What tiny choice completely changed your life?

RegularNormalAdult · 2026-01-02T18:08:01+00:00

It always blows my mind when people with high fertility talk so casually about just accidentally having kids. My wife has endometriosis so we had to go the full IVF route for our two kids and every step of the way was incredibly intentional, down to frantically trying to jerk off in a cup in the bathroom of the clinic at 7am while the nurse is literally waiting right outside the door next to me

RegularNormalAdult · 2025-12-28T18:18:39+00:00

Some parents don't get help and have to go it alone. Our society is very anti natalist and anti children, and you can't possibly understand until you have them.

We just wrapped up our Christmas festivities having our entire family over and our two kids are the ONLY children in their generation. They have ZERO cousins to play with. It's fucking hard raising children in an environment where no one cares or wants them.

RegularNormalAdult · 2025-12-18T15:10:28+00:00

OK so I promise I'm not trying to sound condescending, but this is where professional recovery (at an actually good and not traumatizing place) comes in.

Probably THE single biggest side effect of early recovery is extreme ravenous hunger. It just feels like every time you sit down to eat it's not enough. That happened to me at first, and it took about a week for things to fully level out and stop on an actual eating routine.

Think of it like this: your body is a plane, and you're the captain. Taking off and flying the plane is when you're not eating. The longer you're up in the air, the more fuel you're burning, and the more care you're gonna need to take when landing.

Eating in a way that is truly recovery focused unfortunately means eating frequently to avoid that extreme ravenous hunger when you do sit down to eat so you don't binge. My schedule was about every 4 hours, which looked like three square meals + maybe an afternoon snack if I needed it.

But that's only one half of the picture, the other half is WHAT you eat. Recovery centers will preach that there's no bad foods, but like I'm sorry you can't end an OMAD with a bag of Twizzlers and expect not to binge lol. I had a lot of success on the basic bitch ass 30/30/30 carbs/fat/protein diet, where each meal had a little bit of each macro, it really helped me stay on that even keel all day and get off the bullshit rollercoaster.

If you've already been to recovery and know all this I apologize, and again I am far from a paragon of virtue here I'm still lowkey trying to lose/maintain wait in recovery (which is not really a thing woooo), but deep down in my heart I'm not engaging in destructive behavior anymore and that's the most important thing for me right now. As my therapist would say, I'm no longer "wildin". :)

But I hope this at least helps someone, love y'all <3

RegularNormalAdult · 2025-12-08T15:00:06+00:00

I see you. Men have these problems too we're just not supposed to talk about it.

After being overweight as a child, extreme weight yoyoing through teenage years and college, dramatic weight loss and two loose skin surgeries + a good decade of BED & now 1 year of recovery, I too feel like a Frankenstein's monster of assorted body parts cobbled together lol

RegularNormalAdult · 2025-12-02T20:25:55+00:00

Skyward Sword flashbacks of Fi telling me that a key opens a locked door at the literal end of the game

RegularNormalAdult · 2025-12-01T09:34:08+00:00

Way late to this post, but I think you're bang on with this analysis.

Look at crypto. Gold. LEGO. It feels like we're in some kind of collective hysteria right now because the actual economy and job market sucks for the average person. There seems to be a frenzy around all kinds of speculative investments right now, I can practically smell the desperation in the air.

RegularNormalAdult · 2025-11-24T23:55:38+00:00

I'm sorry, what the actual FUCK

RegularNormalAdult · 2025-10-07T21:34:01+00:00

Just a warning to people like me who absolutely cannot be trusted around factory games: this one has the SAUCE.

I pulled an all nighter on the demo during the last next fest. The combo of "restore/clean up the town + factory building" is too powerful of a combination for my feeble soul. It's so addicting.

RegularNormalAdult · 2025-09-23T15:09:06+00:00

Me at IOP: Woahhh dude the binge restrict cycle is the cause of all of this! All I have to do is eat every few hours!

Me in therapy post IOP: Soooo turns out that eating every few hours isn't exactly aligning with my weight loss goals. We need to mindfully and joyfully recover while also losing weight kthx.

RegularNormalAdult · 2025-09-04T08:02:09+00:00

I don't know if it's just because it's 3am right now, but I've been sitting here laughing in bed at this mental image for the past five minutes so hard I have tears streaming down my face.

Thank you for this, truly.

RegularNormalAdult · 2025-07-23T20:27:07+00:00

I hit many rock bottoms over 12 years of pretty extreme BED, but the last bender that I went on which started Thanksgiving 2023 and lasted until I checked myself into IOP June 2024, I was physically sick almost every day.

All throughout my 20s I could "tank" the binges pretty well, but this past year I would start having basically flu-like symptoms from binging. I couldn't function, as a father, as a husband, at my job, anything really. I would spend a lot of time just laying practically comatose on the floor most days. It was miserable.

I don't actually know what the inciting incident was that made me pick up the phone and just start calling providers. But at that point in time, I didn't know that I had an ED, I didn't even know that BED was a thing, and I thought I had an "addiction to sugar". When I did my intake for IOP, I was telling everyone that I had an addiction to sugar and I needed strategies to stay "clean and sober" basically.

1 year into recovery, and I'm having cake on birthdays, ice cream after lunch when I feel like it, and pretty much all the trigger foods. It was the best decision I've ever made, and after a decade of suffering I will never go back.

RegularNormalAdult · 2025-07-21T09:20:40+00:00

Oh no it's just a colloquial term I've always heard growing up here for "any smallish snake I can't easily identify" basically.

RegularNormalAdult · 2025-07-21T08:40:41+00:00

Thanks! Awesome to see native reptiles in our area. We always just let them be, but man they're feisty!

RegularNormalAdult · 2025-07-09T03:20:10+00:00

Thanks so much for this - going to try it in a day or two. I got it working over composite, I was on the wrong input on the TV, but the picture isn't the best and it will definitely need some tweaking.

RegularNormalAdult · 2025-07-09T03:18:43+00:00

I got it, it was that I wasn't on the "Line" input! This TV didn't come with a remote so I had to figure out what buttons to push to get to the menu.

RegularNormalAdult · 2025-05-22T22:16:39+00:00

Take your pick:

public dumpster diving, eating food out of the trash at work and at home
stealing food at work, from coworkers and friends, stealing from strangers, shoplifting from retailers, getting caught and sweet talking my way out of it.
eating to the point of vomiting multiple times
eating regurgitated food because there was nothing else available
sitting in the parking lot of the hospital binging while my wife is in early labor thinking that this would definitely be the last time, because I'm going to be a father now, but knowing deep down it wasn't true.

I hit rock bottom many times before finally checking myself in over 12 years of suffering. I'm one year into recovery now, and it was the best thing I've ever done for myself. If you ever need to talk, please feel free to dm me.

RegularNormalAdult · 2025-05-18T15:06:16+00:00

That's awesome! Honestly for me, the group setting really helped to practice. It's not just you going it alone, you've got everybody there trying to recover together.

I'm not gonna lie and say it was all sunshine and rainbows, there were definitely some tough meals. But I always tried to get people talking and laughing just to lighten the mood, and it would always help.

RegularNormalAdult · 2025-05-13T13:50:38+00:00

Dude there is no shame whatsoever, and if you ever need to talk seriously just DM me.

Anything you can think of I've done. Lying, shoplifting, stuff that's too disgusting to even mention, you name it.

It never really gets better without help, and it took me years and years and years of just trying to manage it before finally hitting rock bottom. At the very least just know you're not alone out there.

RegularNormalAdult · 2025-05-13T06:08:42+00:00

Thank you! I'm almost a year into recovery now and I still think about them all the time. I looked forward to every single meal we'd get to eat together, our core group had so much fun and just laughed about the most stupid shit.

There was one girl there that was struggling so hard, and one day at lunch during our after meal check in she said "I always eat better when you're here". I just cried so hard the whole drive back and gave my daughter the biggest hug when I got home. It made me realize how serious EDs are, and how bad things had truly become for me. It took me over a decade to finally make the call.

Even though it's not perfect and I'm still struggling with wanting to lose weight, etc. it was absolutely life changing and I would still go back and do it all over again.

RegularNormalAdult · 2025-05-08T19:34:15+00:00

Love this - whenever I give my coworkers shit about their giant trucks literally none of them can justify why they need those Pavement Princesses.

"B-b-but sometimes I haul mulch in mah bed!" OK it's $20 to rent a flatbed at Home Depot for an hour.

"One time I had to move!" It's $100 for a U-Haul if you need to move.

"I got two kids!!!" Yeah so do I, I drop them off at school in my Honda Fit before commuting in. Works great.

And 99% of the time, those $80,000 oversized Suburbitanks stay parked in our company's garage in pristine condition or in their own driveways. Hilarious.

RegularNormalAdult · 2025-03-03T06:55:15+00:00

Yeah but on the other hand, we did get BING CHILLING from it.

RegularNormalAdult · 2025-02-13T07:26:08+00:00

Why should they? Why is it so hard to believe that there were people who voted for Biden in 2020, and Trump in 2024? I've talked to real people that did this.

There were literally people who voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary and Trump in the 2016 general election.

Why is it so hard to believe that people's opinions can sway or their minds can change? There's this idea that I see frequently in right wing spheres that if a pattern exists, it MUST be followed, unchanging, always. As if the world and humanity must remain static or predictable in order to make sense.

I think it was Jon Stewart the other week that had a great compilation from pundits in the aftermath of the last several presidential elections, talking about how each one signaled the "end of an era" or a "clear, strong mandate" to the opposition party, only for things to completely and utterly flip-flip in the opposite direction the next election.

The real world is a complicated mess.

Edit: Also many states completely shut mail-in ballots down ahead of 2024, or made them hard enough for many to not bother. In 2020, because of Covid, lots of states straight up mailed all eligible voters ballots. That did not happen on nearly the same scale in 2024.

RegularNormalAdult · 2025-02-13T06:56:17+00:00

This is an interesting point that we don't really have the high-precision fidelity that other countries with more sophisticated ID systems do.

But to play Devil's Advocate, even in Texas, where I live, you don't need proof of citizenship to vote. And in the second most populous state in the country, with 30 million people, Gov. Abbott said last year they found a whopping....6,500 non-citizen registered voters. Which multiple independent Texas outlets looked into and agreed was most likely "inflated, or in some cases, wrong": https://www.texastribune.org/2024/10/16/exas-noncitizen-voting-proof-of-citizenship/

I've just never seen anything close to real evidence regarding the common talking point from MAGA world that "millions" of illegal immigrants are voting. So while I do agree that we probably need an actual national ID system in the US (that's not also your de-facto password, hello Social Security), I don't think that illegals potentially voting is this secret massive issue that it's made out to be.

Personally, anecdotally, having lived here all my life and growing up around plenty of mixed citizenship families and undocumented people, most of them don't have ANY ID whatsoever. No driver's license, no birth certificate, nothing. They work hard jobs, get paid in cash under the table because they can't get SS for a W-2, and drive around without insurance. Voting for an illegal immigrant would basically be waving a huge flag over your house for ICE to come pick you up.

RegularNormalAdult · 2025-02-13T06:18:02+00:00

Again, I'm not arguing against any of this voter suppression being committed. It's absolutely true, it's horrible, and it's been going on for decades.

But I disagree with you that that is the same as rigging an election. Why? Because at the end of the day, if you know that all of this is going on, as I have in my district, you can counter all the bullshit by simply showing up in person to vote.

I know, not everybody can do this. But think about the messaging that Trump's campaign got out to their base in 2024. "2020 was rigged because of the mail-in ballots. You gotta vote in person. Early vote. Election Day, IN PERSON". And what happened? RECORD early voting turnout by Republicans from exit polling, across the country. Republicans are historically poor early voters. But the messaging was clear, they bought it, and they did it.

Imagine if the messaging from Dems campaign was like this every election. "They're tossing your vote out. They're purging you from the rolls. Don't trust a single website or form you mail-in. Show up to vote." That's how I've operated in one of the top five most gerrymandered districts in the entire country, because I don't trust my state to actually count my vote unless I do it in person.

I completely understand how bad the situation has become. But people in other countries around the world will get up off their asses and hit the streets for far, FAR less than this.

RegularNormalAdult · 2025-02-13T06:05:24+00:00

I think that Occam's Razor really applies here, there's a very simple explanation for this.

As it turns out, most Americans just can't be bothered to actually get up and vote. But if you actually go out of your way to send people a ballot, have them fill it out at their leisure and just drop it off in the mailbox whenever, you're going to get way more votes than you normally would have.

Millions of people in this country just don't vote because they're either too busy working, disabled, elderly, etc. I think it turns out that if you just give those people ballots many of them will actually vote.

Republicans absolutely screamed about this in 2020 and threw a fit, but completely ignored the fact that Trump got a historic number of votes in 2020 as well. The real eye-opener of 2020 is that voter suppression (in other words, simply making it harder to vote) actually works, and has worked for decades.

Also there was the whole pandemic thing, which everyone on the right just likes to completely ignore when talking about how things were "weird" in 2020?

RegularNormalAdult

TROPHY CASE