo. I am just curious, are you sure this is vitiligo or could it be a fungal infection targetting your melanin cells. I am asking because I have 3 small spots on the top of my neck and they appear with each year's tan and fade as I lose tan. I got it tested and they said there was a small fungal infection that attacked the destroyed the melanin cells so those areas no longer tan. I had more but most of those naturally healed and they are no longer visible. So as we are now in the middle of "no-tan" season, those spots may have simply disappeared? Vitiligo tends to form around fingers and face the most and likewise tends to be more apparent during tan season. A GP can run a skin antibody test to assess whether this is an infection or autoimmunity/.

Sounds interesting, I can definitely imagine adding these sorts of microworkorkouts being great for circulation and cognition. On the other hand, It might not be sustainable for most people. Taking 10 pistol squats in an office environment every hour will give you more than a few curious looks, maybe even an invitation to a meeting with HR or your office manager. Fine for home workers Also you wanna make sure you diversify those exercises as pistol squats in particular are really heavy on the entire musculoskeletal apparatus around the knee and pelvic joints especially if the form is anything less than perfect. So do allow time for recovery for individual muscle groups to reduce risk of injury and overtrain. You don't want to tear a knee ligament and be off exercise for 8-16 months. Either way, give it a go for a week @integral then report back to us

Vitamin D is interesting because the evidence shows it is better to maintain it high over a long period of time than hyperdosing irregularly. Especially for all cause mortality it seems particularly powerful. It is one where almost a yearly blood check up is a good idea just to keep your levels optimised. Not just immunity but brain health as well. The evidence on lower risk of dementia in older adults who kept their levels moderate across life is really interesting. There is some speculative data that it has antioxidant function in the brain and can accelerate activation of microglia (immune cells protecting neurons) Getting to 85-95 nmo/L seems to be almost the ideal for long term health. Important to get there slowly and carefully rather than taking toxic doses. So yeah, get those levels optimised 🫵🏻

What units, do you know?

hell yeah! Love the supportive community. @integral great message although I see you once again injected a healthy dose of drama

The volume of your ejaculate is not all sperm, that's only about 10%, the rest being various fluids, enzymes, bulbourethral fluid etc . You'd have to test to assess the sperm count in a lab test. But still, interesting observation with the beet. Curious if you continue seeing effects of that. It would theoretically make sense but I'm surprised that it works so effectively. always the one for drama

Sounds like you have an integrity clash with some parts of the practices that you don't believe in and some parts that you do and so teaching it all is clashing with your values. Could you modernise the way you teach Qigong? Say , getting rid of some of the old traditional elements like the organ healing bit and opening the practice more to people who are stage Orange and Stage Blue (where most of the world's money sits) Could it be like its with the western yoga that most people looking for yoga don't necessarily care about all the woo woo elements like chanting and channeling breaths into chakras. Most people want to stretch their bodies and get a bit of a workout. Perhaps there is a way to revolutionise Qigong to be more that? Maybe you could approach small businesses with something like that to offer short classes for their employees in exchange for a retainer of, say 20 sessions for $2000 dollars or $5000 if you strike the right company. I used to work in a corpo that had yoga teacher come in few times a week, I bet she was earning crazy money. A lot of businesses are pushing "back to the office" model and facing employee pushback so they are looking for incentives and new benefits. Perhaps you could insert yourself into that model somehow. I'm also considering somethign of that sort with my practice to boost sales and be able to leave 9-5 so I can 100% focus on this. Sometimes things need to evolve. I myself have gone through a bit of an evolution in my practice. I started my nutrition company as a men's health practice and it didn't work and I knew it for years until I changed it. I recreated it to be more inclusive, I started changing how I talk to people, the way I write, worked on tone & voice, worked on branding. It isn't perfect but I've definitely had more interest from the market. I greatly struggle with social media as well, I think its an introvert thing or like seeing social media as a fun park for ego which can be deterring. At the same time maybe you focus too much on what others are doing and that's causing you pain. Maybe what you need to do is let go of old ways and modernise? And maybe the trajectory needs to change entirely. You're just 30, you are still young and have probably 60 years ahead of you. Plenty of time to figure stuff out

you know, academia is not the only way. Why not try a private sector? What exactly is the area of work you're looking in? Like ESG? Or is it more a conservation work? Yeah I can understand how this environment would be appealing. The standard of 9-5s has shifted over last decade and many jobs are now like this, that the managers allow more freedom to their direct reports. I think you'd be able to find such a job again you've hit the nail on the head. Frankly its a common topic I see on this forum. Trying to armchair-philosophise one's way out of existential issues like unemployment and being a mess. And it doesn't work. Sometimes a massive action is needed and we seem to be trying to somehow bypass that. And I am with you, you can totally get corrupted by those institutions but just being aware of that and how that can affect you, gives you a great immunity. So you can be employed by an institution, do the work they tell you, get the money from them, yet become completely resilient to the internal corruption, backstabbing and the shenanigans. And you can still use this time to try to figure things out for yourself. Not just "not that useful", it is extremely counterproductive. You'll have to be judge of that. PhD requires needing to teach, research and write but in exchange you get better pay, safe spot at the university, access to excellent resources and once you have the title in an industry that values academic prowess, your career will greatly benefit from it.

@Anastas Sia maybe the amount of freedom is the problem although i can see how saying that can be seen as invasive. I'm 34 but back when I was 18-22 i couldn't get away with 10th of the stuff kids get away with these days. I suppose to some extend the system has not changed while the students have. Its equally possible that the system itself needs to be updated to a newer model , whatever that means. I appreciate that would take a decade if not more. In the meantime you guys should probably discuss other options your partner has without sacrificing their integrity.