Weight Loss Secrets!

Auuughhhh people and their diet mumbo jumbo!

If you eat less calories than you burn, you will lose weight. That's it. Go forth, and eat a salad with a vinaigrette.

If you keep sneaking biscuits and eating burger combos out with friends on the weekend: THAT'S why you're not losing weight.

Please don't cry to me that the sky faeries saw your efforts and decided to imbue your cells with magical jelly producing gremlins. That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works. @_@

PS
To those of you who don't agree, I am now selling magical weight-loss crystals that you should swizzle around in your drinks before you down them. 4 easy payments of $29.99 each, and only  $89.99 for the special shake crystal, which needs to be swizzled after the regular if making any sort of thicker blended drink. (It's purple, so it has a different weight-loss chi).

You Wouldn't Be so Socially Unaware, if You Would Only Read my Posts.

I think people have a tendency to view others through the lens of their own self. I wonder if it's actually impossible not to. Your only reference for life is what you have lived and seen(or heard/read about), isn't it? So we're bound to try to understand the situations of others through the lens of something we've already experienced.

 

One way you've probably seen this play out, is when people are giving advice. I laugh at how many times I've heard people advocate for everyone to go gluten-free or try to breathe more from the diaphragm or hit up an Atkins diet because it worked wonders for them. "Do you experience symptom X? Why then, disregard everything else - you must have the same problem that I was able to cure with product Y!"

I mean, sometimes it's good stuff, right? Not all advice is bad advice. But something that's been getting under my skin lately is HOW we talk to each other when giving this sort of advice.

 

If I see someone suffering the same symptoms of chronic fatigue as I had experienced a few years back, I'll tell them another avenue to explore might be food allergies. I know I wish somebody had put me onto that lead a long time ago, and saved me some wasted years. But that's right where I leave it. If they want to take that info, great. If they've done 50 million medical tests, are just tired, and don't want to hear it - well, that's also great.

Because it bugs me, you guys - when we offer advice in the form of victim blaming. When in the course of trying to help, we tell someone that if they don't take our advice, it's their fault for their suffering. It's disrespectful, and sometimes downright cruel.

I'm not talking about fact here, such as when a doctor tells you that without surgery the cancer will spread and you WILL die. I'm talking about those... fact-ISH things that we all love to hold on to, whether we know it or not. Those things that we want to be hard and fast rules for life, so that we can feel safe so long as we follow them. Sometimes there's evidence for them being a general rule, sometimes the only evidence is that we want them to be true. When we're scared or we want to help, they come out.

"Your dad wouldn't have died of cancer if he had eaten more vegetables - oh, he did eat a ton of healthy food? Well maybe he didn't eat ORGANIC." You wouldn't have heart problems if you exercised - oh shit, you hiked and did cardio all the time? I dunno, I do swimming. You should have also been swimming." "Your sister wouldn't be in pain every day if she just drank my $200 bird's nest soup / ginseng combo!" 

 

When we offer advice in such a way we are actually disrespecting someone's own right to chose, while also telling them that their choices are the only cause of their continued suffering. (If they decide not to listen to our all-knowing self, that is).
In this wide world, none of us are going to agree on everything. I'm not advocating for a tenuous calm where we all shut our opinions up and go about encouraging everyone down the garden paths of their hearts. But I would love it - if we could think twice and learn to offer advice humbly, and without judgment. 

 

I know we're trying to help. I know we want to control the situation to make people we love feel better. But if you're thinking of starting a sentence with something along the lines of, "If you just -" or, "You wouldn't be ____ if you only -" ...

Then you are about to blame someone for their own suffering. 

 

Is that really the message you want to come across?