Hyperfixation Station

"craving a food means your body needs something that food can offer" now what the fuck does my body need with an ice cream

it makes your brain happy! your body could use some joy too

no everyone shut up and listen. truths were said

in all seriousness, if you're craving ice cream, it's likely that your body needs fat and carbs. If ice cream isn't an option for whatever reason, you can try to feed yourself something else with a significant amount of fat and/or carbs. You may also be dehydrated if you're craving sweets.

That said, sometimes your body and brain do genuinely just need a pick me up.

The more frequently you practice intuitive eating like this, the better you'll get at figuring out what it is that your body is asking for.

Also, a great trick is to take a look at what you're craving, note the nutritional contents (fat, carbs, protein, plant matter/fiber) and try and figure out what else sounds tasty for your particular craving. This can give you more data points to go off of. For instance, if you're craving ice cream, but a sweet roll sounds just as good, it's probably carbs your body is asking you for. That said, if you're craving ice cream and a sweet roll doesn't sound good at all BUT a bagel with strawberry cream cheese or avocado toast DOES sound good, you know it's fat you're needing.

If all you're craving is ice cream and nothing else sounds worth the effort, you may just need a low effort mood boost, which is also totally valid! This can also help you even if you can't have ice cream, because now that you know what your body actually wants, you know there are more ways to fulfill that order than the way it asked you to!

Undo the Damage of Sitting

(Technically, this isn’t about saving your hands… but if you draw, you’re probably doing a lot of sitting, so…)

This has such extreme shitpost energies but it’s 100% serious

Looks pretty useful for everyone endlessly working at home at their dining room table.

As a movement professional who helps get people out of pain. This is a fully pretty great and relevant for a lot of people.

oh wow! hey if you take pills check this out. new medicine taking meta just dropped.

according to these models, out of the 4 tested postures, the best position to digest pills is laying on your right side. standing upright has a similar time to laying in your back at twice as much as laying on the right side, and laying on the left side is the slowest by far.

laying on right side: pill dissolves in around 10 minutes.

standing: pill dissolves in 23 minutes. laying on the back has a similar time.

laying on left side: pill dissolves in up to 100 minutes.

https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0096877

definitely worth a lot more research.

if you want your medicine to kick in fast, try laying on your right side! if you want your medicine to kick in slower, try laying on your left side.

This makes sense! I learned from a doc that if you have gas pain or nausea, you turn on your left side to make it easier for your stomach to send stuff through. The goal in turning left is to NOT absorb, but to release.

Turning on your right can make nausea/gas pain worse because it has to fight gravity to exit your stomach/body. So, yeah, lying on your right would make things absorb faster because it's going into the stomach lining, which is the point.

Righty-tighty, lefty-loosey

I was going to reblog this anyway for the useful info but the last addition fucking sent me

when you see me say stuff like "yeah doctors make me mad sometimes but they deal with a lot of bullshit too so not everything is their fault" this is what I'm referring to. thank you to the doctors who will send the authorization back as many times as it takes

#i wish all insurance companies a very die

Heart attacks symptoms are different for women. I recently learned this. 

Everyone should know these things.

thanks to mainstream media and being unable to show breasts on TV, way too few people know about female signs of cardiac distress, and impending heart attacks. they only know about the “pain in the left arm” male symptom.

i had all these symptoms once and they sent me right to hospital

it was scary bc i didnt know these were the symptoms for female heart issues

Please, please, PLEASE, reblog this. i don’t know if I did save or called false alarm, with my boss’ life tonight. I felt I was being a bit paranoid, overreacting, but I told Mirage my thoughts and he, after reading over the article I showed him, immediately sprung into action and then shooed her off to the hospital. I don’t know if I did or not, but I knew she’d been super stressed. She’d off-handedly commented on her arm tingling and I asked her if she felt queasy on a hunch. I went to look at the symptoms and we went from there.

Holy shit, I didn’t even think the symptoms would be different between men and women. This is so hugely important and I don’t understand why we aren’t taught this. 

One of the other symptoms that doesn’t get talked about , especially in women, is a “feeling of impending doom”. I am not even kidding, that is a legitimate diagnostic criteria. Please - if you are feeling any of these symptoms and a sudden onset of “Holy shit the world is ending” do not let anyone tell you it’s “just nerves” or “just heartburn” or something.

Keep these in mind ESPECIALLY IF YOU’VE GOT HEART DISEASE IN YOUR FAMILY!  So many more women die from heart attacks than because they don’t recognize the symptoms when they’re so different. Please stay safe and stay informed.

Huh

No, but seriously. If whenever you get up from wherever you start to feel faint, get palpitations, get numb, get nauseous, get light-headed and/or literally feel your blood drop to your feet, check the symptoms of Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome.

Also add more salt to your diet lol. With or without the POTS unless you have hypertension in which case I’d be more cautious.

Actually, it’s not just that you can reblog this. I want people to reblog this.

My poor mom went by years without knowing why the fuck she was having all these debilitating symptoms.

All it took was me making her add some more salt to her diet and have an isotonic drink daily and she IMMEDIATELY (as in, less than an hour) stopped feeling faint whenever she got up from kneeling down and her hair is slowly falling off less and less.

She used to need at least 5 minutes to recover from kneeling down and now she kneels down and stands up like it’s nothing. Even her joint pain from EDS and brain fog have improved tremendously and she has much more energy.

It’s not normal to always get dizzy when you kneel down and then get up, or when you get up from bed or a chair.

It’s not normal for any of that to make you light-headed or nauseous, or get blurry vision, headaches or palpitations.

It’s not normal for your body to suck at regulating its temperature and for your heart rate to go insane if you’re just mildly stressed.

It’s not normal to want to be active and “productive” but be unable to get your body to do anything so you just lay there, or if you manage to get anything done, you’ll need a whole week to recover.

It’s not normal to be tremendously tired all the time no matter how much you rest and sleep, even if people think you’re just “lazy”.

I’m pointing all these things out as abnormal because chronically ill people tend to not realize that our symptoms are symptoms.

Our individual bodies are the only bodies we’ve experienced and since most of us don’t look any different from others and aren’t taken seriously when we complain of any ailment, we assume our symptoms happen to everyone. They do not.

People with no physical conditions (at least not impairing ones such as being a bit short-sighted) do not have their bodies make life difficult for them, unless they’re temporarily ill. But we are ill ALL the time.

Take yourself seriously. Doctors and healthy people already don’t, so if you don’t take yourself seriously, who will?

If your body is making life difficult for you, there’s probably something going on with it, and if it persists and nothing makes it go away, it may be a chronic illness.

POTS can develop in previous healthy people after a Covid infection. If you have had Covid recently or know someone who has, please keep this in mind.

fresh, clean no-terf version for reblogs!

Your mom and aunts aren’t on tumblr.  Please warn them about this as well. 

I forgot to mention that it doesn’t have to be a heavy flow period. Even spotting or link discharge can be an alarming sign. So watch out for that!

Helpful info on that

Stay safe everyone

Some eaiser variations of push ups to help you build the strength to do a traditional one!

I don’t generally reblog ‘fitness’ stuff but gaddamn could I use some more arm strength.

Push-ups are my worst nightmare. I can only do 44 before I pass out on the floor.

“I can only do 44” hahaha omg I can’t even do one.

yes good

I was always frustrated how my P.E. teachers wanted all of us to go “all-or-none” and basically hurt ourselves without letting us build up from square-one like in the first gif.  Then they’d fuckin yell at us for not doing it right >:|

Knee-pushups is not square-one.

When I got my first personal trainer, she had me doing push ups almost standing upright in the weight lifting bars so that I could do 15 reps and 3 sets of them. It’s more about the technique of the push up, and if you’re pushing too much weight, you can’t exersize the correct muscles within their tolerances. This post is pretty important tto know cause of that.

I was introduced to the knee push-up last year and it was such a fucking game changer. I had NO idea it was possible to work those same muscles just with a slight variation in position. 

I wanna just verify that these are excellent for building strength, both as someone who took weights class in high school with a good teacher, and as someone who’s had a lifetime of physical therapy (not for my arms specifically, but I’ve spent a lot of time in sports medicine centers). And again, if the vertical one in the first gif is difficult, you don’t even have to lean into it like that. Start standing, and only lean as much as it takes you to lower towards the wall.

And remember, many exercises can be modified in this way! I did an image search for “modified pull up” and got exactly what I was looking for right away, which is this:

Doing pull ups on a lower bar, or from the straps with handles that gyms sometimes have (called the TRX - they can also be used to support yourself during squats and some balance exercises) is a lot easier than jumping straight into vertical pullups, and lets you build up that muscle with exercises that are still comfortable and safe for you, so you can do more sets of more reps.

As a general rule, always start with lower-strain exercises and practice good form before you work your way up. You don’t want to have to unlearn bad habits that could lead to injury later as the difficulty increases.

@imfemalewarrior I’m assuming you’ve seen this post but in case you haven’t—it seems like your kind of thing

Here are push up and pull up progressions! 

-FemaleWarrior, She/They 

Because I have serious issues with core strength and cannot do a sit up or a crunch without using muscles I shouldn’t and hurting myself, I looked up core exercises for beginners (because modified sit ups just have me ways to make it harder), and here’s what I found.

All from here, which also includes sit ups with the idea that you start up and don’t go all the way down.

This stuff on the bottom is some of the stuff I do for physical therapy, can vouch for it

The flip side of “cleanse diets don’t do anything” is that if you tried a cleanse diet and you did experience a notable reduction in fatigue, joint pain, and general blarginess, you need to talk to an allergy specialist, because there’s nearly a 100% chance that means you have an undiagnosed allergy to some component of your customary diet.

This is an excellent point and I’d imagine there’s a lot of quack diets that continue circulating and getting press based on this exact principle.

Absolutely – a great many diets of the “stop eating everything except these three foods” variety are 100% trading on the fact that they’re practically guaranteed to generate some positive testimonials by virtue of coincidentally cutting somebody’s undiagnosed food allergy out of their diet.

as ur friendly Neighborhood Nursing Student™ i feel somewhat compelled to remind everyone with the hot weather:

In regards to #1, don’t take this as an excuse to drink the sugar water that they call sports drinks. They aren’t bad for you per se, but please choose water.

actually this entire post was written in the spirit of ppl using it as an excuse to drink sports drinks and soda etc

ppl have been commenting abt sodium levels in soda and sugar levels in sports drinks and thats all well and good but what i’ve noticed is that people who internalize “well, ONLY WATER hydrates me” but who HATE WATER remain horrifically dehydrated cause they dont drink anything. 

so like. if ur a person who haaaaates tap water, this is absolutely me giving you permission to drink whatever fluid you can stomach. please take this as a direct excuse to drink nothing but gatorade if that’s what it takes to get enough fluid into ur body.

it’s not the healthiest for you, sure, but you’re a smart enough person to know that. please drink fluids anyways. 

if u like water thats gr8. if you can stomach water that’s gr8. if you can’t, that’s okay too, and you need to stay hydrated just as much as anyone else, so please drink. 

I used to hate tap water, and in some places (looking at you, Iowa) it is legit disgusting, but one thing I do which helped a ton and was long term cheaper than buying soda or juice was to get a bottle of Angostura bitters. It’s a cocktail additive with a strong distinctive flavor, so although a tiny bottle is like $6 it will last you for ages. Put a small drop or dash in your glass then fill with water. It has a pleasant sort of herbal metal taste (I understand that those words don’t seem like they should go together but it’s hard to describe) which masks tap water. It also helps me smooth an upset tummy but your mileage may vary. It’s not something that will get you drunk, just a flavoring like vanilla extract.

If that all sounds like too much bother, dropping a lemon wedge into water also helps.

I am learning that lemon wedges are magical in almost everything I like to drink.

here is the magic that made me stop being chronically dehydrated:

because yeah, i can’t STAND plain water – it tastes like the inside of my mouth. it tastes like spit. imagine drinking a glass of ice cold spit. ugh. but add a squirt of this stuff to your glass of tapwater, and now it tastes like apple, cherry, lemonade, whatever.

i also got a bunch of these

and pre-prep them with flavored water, iced tea, iced coffee, whatever (or ask my helper to do it), and then when i’m thirsty but distracted and want to just grab some kind of liquid without thinking about finding a clean glass etc., i can just grab one of these.

because yeah, hating water is a thing, and dehydration SUCKS. so drink SOMETHING, don’t be a water purist. better to chug iced coffee than go without.

mio was a damn genius for comin out with that shit

can I just speak up here as someone who has been a nurse for 17 years? I heartily endorse this post and also give you permission to DRINK WHATEVER THE HELL IT TAKES TO KEEP YOU FROM BEING DEHYDRATED

especially in the summer, you can’t play around with that. drink something. seriously. for the love of kittens. DRINK SOMETHING. 

Addendum: If you’re engaged in sustained activity that makes you sweat, then yes drink water, but PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD also drink some Gatorade or something. If you sweat a lot and drink tons of water, you won’t be replacing your electrolytes. I used to get horrible headaches and feel awful after long hikes because I was drinking like 150 oz of water. This can cause hyponatremia, or low blood sodium levels. I started adding one bottle of a sports drink (and yes, sugar is bad, for me especially, so I drink Powerade Zero which has no sugar or calories) to my water intake and I no longer get those headaches.

There are also electrolyte supplement capsules you can get at any sporting goods or outdoor outfitter’s store that you can add to water bottles that accomplish the same result.

Hydrate or die-drate lads!!!

Popsicles count as drinking! Especially the pedialite ones

Letting teens sleep in could save the US over $9 billion dollars a year. 

Studies show teenage brains are wired to stay up and wake up late, they need 8 to 10 hours of sleep per night, and that school therefore starts too early. 

It is estimated that high school classes starting after 8:30 am or later would improve student health, boost graduation rates, raise lifetime earning potential, and lower the risk of fatigue-related car crashes, all of which could potentially contribute at least $83 billion to the US economy within a decade. 

(Source, Source 2, Source 3)

Ah the free market at work. (Similar to when I went to CVS to pickup a 90$ prescription and they had their own generic version for 7.99).

This is important! Tell your Friends.

I can’t believe some insurances quit covering them 😐

From Slate:

The generic Adrenaclick will cost $109.99 for two doses, compared with $649.99 for the same amount of drug in an EpiPen. That’s good news, both for financial and safety reasons: STAT reported last year that some parents and institutions had begun filling up syringes with epinephrine as a cost-cutting measure, a DIY solution that could pose great risk to the children who may have eventually needed injections. A more affordable alternative will help ensure safer epinephrine injections.

That’s assuming, though, that the people who need these devices know exactly what to ask for when they’re sitting in their doctors’ offices. Otherwise, they’ll still be stuck with the overpriced product. Here’s why: The mechanism by which Adrenaclick injects the drug is slightly different from EpiPen’s mechanism, so the Food and Drug Administration has ruled that the two are not therapeutically equivalent. That distinction is important because it means a prescription for an EpiPen cannot be filled with Adrenaclick. If you want the cheaper option, you have to have an Adrenaclick prescription.

You must ask your doctor for an Adrenaclick prescription! 

I also found a coupon from Impax on 0.15mg and 0.3mg epinephrine injection, USP auto-injectors, which appear to be the generic version of Adrenaclick; these coupons cover up to $100 per pack for 3 packs of these injectors (6 total injectors).

Some customers may be automatically eligible for $100 off the retail price thus only paying $10 for a pack, but this may be good backup for those who for whatever reason do not meet those requirements.

Pass this information on, potentially save a life.

Also: don’t stigmatize HIV+ individuals because they all have different circumstances and might’ve  gotten the virus from a variety of sources (sex, occupational, birth, blood transfusions in other countries). 

HIV-related stigma remains a huge barrier to preventing HIV, and is linked to a low level of people testing for HIV. 

The bad news is that Trump is cutting America’s spending on HIV year after year.  He has taken steps to weaken the Affordable Care Act since coming to power.

Workout For Daily Life

Reblogging for the neck pain ones… whoa Nelly, do I ever get the most killer neck pains.

Cellulite is a female secondary sex characteristic and should be celebrated as a rite of womanhood, not despised or eradicated.

it’s really a secondary sex characteristic?! 

It is. It has to do with the way our bodies network fat. Female bodies create sort of a mesh network to support fat (female bodies are MUCH more hardy in times of stress) and it can present as delightfully lumpy. More than 90% of women have visible cellulite, but all women store fat in this manner.

why did no one tell me this?!

You know why :/

Spread this. I only just started to see mine and I started to freak out a bit. More people should/need to know about this

Here’s an illustration of the aforementioned difference in fat storage.

Men’s lattice pattern collagen threads holds subcutaneous fat in a way that, when the skin expands because of the fat storage, it expands evenly. Women’s “pockets” expand unevenly when we accumulate fat, creating that orange peel effect. Our storage pattern means we can healthily store more fat than men. Like a woman with 25% body fat is average, a man with 25% body fat is chubby. Because of that, like OP said, women are hardier in times of stress or famine. It’s also one of the reasons why our bodies can survive pregnancy, which is a massive energy demand on our system.

And there’s absolutely NO “treatment” for cellulite that will work. They are all bullshit designed to separate you from your hard-earned cash. It’s a secondary sex characteristic, it’s perfectly normal and it’s not going away no matter what you do. Like I’m very lean myself and I work out 5~6 times a week, and I still have cellulite. Someone giving a woman shit for having cellulite is akin to giving her shit for having skin. It’s just a mixture of misogyny and corporate greed.

Love your lumpy skin, ladies. It means you are a badass surviving machine shaped by millenia of evolution.

The first mention of cellulite as a negative was in 1933 in a French beauty magazine. WWI led to more women entering the workforce and many continued to work after the war. The French beauty industry was eager to cash in on women having more disposable income. Talking negatively about cellulite was just another way to expand the beauty market. (x)

Women are taught to hate their bodies because people get rich from it