It Is Important - Tumblr Posts

I gave my soapbox speech about how weight loss is mostly bullshit to two different patients in a row yesterday and so help me I’m pretty sure one of these days someone is going to say “but SURELY you agree I’d be HEALTHIER if I lost weight!” bc you can see the disbelief in their eyes. And like. Sure, maybe! You might see some improvement in biomarkers like LDL and A1c, and your knees would probably feel better. But you would be amazed at how much more good you can do for yourself by focusing on things you can actually meaningfully change without resorting to making yourself miserable. Eat more fresh fruits and vegetables—it’s hard bc they’re more difficult to prepare and more expensive per calorie and go bad faster than other foods, but they’re what we evolved eating the most of so they’re what our bodies need the most of. And walk around more; sure, cardio is great for you, but if it sucks so bad you don’t do it, it isn’t doing shit for you. And we evolved to walk very very long distances, a little bit at a time, so our bodies respond actually very well to adding walks into our schedules, which is vastly easier than adding workouts that are frankly designed to be punishing when the definition of punishing is “makes you less likely to do it again in the future.”

You get one life. It is shorter than you can begin to imagine. Don’t waste it hating yourself because somebody is going to make money off that self-hatred. You deserve better than to be a cash cow for billionaires who pay aestheticians and dermatologists to make them (or at least their trophy wives) look thin and beautiful no matter what they actually do.

His mug says "Best Ori'vod" and has Wolffe, Rex, and Cody's little symbols on the bottom >:3c

Fox Day! Fox Day! Fox Day! Fox Day!

I've still not gotten over the results of this poll, and in fact have decided it makes an excellent example of how only doing part of the work for an important task can be not only as useless, but also sometimes more useless than putting in the effort to do all the work instead.

Consider, if you will, an analogy to building a bridge over a deep river.

Nominally, you can first divide people into two groups: those who want to build a bridge to get across, and those who decide not to build a bridge.

For the people who look at the river and decide that building a bridge is too much work - they don't have time, lack the knowledge and/or resources, just honestly don't even care all that much about getting to the other side anyway, etc - they at least will ideally be aware that if they later change their minds and would like to reach the other side of the river, they're going to have to suck it up and swim.

For those who decide to try their hand at bridge-building (assuming you've randomly selected a bunch of people from the general population in this admittedly rather silly analogy), it seems reasonable to expect that some percentage of them will get partway and give up with only, like, half a bridge, or even just a pile of materials they collected up and then abandoned when they realized they had no idea what to do with it. Others, likely, won't be professional bridge builders but will manage to see the work through and get some degree of hopefully functional bridge that may or may not dump them in the river when it breaks halfway across. And some percentage would, if the sample size is large enough, hopefully know or be able to learn what they're doing and complete the work of building functional bridges.

The group which represents the most common answer from the poll in this analogy, unfortunately, is none of the above groups.

Imagine, now, a group of people who looked at the river, realized they knew a few things about both water and bridges, and decided that: first, they didn't really need a bridge until the water was too deep to feel safe anymore; and second they only really needed to look up how to build bridges when it came to the parts of bridge building they were already aware they didn't know.

And this group of people wind up with bridges that have no anchors to stable ground on either side where they felt confident just wading and thus only begin when the water is already over their heads, and which are also liable to break and dump them in the water anyway because they're missing some critical component that the builder in question wasn't already aware they were ignorant of before they began constructing their mid-river bridge.

In conclusion:

Don't build your bridge in the middle of the river, and don't leave in stupid defects because you didn't bother double-checking every part.

If you don't want to build a bridge, then just own that and don't build a bridge, instead of building only half a bridge and then expecting it to function.

Fact check all the posts you share about real people and real world concerns, or you will become the person whose bridge has no connection to any ground you already thought was stable enough to walk on, and which is missing all the parts you didn't already know you didn't know before you started.

There are a lot of consistently repeated "facts" around tumblr that fall somewhere in this gradient—some of which are only corrected by actually crunching numbers, reading scientific papers, etc. Falling for misrepresented data isn't anyone’s fault, but it does mean that some things that "everyone knows" are straight up incorrect, because the source was written by someone who didn't understand what they were reporting on, or the subject was twisted to suit a narrative (for personal reasons, monetary gain, etc).

Meanwhile, SOME claims just don't have a real source at all.

Do you check sources before you repeat a factoid or spread a post?

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