Step One. Count all of the calories you eat in a day. Check that nutritional info, do the math, add it up, see what you’re eating without leaving anything out.

Step Two. Try to minimize sugar, carbs, and bad fat, while maximizing protein and fiber. My go-to daily meal plan is steel cut oatmeal in the morning, sweetened with baking splenda, pinch of salt, and cinnamon. Intermittent fast through lunch with coffee. Dinner is open face (so only 1 slice of bread) turkey sandwiches, Black bean soup spiked with tobasco and extra black beans. For dessert, make a big ol bowl of banana cream or vanilla pudding with skim milk. Find a meal plan that works for you, you don’t have to eat the same thing everyday, but have that back-up meal plan ready to go in case you don’t feel like making something different.

Step Three. Don’t inhale your food. It takes your body 20 minutes between attaining a “full” stomach, and your stomach alerting your brain to that fact. Thus, pacing your food is important. How to do that? PUT THE FOOD DOWN. If you pick up your sandwich, eat half, then put it back down, take a drink of water, then you can finish it. Have a big ass glass of water with every meal. I also buy baby carrots, you can get a nice 1 lb bag, and in between dinner items, eat a handful of baby carrots. They’re crunchy, full of water, and help you pace yourself through dinner.

Step Four. Go for a walk after you eat. A little bit of exercise, even a walk around the neighborhood for a few minutes, is enough to to tell your body that you want it to take all that energy you just took in, and use it immediately. You’re telling your body “Hey, don’t put all that energy into long term (fatty) storage, make it available, and of use right now.”

Step Five. Add in Exercise at your own pace. Start with something manageable, achievable, and then make it routine. Whether that means walking your dog instead of just letting them out into the yard, start small, build at your own pace. Make it a daily habit. (Pro-tip, whenever you feel like skipping a day, tell yourself all you have to do is get dressed for the exercise and do it for five minutes. if you do that much and still feel off, you’re allowed to take a rest day. The majority of the time, once you get started, you start to feel better and end up doing it. the key is getting dressed and putting yourself into the position to do it, even if you allow yourself to stop. just keep putting yourself into position to succeed with your new habit.) This also works as an effective daily anti-depressant.

Step Six. Reward yourself for achievements. When you start these things, your body will respond, and you will feel better, more confident, sexier in your own skin. Celebrate with some new clothes that let you show it off. Feel good about it, it’s something you earned!

Step Seven. Allow for cheat days. This you can do every week, every two weeks, whenever you decide. If you find yourself going hard-core on the diet and then crashing into a food frenzy, it’s because your going too hard, and need to allow for a cheat day. Be kind to yourself if you break your diet on a miserable day, and use that as information to consult when scheduling your next cheat day. The long term goal is to reorganize your thoughts around food, and having specific times when you let yourself go whole hog on a bag of Oreos or whatever, lets you recognize that behavior as a reward, or special circumstance, and not a daily activity.

Congrats, you’re now feeling better, looking better, and those two facts will reverberate through the rest of your life like ripples through a pond, making you happier and healthier.

which hot sauce?

Sometimes the Simpsons parodied things so well, that it’s only later on in life that I realize iconic and hilarious Simpson moments were actually parodies.

The Cape Fear episode. The Citizen Kane episode. The Thelma and Louise episode. The Planet of the Apes musical.

fuckin’ classics

Maybe in this trolley problem, someone pulls the lever. Stanislav Petrov did the right thing, perhaps others will too.

Everyone experiencing pain, has to find their own reason to push through it, or they will succumb to it. Whether it’s emotional or physical, most of the time the best way out is through. If you’re in dense brush, with thorns all around, you can stop, and hope that by remaining perfectly still you’ll avoid being poked, or you can clench your teeth, move as much as you can out of the way and push past the rest. Sometimes it’s remaining still that becomes more unbearable.

Whenever I fall out of running, and try to pick it back up, my inner mantra remains the same. It doesn’t matter how many times you stop, as long as you start back up again.

Beauty and the Beast

But also I recently saw the comedy Bottoms, and thought Charlie XCX did a great job with that soundtrack

It’s amazing. I recommend sitting outside the central train station in Amsterdam and people watching, as thousands of tourists attempt to bicycle or walk somewhere, and they’re just in everybody’s way. It’s hilarious. If you’re going to cycle (which, yes, you should) stay to the right and signal where you want to go. There are bike lanes there for you to take, don’t just be off in the middle of the street. Also, they want you to pay for an extra ticket to bring your bike on the train with you, I found that this can be ignored if you’re not a jerk about it.

The fuckin moon, and it’s not even close. Get me off this rock

lol you’re a fucking loser. eat shit troll.

yeah sure, I love wasting time arguing with bad faith actors! You’re clearly in the special group of the best thinkers, it’s so fun to spend time talking with people like you!

Yeah this is totally warranted given the recent news. I mean, one side trying to expand medicare, the other gutting it. One side trying to close Guantanamo bay, the other opening concentration camps on it. One side trying to get money out of politics, the other side destroying democracy for want of more money.

Totally helpful, totally warranted, OP. Well done. Way to go. You’re so cool and centrist.

Something along the lines of me no longer being able to afford to live alone while saving money, use of the military against U.S. citizens, or if they try to sell our national parks. Those are a few that would demand real retaliation, not just in the form of protest. Another would be the orange rapist going for a third term.

Right now I’m just comfortable enough, and with hopeful plans for the future, that I wouldn’t want to do anything revolutionary… but if shit starts to turn, I have no qualms with tossing my comfort and future plans aside and going rogue. I’ll live in a ditch and eat out of the trash before I let these fascist thugs steal my country.

My parents have conservative talk radio and/or fox news on basically 24/7 in their house and car, so there was really nowhere I could escape their politics. I figured out that all their talk was BS, but could never convince my parents of anything. I could take a quote from their favorite host, and pair it alongside facts stating the opposite was true from an organization that they, themselves, were members of, and they still would dismiss me.

In reality, it’s not the politics that got between us, it’s that they’re shitty people.

My therapist made a really great point when I brought up this exact issue with him. He asked if I value a relationship with my parents, and I said yes. Then he said that the price you have to pay for having a relationship with them, is never discussing politics.

It worked for a year or so, but then they voted for that rapist again, and I’ve since cut them out of my life. I’m not walking around on the eggshells of their bigotry and ignorance just so I can get some semblance of what some may describe as affection. You can only say/do so many shitty terrible things before I’m just done with you completely, and they hit their limit, so it was time to cash out.

Sorry, my advice of ignoring politics only works for a little while.

Cloud Atlas is one of my favorite movies! When I first realized I was watching

… I was astonished. And I’m still floored by the expansive idea of it to this day.

Living in the US is like living within the prisoners dilemma. If we all work together, we could make the world an infinitely better place, but we’re all worried that a bunch of us won’t, and they’ll instead drive all of us off a cliff if they have even the idea that it might make them richer than their neighbor. Our worries are founded in the political landscape of today, where everywhere you look the world is getting worse, and there’s some rich republican smarmy asshole doing everything in their power to make it worse (while profiting from the chaos).

Artistically, I’d say:

• Cloud Atlas
• The Fall
• Pans Labyrinth

For Epics, I’d say:

• Lord of the Rings Trilogy
• Kingdom of Heaven
• Seven Samurai

For Comedies:

• Airplane!
• Home Alone
• Naked Gun
• Hot Fuzz

Super Hero Movies:

• Logan
• Batman: The Dark Knight
• Batman vs. Superman (The Snyder Cut)

Animated:

• Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse
• Spirited Away
• Beauty and the Beast
• Akira

Horror:

• Alien(s)
• The Shining
• The Thing
• Psycho

Honorable Mention:

• Oh Brother Where art thou
• Fargo (the TV series is great too!)
• Django Unchained
• Pulp Fiction
• Dunkirk
• Inglorious Basterds
• Dial M for Murder
• North by Northwest
• Wild Strawberries

(I’m sorry, I love movies)

You can rewatch Requiem for a Dream!?

To pay tribute to the late director, David Lynch, I finally got around to watching Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, and The Straight Story.

The Straight Story was an homage to the American Midwest, and despite being as slow as the protagonists method of transportation, kept my interest throughout.

Mulholland Drive had some brilliant acting, some amazing scenes, and really left a lasting impact on me. Most notably, I was left saying “WTF?”

While Blue Velvet is like a crime drama with Camp turned up to 11. Had some great scenes, and was interesting, but some of the acting choices and dialogue were bewildering to me. (“It’s time to FUCK! Let’s FUCK!” comes to mind lol)