It's not clear that I need mine either. But whenever I try to get off my medication (Effexor), I just can't: with a month, I am having debilitating anxiety and suicidal thoughts. I have to live with horrible side effects for the rest of my life.
Yes, mindfulness is helpful in practicing this. When we have a thought – any thought – there is an inherent relationship with it, whether acceptance, resistance, fear, estrangement, desire, and so on.
The quality of this relationship is informed by various signals in your body/mind system (emotions, impressions, other thoughts and even skin reactions, in the case of persistent patterns).
It is crucial to be aware of this relationship, as your actions – and therefore what happens as a result of them – are strongly informed by it.
I do have issues with my balance and motor control. If I get dehydrated, my blood sugar gets low, or I get too tired, I can lose the ability to drive. Not drive safely. Drive at all.
As a precaution, I always have extra food, water, and medication with me all the time. I plan trips so I don’t get into problems. And I have friends who will drive me home. Which I did have one do early in my treatment because I didn’t know all this yet.
My psychiatrist has me on additional medication twice a day to help with both motor control and muscle pain. Works pretty well.
I’ve learned that feeling one strand of muscle being tight in my arms or chest is a warning I’m getting dehydrated. At that point, I have about half an hour before I’ll start having problems.
Note: If you’re worried about my ability to drive. It’s not an issue. The symptoms are very obvious to me and it about an hour to get that bad. Anyone who is diabetic deals with the same kind of issues.
I think you'll be alright because you are very aware of your condition. That's really how I am too. I'm always checking in with myself like that song in The Big Lebowski - "The condition of my condition is good." There's aways Uber.
After I wrote my comment I thought of something weird. California sent me a tax bill every month. Every month I would ignore it and every month it would go up due to fines. Finally California siezed my bank account and cleaned it out, all $13,000, leaving me destitute. What I thought was weird was my reaction. I didn't care. I was watching it happen like watching a fly walk across the cieling - with complete indifference. So here's something else family can do - ask to see the bills.
I'm lucky I only need a low dose (50 mg) but you're right, the weight gain is a drag. At least I have the energy now to excercise, so I have normal problems, thank god.
Weighing of components. Keep digital kitchen scales on the table and use them all the time. E.g. if you eat breakfast cereal, put the bowl on scales, press button, put in cereal, remember the weight, press button, pour milk, remember the weight. The same for everything you put on a pan. Don't forget to include the cooking oil, it makes a surprisingly large contribution to the total calories of the meal. If you're sharing meals, then you know the "total calories" you put in it, weigh the final product (it generally will be significantly different than what you put in) and weigh what's on your plate - so you know that you ate e.g. 40% of the total. It doesn't take much time (unless your scales suck), but it does take much attention and looks weird. It's a pain in the ass when starting out, but becomes easier when I can just reuse the numbers from when I made the same thing last week.
Some types of meals are easier than others, though - e.g. if you make a large pot of "non-uniform" soup for the whole family for multiple meals, then it's going to be an estimate. It's socially inappropriate to do it at some situations (e.g. if you're visiting your grandma who's providing a meal), but on most days you should be able to track how much calories you got on that single day.
Some restaurants will provide numbers for their dishes, some won't. For takeaway/home orders weighing gives a good estimate - if you don't have the numbers for some kebab or sushi or pizza, then you can assume that it's going to be the same per unit of weight as someone else's similar product, what matters is how much of double cheese pepperoni pizza you eat, not the particular pizza maker.
Restaurants are usually difficult, so I treated them as an "off day", and hence would not go to them too often. One might order a salad, but who knows how much sugar, oils and whatnot they put in there.
For home-cooked I would do rough estimation based on weight and some quick web searches for calorie content of the ingredients.
After a short while I got a pretty decent hang of where the calories were, so could focus more on those. I had a small kitchen weight for the "heavy hitters", for the rest I just estimated based on listed weight and how much I used (~1/3 of package fex).
In the beginning I did weigh slices of bread and so on, and quickly built up a good overview over how many calories there were in such recurring items. Except for oils, butter and similar I wouldn't be super-accurate.
But having a fairly good idea of how many calories was in my food really helped me plan portion sizes and compositions to roughly match the deficit I wanted, as determined by a web page estimating my calorie requirement[1].
Like I said, focusing purely on calories in, calories out, rather than say "yes foods" and "no foods", made it a lot easier for me as I could eat what I wanted, just perhaps not as much.
For example, I quickly found out that my weekend favorite of steak with french fries and bearnaise was way over target. However, I found that if I ensured my steak was no more than 250g, swapped french fries for quality green peas and reduced the butter in the sauce by half, the calories were around my target value. So I could still enjoy my weekend treat.
One potential issue was to feel full while reducing portion sizes. For that I leaned on some studies I read about which seemed to suggest high protein and high fiber. So I tried to have at least 20% of my calories in proteins, and also have as much fiber as possible. My breakfast bread is 90+% whole grain, my pasta is whole grain, I swapped out iceberg lettuce for romain lettuce (which has much more fiber) etc.
Based on this I had a almost entirely linear decrease in weight over a year, without feeling like I was on a diet. In the end I lost 30kg.
Adjusting to a new company takes time. Most reasonable managers understand that - I hope yours is. Just out of curiosity, what is the tech stack/language?
I wrote this tool all throughout a Saturday night 9 years ago and shared it with my friends on the next morning. The first URL (post 13) shows the first puzzle that was shared with the tool. The fourth URL (post 39) was the first post by someone I did not know. That's when I realized that people beyond my immediate friends' circle have begun using it now.
I lean toward either butter or tallow as a cooking oil, but outside of directly eating a stick I can’t imagine using an entire one to cook a meal per person.
I agree with your description. The devil on my other shoulder tries to argue with me about being knowledgeable about the world so that I can do something about it. Support my causes by protesting, donating etc Instead I get into snark warfare on twitter :-(
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