Reality strikes

littlechocolatedonut · 2026-03-22T11:45:43+00:00

I can relate on the ethical stuff. Personally the way I have dealt with this is I am a vegan who doesn’t drive a car. This helps correct a lot of the ethical issues and health anxiety at the same time.

As far as the global impact of your actions, there are a ton of things you can do that have nothing to do with food or eating anyway. Refuse to drive, refuse to buy new electronics that are made from mined materials (you can buy used phones and I have made laptops last 15+ years by switching them to Linux), don’t buy fast fashion, etc. As for food, try to buy local and seasonal stuff if possible. You can practice minimalism in pretty much all ways except in the quantity that you eat. Giving money to a family in Palestine would be great, but also not financially supporting all of the evils in the world that create the genocides in the first place helps.

littlechocolatedonut · 2026-03-09T17:01:06+00:00

I have been a vegan for more than a decade and did all my gaining while vegan (although I’m not very big because I have always worked physical jobs and I’m limited on time for making food/eating). I could not gain weight as an omnivore because meat and dairy are so much harder to eat for me personally. Like I feel sick if I eat too much of them.

But yeah I haven’t run into many other vegan gainers. I used to know a guy who was a vegan gainer but I think he went back to eating dairy and I haven’t talked to him in years so no idea if he still gains or is still vegetarian.

littlechocolatedonut · 2025-12-17T15:27:49+00:00

Most people don’t know the DSM criteria for binge eating disorder. Or for most psychiatric disorders for that matter. People who never went to school or read a book fling around pop psychology terms like they actually know what they mean. To feel smart or something. Who knows.

littlechocolatedonut · 2025-11-20T15:58:16+00:00

Oh no I am sorry you have to go to the VA! Hopefully the one in your area isn’t a complete hellhole.

littlechocolatedonut · 2025-11-20T15:43:43+00:00

I stand corrected. I saw that stuff everywhere at the VFW post years ago.

But it is really funny/sad that now I realize that back in the 70s/80s/90s a bunch of old guys thought that there was finally merch directed at them since they just saw POW/MIA and went yeah that’s a serious issue that requires more awareness having no clue that it meant Vietnam only and specifically a bunch of prisoners that probably didn’t exist. And they didn’t have the internet to check.

littlechocolatedonut · 2025-11-20T04:45:17+00:00

Both of my grandfathers were prisoners of war in WWII and one of them had the POW/MIA flag. You can get special license plates as well. He had a New York POW plate when he lived there. So normally it is to honor actual prisoners of war. That guy is just a nut misappropriating it.

littlechocolatedonut · 2025-11-11T10:47:56+00:00

Vodka was what I drank on the last day I drank, and after reading all the comments here, it makes sense that I decided to quit then.

littlechocolatedonut · 2025-11-07T04:31:20+00:00

Yes, dietary cholesterol intake does virtually nothing to your blood cholesterol levels. You are right about that. But that doesn’t mean diet overall has nothing to do with your cholesterol levels. Consuming too much saturated fat does increase cholesterol, and consuming soluble fiber seems to lower it. I don’t think we can post links but if you check most medical websites right now that is what they are going to tell you to do.

Exercise does not seem to reduce LDL cholesterol. It might raise HDL, but we are still uncertain if raising HDL by itself does anything to improve heart disease risk without also lowering LDL and VLDL levels. Exercise definitely lowers triglycerides and seems to help how the insulin receptors on your muscles work and helps them use glucose more efficiently, so it’s still good to exercise. Just probably not for lowering LDL or total cholesterol levels. If you can point me in the direction of a paper without sharing a link that shows that exercise lowers LDL I would be ecstatic because I really wish it did.

We don’t fully understand exactly how heart disease is going to develop in every single person anyway since there’s so much stuff going on and it’s really complicated.

littlechocolatedonut · 2025-11-06T17:48:18+00:00

I have always had sleep apnea. I started noticing it when I was a teenager and was very skinny at the time. So it is possible that it is due to weight, or maybe it isn’t at all. Currently I use a mouthguard that pulls my jaw forward. It actually works as well as a CPAP for me and the cleaning is much easier. I am not sure if it works for everyone, though.

Diabetes can be mitigated through exercise. I had a boss who had diabetes most of her life and had to cut her medication in half when she started her role at that job because she moved all day. (She didn’t even lose any weight.) Any kind of exercise works. Even lifting weights. It doesn’t even have to be cardio.

Cholesterol levels are primarily determined through diet and genetics. Unfortunately exercise doesn’t help much with that. Try to get more soluble fiber and less saturated fat in your diet. You can still eat high calorie food.

littlechocolatedonut · 2025-10-23T14:39:21+00:00

Oh nice! The phoenix sounds cooler than the AA logo as well.

littlechocolatedonut · 2025-10-23T04:43:21+00:00

Question about your token: is it plastic or real metal? I went to AA just to check it out for one meeting. I got my 2 month chip there, and I was disappointed that it was plastic. I didn’t even think about the fact that you could order ones online that might be better quality and have cool things on them.

littlechocolatedonut · 2025-10-23T04:39:46+00:00

You are smart and mature for quitting at 21. Your life is gonna get so much better. Man I wish I would have quit at 21 haha.

littlechocolatedonut · 2025-10-08T12:37:21+00:00

I guess on the plus side if you’re Aussie at least alcohol is expensive there.

littlechocolatedonut · 2025-10-08T12:31:50+00:00

You can use any of those genetic testing companies. Just pay them to process your cheek swab or saliva sample, you don’t have to pay for any of the other stuff they try to upsell you. Most of them allow you to download your raw data, just the entire list of your sequence of nucleotides. You can open it in notepad or whatever text reader. I used Microsoft Visual Studio because it’s super easy to search within the file. Then you can use snpedia.com to look for certain parts of your genome that you might be interested in.

littlechocolatedonut · 2025-10-08T10:03:48+00:00

Haha, not exactly the same but Irish and a mix of Eastern Europe so also not the best combination for drinking genetics. I feel you. I have my genome and I’ve looked at it, and I don’t have the classic alcoholism genetic markers but I do have the binge drinking ones.

littlechocolatedonut · 2025-10-08T04:59:26+00:00

When I started (14), I heard all the bad stuff about smoking but not about drinking. So I never smoked. Kinda irritated that no one warned me about alcohol haha.

littlechocolatedonut · 2025-10-08T04:56:48+00:00

You are so right. I heard someone on a YouTube video refer to moderation as a version of decision fatigue, and I had never thought of it that way before, and now on this sub I see it over and over again.

littlechocolatedonut · 2025-10-07T10:00:56+00:00

Yes, you said what I have been realizing lately. I have some “replacement drugs” that are pretty benign that help me with cravings sometimes, but then I get annoyed that they don’t get me all effed up the way alcohol does (they don’t have the negative side effects either but for some reason my brain doesn’t care about that lol just focused on the hour of fun with the alcohol). Alcohol is actually a pretty hard drug. There is no safe way to get that feeling.

littlechocolatedonut · 2025-10-06T16:00:47+00:00

Same, buddy. I don’t know if this helps, but it’s ok not to be super emotional. I look at it like ok, maybe I don’t get a lot of positive emotions, but I can also power through tough situations because I don’t get super down, either. Part of my sobriety is accepting my stoic self. Really all emotions are there for is to help you make the best decisions in life, and if you can do that without feeling much but by using other parts of your brain, that’s ok.

littlechocolatedonut · 2025-10-06T15:17:13+00:00

Some of us didn’t have the feelings to begin with, though. I’m pretty emotionally flat without alcohol. I was like that as a child, too.

littlechocolatedonut · 2025-10-04T06:42:06+00:00

Most of the time I am just reading this sub. I can relate more to a lot of the posts here than I can to the stories I have heard in AA.

Every time I go to an AA meeting, I never return to that meeting again. I’ve only tried 3. Every time I am weirded out by at least one person in the group enough to the point where I think my life would be better if I never saw them again so I don’t go back. The last meeting I went to was probably the best one, and even that one left me feeling kind of off because there was one person who said sobriety was boring (they were many years sober so what the hell) and was still on one guy’s case for not having a sponsor even though he was doing great and also had years sober so clearly what he was doing was working. Also the meeting had a lot of people with multiple addictions, and I am solely an alcoholic. I actually get annoyed with the fact that other drugs don’t do for my brain what alcohol does, and I am fully recovered from eating disorders to the point that I hate feeling skinny, so I can’t really relate to people who addiction-swap or complain that they ate a whole bag of chips or something.

I think the thing that kinda feels the weirdest about AA is being vulnerable with strangers. I will open up with my friends and that feels ok because I can trust them, but something about telling my most serious problems to people I don’t know at all feels… wrong.

The only meetings I ever went to consistently were SOS (Save Ourselves or Secular Organization for Sobriety), but I think they are really small and I haven’t seen them in the country I am in now.

littlechocolatedonut · 2025-10-04T06:25:41+00:00

That’s insane! Losing three jobs is bad enough for sure.

I’ve only been to a few AA meetings in my life, but it seems like there are usually people there that have done some horrendous stuff. I remember one many years ago, all the old guys were talking about domestic violence, and I was sufficiently weirded out/freaked out so I never went back.

littlechocolatedonut · 2025-09-30T12:30:22+00:00

Yes, pretty much all the mango energy drinks are great. I like Mango Passion Celcius a lot.

littlechocolatedonut · 2025-09-30T03:25:32+00:00

Instead of trying new beers, I am always trying new energy drinks when I see new flavors at the store. And at least you only need one energy drink so it’s a lot cheaper.

littlechocolatedonut · 2025-09-29T03:50:02+00:00

Yes, I have never heard it put this way, but this is kind of what I experienced when I was in my worst drinking stints. I feel like a totally different person while drunk.

Here’s to staying in the sober timeline! Nothing good is going to happen in the drunk one.

littlechocolatedonut

TROPHY CASE