Casual Conversation

So four weeks into the new year most regulars are at my gym and two of the 50 new people stayed.

Maybe someone is here who is one of the vanished people that I can "bait" back to the gym, atleast is my hope. So now real talk:

BRO, it's four weeks. FOUR WEEKS. You can't and I can't fix a trashy one decade lasting diet. You can't get from skinny to strong in four weeks. You can't get from obese to lean in four weeks. You didn't notice change after four weeks because your scale at home has the same high number?! YOU fail to understand that you are most likely GAINING MUSCLES and LOSING FAT at the same time so your job is to throw that scale away and take pictures of yourself every week.

Throw away all youtubers you know and just go to the gym and move things around. You don't need splits, routines, kcal counting, you need to get back to this gym and keep going.

I am not saying counting kcals, tracking protein intake, following a routine is bad. In fact all these things increase the time to reach goals if done correctly. But if you are exhausted and quit after four weeks cause counting kcal is exhausting, you hate every protein shake, you are following a routine you hate you will fail.

If you hate doing benchpresses find another exercise that is for your chest that you love. Who cares if benchpresses are better for chest if you won't do it the rest of your life while you love doing push ups but not doing them cause it's not in your routine.

Find one, only ONE exercise you like and stick to it. Forget about all those woobidoobi youtubers "Switch routine every 6 weeks" screw it. Do that forever if it makes you happy and makes you go to the gym regulary.

Don't scratch your whole nutrition and lifestyle just for a friggin' gym. In the end it took you (and me) a few years to get overweight or staying skinny. Forget people telling you to eat oat meal and bananas for breakfast if your bad diet was Pop tarts in the morning. You won't remove that habbit for longer than three months and eventually quit so keep eating it and go to the gym anyways. Worst case scenario is you won't gain weight but not lose weight. Not gaining weight is already a win (if obese). Worst case as a skinny dude is your not gaining muscles if not enough and being exhausted. Your body will tell you to eat if the scale isn't hint enough after a few weeks.

So get back. Don't quit. Most people in the gym are chill and honestly people quit and they don't even notice they achieved so much in four weeks.

One person started in January and told me last week he ain't seeing results. He showed me his routine and I told him: "Bro, you started Latpulldowns at 3x12 with 25 kg. You are ding 32,5 kg now..." 7,5 kgs more. He didn't see that as a positive result because his physic hasn't changed.

good morning! what do you plan to do today?

3 months later back to zero.

People say that dying isn't the solution... But piling this with my eternal single status, loneliness and other problems...

Life is a torture.

I am a native English speaker and recently started learning Esperanto a few weeks ago. I was inspired by a TED Talk that explained how Esperanto is an excellent first choice for those interested in acquiring multiple languages.

Due to its relative simplicity, learning Esperanto effectively prepares your brain for learning additional languages, making the process quicker and smoother.

So how many here speak different languages and what are they?

This is my first post on Lemmy that isn't a reply.

I'm putting in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves for my living room today. I mostly read e-books on my Kindle, but I have an affection for old paperback pulp books from 60's and 70's.

So I go to ebay and buy "lots" of them fairly cheap, not caring about the titles. Sometimes 10 books at a time. Now that I'm retired I plan to read every single one, even the bad ones. I have the equivalent of a small home library of them now.

How many fiction books do you all read? E-book or paperback. But not interesting in audiobooks. I'm curious about physically-read books.

Being allergic to ads, I can’t watch YT on the default app. Google isn’t one of my favorite companies, so getting premium isn’t on my wishlist either.

When at home, I use a computer with Firefox and uBlock origin, but now I’m traveling light , so I left my laptop at home. Previously, it was possible to use my iPad to block YT ads, but that stopped working about two months ago. There are ways to watch those videos anyway, but I thought it would be fun to see if I can avoid YT instead.

Currently, I’m traveling with a tablet and several video apps, such as Nebula, Odysee and even Loops. My local TV channels have made some video apps, and nextDNS can block those ads without any issues, so now is the time to explore those as well.

Got any thoughts, questions, comments, or random stuff?

GOOOOOOD MOOOOOOOOOOOOOORNING!!!!

I hope you have a swell day today. what do you plan on doing today?

So, after like 8 months of dumbphone only, I've given up.

It wasn't one majorly annoying thing, but just a non-stop death by a thousand cuts. Modern life really requires at least possession of one of these stupid little rectangles, and if you don't have one, you get slowly nibbled to death by the ducks of modernity.

So, rather than redouble my efforts to bend the world to dealing with me wanting to be a bit of a luddite weirdo, I've given up and just..... bought an iPhone SE and paired it with an Apple Watch 8 I already had.

See, the thing I really didn't consider is that I pretty much already had the ideal dumbphone: this AW8 is a cellular version.

It does phone calls, text messages, and has sufficient ties to modern services (music, podcasts, audiobooks, maps, etc.) that it is, by itself, a 60% solution. And just for perfect clarity: there's a lot of things wrong with the watch that make it not an ideal device, with the biggest one being really not fantastic battery life.

For everything the watch doesn't do, I also have the phone, but the phone isn't strictly required, and I can simply leave it at home when I don't want to deal with all the modern smartness and just rely on the watch.

For sure, it's not a cheap solution since an iPhone and a cellular watch is a giant investment even if you go for the "cheapest" versions, and I'm paying for two cellular plans (though, with US Mobile it's $96/year for each so, relatively speaking, still pretty cheap).

Feel free to have a look at

• !movies@lemm.ee
• !showsandmovies@lemm.ee
• !animation@lemm.ee
• !horrormovies@lemm.ee

I certainly did.

I was taking a wooden box apart and realized I grabbed the wrong bit. Rather than go get the correct one I used my extremely hard head and decided to make the wrong bit work. The screws were not fooled.

On the bright side, I successfully turned a <5 minute activity into a 2+ hour project. Go me!

Edit1: some thoughts based on comments. I was diagnosed with low vitamin D a few months ago but took bills. Maybe a month ago I ran out. I thought getting outside more recently was enough. You all inspired me to be more serious about it. Got my vitamin D3 and b12 pills.

Also, I noticed the two days I felt so tired I slept later and had alcohol too late in the night. One drink but around 12am. I think not just sleep quantity but when I sleep and quality matter.

Will aim to take my pills, not drink after 8-9pm if I drink, and sleep before 11pm.

Thanks for all the advice :)

“Everyone will think you’re useless,” my brain tells me, as if every person thinks that way. It thinks I’ll be shunned if I ever need help or can’t do the same things others can. People will think I’m gross and want to stay away from me because this neck brace I have to wear makes me look like some kind of sick, feral creature. I could never get a partner because I would be too much of an economic burden and my chronic conditions take the fun out of everything.

What’s my source for this? My narcissistic father, who always tells me that I’m a useless failure who will never succeed. He told me that people would react in that way. My lived experience refutes many of his claims, but apparently that didn’t stop me from internalizing them. Maybe I should start wearing earplugs around that guy.

I’m getting ready to touch grass for the first time on my own since I become disabled 3 years ago. I know things won’t be easy, but I also know that this kind of self-defeating thinking is more than useless and literally why it took me 3 years to want to go out in the first place.

Maybe I should reject my father’s framing entirely. Why can’t I put a positive spin on it? The world threw a bunch of bullshit at me, and my presence alone is proof that I didn’t give up. I kept going. If people see that as weak, that’s their problem.

I should stand in solidarity with everyone else fighting through their own bullshit and we can help each other in whatever ways we can. Life wasn’t meant to be a singleplayer game. We’re in this together, and I can find like-minded people who recognize that.

I hope my defiant spirit that’s ready to kick some ass and make lots of buddies wins out.

I'm retired so I fill my days doing whatever I want. But I'm always interested in what other people would do if they had more free time.