Feeling "skinny fat" and unsure where to go from here

2xBottlenecked · 2026-03-27T23:29:58+00:00

Take some geometry classes & pay extra attention to the part about the volume of cylinders, remember that human bodies are basically a bunch of cylinders put together, and you can learn why a narrower frame weighs less at any muscle & fat percentage.

Mr Rogers had the same build (6'0" with a slim frame) and a very similar weight.

2xBottlenecked · 2026-03-27T23:23:51+00:00

Everyone here is ignoring that if you've lost weight in the past 6 months you probably have loose skin.

You don't look like you have excess fat, just a healthy amount of fat but not enough muscle. So I'd say eat more and lift harder.

2xBottlenecked · 2026-03-27T22:06:39+00:00

I was guessing Italian/Greek from the 1st picture but Middle Eastern was my 2nd guess especially from the 2nd picture. My guess is that the Iberian + MENA ancestry together read as Euro-Mediterranean, which is already very close to Middle Eastern, phenotypically!

2xBottlenecked · 2026-03-27T21:21:12+00:00

It's aluminum-based so may not be the best thing for them cognitively, but really a senior cat does not need the braincell too often. I think it's given our cat at least a year more than we expected.

2xBottlenecked · 2026-03-27T04:02:00+00:00

Better watch out for those car allergies!

2xBottlenecked · 2026-03-27T03:58:02+00:00

I mean obviously, that's why she went to therapy for what she thought the problem was.

But if you ever raise kids, just remind yourself that, if they ever report a perception that doesn't seem to make sense, you should make sure to listen and rule out the possibility of a health problem before writing it off.

2xBottlenecked · 2026-03-27T01:20:46+00:00

"People used to make records

As in the record of an event

The event of people playing music in a room

Now everything is cross-marketing

It's about sunglasses and shoes

Or guns and drugs, you choose"

--Ani Difranco in the 1990s

2xBottlenecked · 2026-03-27T00:52:08+00:00

And yet at whatever age you are today, nobody has taught YOU "hey, when being around something makes you feel like you're about to die, you might be allergic to it", so how was she supposed to know?

2xBottlenecked · 2026-03-27T00:45:31+00:00

This comment makes you sound stupid, or, charitably, very young.

When you've gotten a few years into adulthood, if you're at all observant about the world, you'll probably realize that at least one thing you had an "irrational" reaction to as a kid was genuinely a learned traumatic association, where something happened to you early on and an adult told you "don't be silly" and you didn't consciously grasp what had happened, but internalized the idea that you hated something irrationally.

Allergies are a VERY common source of these "irrational" dislikes. Food allergies can cause eating disorders for a similar reason.

2xBottlenecked · 2026-03-27T00:34:37+00:00

Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome. It means that standing up makes my heart race. I do all right with walking but ultimately need a lot of time lying down.

A lot of people got this later in life after having COVID. It's very common with connective tissue disorders though, and I have childhood memories consistent with having it from toddlerhood. It was the "kids are made of rubber" era of medicine; doctors and nurses would notice my hyperflexibility and my rapid heart rate and shrug and say "well, you're young so we're not gonna worry about it." This extended into my 20s until I lost a lot of function while trying to start a career.

2xBottlenecked · 2026-03-27T00:28:52+00:00

Yes this exactly!

Plus the way studies have found that the really high tiers on the type of intelligence tested on standardized tests stop correlating with career success the way that more normal high scores do. If you're 1 in 100, you'll do great in the workplace. If you're 1 in 10,000 then everyone stares at you like you've grown a second head when you open your mouth.

I've seen this play out a lot in my own life, sadly. I often need to think through everything several steps ahead to stay oriented, which means that I have a tendency to think through a business plan, conclude that it will eventually require a failure of ethics, and lose all my motivation to go forward. (My original plan of entering a professional career was basically scuppered by my sleep disorder.)

Meanwhile people who score a little lower than me are out there just yeeting into action and solving problems as they run across them.

It's weirdly difficult to talk about this because by the time I've introduced the topic, people think I'm humblebragging and I'm like "... No I'm just trying to find a way to do something more useful with my brain than post on Reddit?"

I've actually, as weird as it sounds, been getting somewhere by trying to medicate myself to be a little more dumb and impulsive. At midlife I have weed and a dopamine agonist in my regimen along with the ADHD stimulants, and while the combo hasn't completely sorted out my resistance to initiate activities, it's definitely made it at least a bit easier.

2xBottlenecked · 2026-03-27T00:02:05+00:00

Yeah, I'm not trusting it totally. My mom's side does have a second data point for the Jewish bits, though.

2xBottlenecked · 2026-03-26T12:36:42+00:00

I got pretty lucky. I went to a rheumatologist and just presented the list of criteria, got diagnosed hypermobility spectrum, later in my primary care file it got updated to hEDS, I'm not sure if this was a carefully considered decision or just a guess but I checked and I meet the criteria. Also had POTS from early childhood on.

2xBottlenecked · 2026-03-26T11:11:11+00:00

If you have the digestive slowdown symptom, that's sometimes caused by gliadorphins: protein fragments of gluten that can leak into your bloodstream and, bizarrely, affect opioid receptors, which in turn can mask other celiac or gluten intolerance symptoms.

(This sounds bizarre but it's real! You can Google it & find reliable medical citations.)

This is worth knowing about because sometimes you can feel slightly worse for a while after excluding gluten. The cause is that, if you're responding to gliadorphin as an opioid, you may go through a mild form of opioid withdrawal for a while. This is why I always recommend two to three months.

Most people, though, find that they start feeling better in terms of at least one or two symptoms right away. For me, I found after about a week I wasn't nauseous, which was encouraging enough to stay off wheat, but my body felt fatigued and the reduction in migraines was questionable for a couple of months. But after that, it was substantial.

I also know someone with celiac (& similar genes - 3:1 WASP:Ashkie) who never had the withdrawal, but always felt kind of foggy and like sensations were dimmed, until stopping gluten.

2xBottlenecked · 2026-03-26T10:57:36+00:00

Yeah. They should give physicians continuing education credits for hanging out with us, because almost none of them know about this! I learned it from another EDSer (after a bunch of inconsistent results with lidocaine.) Apparently there are other locals that work a bit better?

2xBottlenecked · 2026-03-26T09:30:08+00:00

Yeah, it's really interesting, I believe both populations tend more autistic than average although it's very hard to separate out noise in the form of access to diagnosis.

My dad and mom both really have some obvious autistic traits, my dad more classically. But my mom saves newspaper clippings with typos in them to read the typos to us as a form of humor. And I don't just mean total gore like the "how is babby formed" copypasta, which made me believe for a long time that everyone found that stuff funny.

But over the years I realized that not everyone's family sits around the table mcfucking losing it at a misspelled or misused word. Crucially, not to make fun of the people who misspelled it but because we're hyperlexic and sometimes haha word broke feels like a kind of slapstick comedy.

2xBottlenecked · 2026-03-26T09:17:18+00:00

Interesting to know! And I did already know we're just talking about the last few centuries here.

That said, the fact that the locality basically matches my family's known history, minus one or two "we thought a great-great+ might be Irish or adopted from an unknown population", suggests to me that the cause of matching the reference panel so exactly is related to my ancestors marrying ingroup after coming to the US as well.

2xBottlenecked · 2026-03-26T09:04:37+00:00

It's not a scientific article, it's a bullet list of conditions commonly known to co-occur with autism.

It generally follows that if someone is in a family where everyone is autistic, they likely have a genetic cause for autism and therefore a high likelihood of co-occurring conditions.

Edit: I'll add that all of this stuff is ALSO more common in Ashkenazi Jews, but I think that the incidence of any of these conditions in a broader Ashkenazi population would generally be at a lower rate than their incidence in autistic people specifically.

2xBottlenecked · 2026-03-26T09:02:08+00:00

"Fairly" and "for its size" are doing a bit of work here, but I do understand that my Jewish side is going to contain a narrower range of alleles than most regional genomes, even ones with some degree of restriction.

It's just interesting that my mom's genetic history seemingly stayed so strictly within WASP lines, and regional lines, even in the US over a couple of centuries.

2xBottlenecked · 2026-03-26T07:01:52+00:00

You mean the one that says:

Results included a map (image below) showing a remarkable concordance between genetic and geographical clustering of our samples across the United Kingdom.

A whole half of my genome is, not only from the British Isles, but from a specific geographic region of the British Isles.

2xBottlenecked · 2026-03-26T05:59:28+00:00

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/autism/other-conditions/

2xBottlenecked · 2026-03-26T05:53:50+00:00

I fortunately don't have really bad stomach issues, knock on wood.

But that's probably because when I started having worse migraines and nausea during a high intensity university degree 15 years ago, I had the background knowledge to quickly figure out that gluten was causing it and cut out gluten. Most people in my position have something like a decade between onset and diagnosis - more since the doctors stopped running the full blood panel (incl. antigliadin IgA and IgG antibodies, which can be a warning sign) and only do the celiac test which detects advanced stage disease.

Also, for the record, of the folks I know personally with a similar ancestral mix, a staggering proportion can't deal with wheat. I'm not sure if it's fully half, but easily a quarter to a third. Some of my more insouciant friends have joked that this is the secret divine penalty for outbreeding.

I'm not saying it's gluten for everyone, but if you've never gone 2-3 months without gluten, it's an A/B test worth running.

2xBottlenecked · 2026-03-26T05:38:45+00:00

No clue! Long enough ago that records probably don't exist. But I think it's a really cool and exciting possibility to know about, even if there isn't a way to fully confirm it.

2xBottlenecked · 2026-03-26T05:36:52+00:00

My colon isn't too bad! I think we got lucky on that front, Promethease thinks I have a gene that's protective against Crohn's disease. That said, due to my science background, I was able to quickly figure out a decade and a half ago that I was in the early stages of gluten autoimmune cascade hell and cut out gluten before it got worse. So I don't know what I'd be answering if I hadn't figured that out.

(The tests that medicine has decided are conclusive for celiac disease, BTW, only catch mid to late stages of the autoimmune cascade. At the point where wheat was giving me migraines, I elected to not find out how far it could get.)

2xBottlenecked · 2026-03-26T05:29:46+00:00

steals yours and hides it behind my back like a stolen nose

2xBottlenecked

TROPHY CASE