Why is life so much suffering?
Not so much eating, but having to choose what to eat, prepare/order it, and clean up afterwards. Sometimes, after a full day, it’s one chore too many.
My depression meal is just biting straight into a block of cheese. 5 bites or so is like 400 calories. Easy, quick, and it’s cheese.
Three spoons of peanut butter in the kitchen at 1am
Spoon of PB gang. If I don’t “feel like” eating but I know I need to that’s my go to also.
Cheese sticks do this slightly better because then you don’t have the big block going bad from your mouth germs.
Yes, that’s what the sleeves of saltines are for!
The forbidden knowledge is to butter the saltines like toast
I either eat nonstop or don’t eat for 2 days. There’s rarely an in-between. Friends have said I eat like a snake lol.
I have the unfortunate timing of always being in the non-stop eating mood when I am almost entirely out of food and waiting to get paid.
You walk down the street and every neighbor is cooking some deliciously smelling food.
You hear laughter, families enjoying themselves.
Then you get home. Oh shit.
Absolutely. When I’ve been in a bad place mentally in my life, I literally wouldn’t eat except about once a day when I became starving. It was like the whole system that was supposed to make sense of what I was feeling and take actions to fix something that was producing a “bad” signal just was burned out, not working at all.
I started seeing a therapist, and a big part of her solution was for me to go on antidepressants. I refused, stopped seeing her, and continued roughing it out unsuccessfully on my own. Great stuff. Better now. I would say that not being able to function enough to feel hunger or eat when you’re hungry is a bad place though. That’s pretty far down. I would take it seriously.
I have not a lot of input about how to get yourself out of that way or what to do. Not sure if you’re even looking for advice anyway, or just curious. If you are looking for advice, then about all I can come up with is this: A lot of life is habits. Habits don’t consume mental energy, and so if you have a lot of good ones, you’ll automatically be doing a bunch of great stuff without having to expend. It’s like autopilot. And, it feeds on itself: As you’re taking better care of yourself you’ll have more mental energy to expend to make deliberate choices and put in effort, and you can get to new places. It’s crazy how much freedom life really has, it’s wide open. But it’s not automatic and your brain and your self are one of many types of limited resource that can stop you from getting there.
A lot of it starts with just your thoughts: Your visions for what you’re trying to get to. It has to translate to action to do anything, but having the vision will make the action easier, it’ll give a reason. But recognize that setting the habits in the beginning is mad hard. Chip away at it, keep building up that consistent track record of the stuff you want to see yourself doing starting small, try things and adjust as you go. It’s harder than it seems but you can make small changes consistently and it can work. It’s just hard.
I like the way you think, it feels so relatable.
Thank you, I hope it is useful
Not to feel all alone in this confusing world is always useful.
When I’m super stressed and completely demotivated, I’ll eat even more than usual because food gives me that sweet sweet hit of dopamine
Yes. it’s tied to my depression. I know I need to eat, I feel the hunger but it’s just: meh.
One thing that does help when I’m like that are things like Ovaltine or the Muscle Milk I drink every day at work to get an extra dose of protein. I’m old now and it really does help. I buy the Muscle Milk powder and have a couple of shaker bottles, it’s really hard to mix otherwise. I chose that brand because it’s super cheap and has a tolerable taste/texture. Some of the whey products are almost chewy.
Definitely not. Making food and eating are among my top pleasures, I’m always motivated to do that. So I rather have to be careful to limit my intake when I’m feeling down.
I get this way with cooking. Like, I don’t want to cook, prepare, or go out to get food. I’ve found that having other people to cook for makes me much more motivated to prepare meals.
Sometimes I will be hangry but no particular food seems appetizing, if that makes sense. It’s like my body wants food but my brain doesn’t. Eating just seems like a chore sometimes but I can’t focus on anything if I skip it.
Definition of first world problems, I know
It’s my weight loss strategy
Had it frequently throughout highschool whrn I was taking my ADHD meds. I hated it, I’d go for a long day of school, only to get back home in the evening, touching none of them
Not that I’m a huge fan of eating either, but for me it’s the cooking I can’t be arsed with. I’d rather eat cereal or a bowl of nuts than cook a proper dinner - or sometimes I’ll just skip eating altogether and go to bed hungry.
Soylent sounded like it was intended to address this - like a high-calorie SlimFast. But the actual goals, marketing, pricing, and even form factor ultimately weirded me out.
How is there no commoditized oatmeal shake in a can? Gimme a 600-calorie bottle of lightly-flavored goo.
Pet Food, but human edition. 😆
Bachelor Chow.
I kinda think bran flakes are the human equivalent of pet food
I used Soylent for years exactly because it took all the thinking out of food, one less thing to worry about.
There’s Huel too
Wow, a name more offputting than Soylent.
Yeah, sometimes when I’m angry or stressed I don’t like to eat even if I physically feel hungry.
My appetite seems to be tied to heat, weirdly
Like I could be hungry one minute, but if I step outside on a hot day my appetite would be gone the next
