Note: there's a number of disclaimers I feel I want to include regarding "miracle" diets, direct-to-consumer businesses, health benefits/risks of dieting, etc but it'd get too long to put them up here. I'll add a comment with that stuff. Also, no one is paying me to say anything here.

I decided to write about my experiences with different low calorie/diabetic-friendly/keto food options. Let me know if this is at all helpful to you :)

Magic Spoon

This is that unavoidable direct-to-consumer business; you may have been bothered w/dozens of promo codes for their cereal across various podcasts, YouTube videos, and Twitch streams. I have been on a ketogenic diet for a long while (and have had success with it*), and saw that Magic Spoon is low carb and comparably low in calories compared to other sugary cereals.

I bought a variety pack with 4 boxes for ~$40 including shipping w/promo code. $10/box is pricey, but since I used to be a cereal lover, I figured it might be worth having it to scratch the itch. All of these I had with Blue Diamond Almond Breeze Unsweetened Almond Milk (<1g carbs.) I can't really tell a flavor difference between almond milk and low fat milk. Whole milk sells for about $3 in my market where as almond milk is about $4. Note: I am easy to please, I definitely don't have a "refined" palate. Now to the boxes:

Peanut Butter

I think maybe my expectations were off for this. I'm not a sommelier, so I'll describe flavors best I can in common folk language. This is just not good. At all. The taste is peanut-buttery, but has an overwhelming salty flavor. There's also this off-note that tastes like artificial sweetener. Texture-wise really adheres to your teeth. I finished the bowel, only because I didn't have enough time to pour a new one before work. It's been a few weeks, and I still haven't touched the box (aside from a small bowel to write this review.)

Rating: 1/5

Fruity

I had pretty low expectations from the previous box, and some anxiety about having potentially wasted $40 on food I won't eat. The smell when I opened the box was immediately that of fruit loops. I noticed the shape of the cereal was the same as the peanut butter ones. Fortunately, these didn't glue themselves to my teeth in quite the same way that the PB flavor did, but I still used my tongue to dislodge it from a couple of molars at the end. This tasted quite close to fruit loops, but overall is a unique flavor. I quite enjoyed this flavor. This cereal can sit in the bowel for some time before becoming soggy; a good quality since I typically take my time and browse Reddit/HN in the mornings while slowly working on a bowel of cereal before work. Flavor is a half-step down from fruit loops, but a step up in consistency.

Rating: 4/5

Frosty

When I tried this, this was the best keto cereal I've tried. I'd say it's the best cereal I've ever had, but that title still belongs to Reese's Puffs. It's hard to describe the flavor, something like Lucky Charms if you had a high-number of mash-mellows, but far more substantial. It isn't an especially complex flavor; it's just a "frosted" flavor that seems perfectly balanced in both flavor and consistency. Following the trend of other cereals, it doesn't get soggy fast, which I appreciate. Doesn't really get stuck in the teeth.

Rating: 5/5

Chocolate

This will be a short review: not great. It tastes like Cocoa Puffs, if they very obviously had substituted artificial sweetener for sugar. Maybe that's your thing, but I wasn't a huge fan of Cocoa Puffs in the first place. Not offensive, I'll probably finish the box when I run out of other things to eat, but not great.

Rating: 2/5

Conclusion

This scratches that craving for cereal that you miss out on when you go on a low carb diet. If you are on keto, you should note the cereal is relatively high in protein (around 13g per cup) where total fat is only 8g per cup. I'll probably purchase again, but I'll do a custom bundle next time w/fruity, 2 frosty, and maybe a different interesting flavor as a fourth.

I'll start this post off by summarizing my hair loss experience.

When I was 18, a few months shy of 19, I went to the barber and there was a miscommunication and the barber ended up buzzing my hair off. This is the first time that I was able to see my hairline in a while and I saw that it was higher than I remembered. I was scared at first, I couldn't believe that my hairline was receding. But then I read a few things figures maybe it was just maturing, and then I eventually forgot. Actually a few months later I was back thinking to whether I was losing my hair or not. I talked to a cousin of mine and he said something about a pill that he was taking but that it had a possible side effect of erectile dysfunction. I wasn't going to take a chance on that when I wasn't even sure if I was actually balding.

The next year and a half, I stop thinking about hair loss. It's like I had my memory wiped of that moment, probably due to stress from school. The only thing that happened is that I thought to myself was "man my hair is kind of weird right now." And also I had developed a scalp issue, which I later found out was psoriasis also due to stress.

So, right before the pandemic hits in February 2020, me and my dad go have lunch at this restaurant. I take a shower and go out. My hair is still wet by the time we go to the restaurant. My dad looks up at my hair and asks "are you losing your hair?" And that's when I realized that I was indeed going bald. For the next three months, I was going through all the stages of grief. I was wildly depressed and anxious. I did some research into possible treatments. It took me a while to learn (or re-learn) about the pill known as finasteride. I then find out about a website where you can buy prescription meds without a prescription shipped over from India so I buy finasteride from there and I started treatment on May 1st 2020. I was 20 years old. I then go to the dermatologist two months later and they prescribe me Dutasteride which I have been on ever since.

My initial side effect on the drug was watery semen, which cleared up a few weeks after starting the drug. My hair has re-grown a lot. It's back to it's original thickness, and my hairline has made a rather substantial comeback. It's not all back, but enough to the point where the average person wouldn't know I'm balding anymore.

Let me know if you have any questions. I would love to post pictures, but I rather not if that's okay with everyone.

Insight once came to me after I was prepped for a surgical procedure. As my body's weight began to evaporate, a pain I had never recognized, but which must have always been sounding in the background noise of my being, vanished. The superadhesive worry--which sometimes frightened others as much as myself, that in order to socialize, I had learned to sometimes twist into a temporary shape resembling charm--came unstuck and peeled away. Then followed a great thought, a mandate for how I should spend the remainder of my life. Also, I needed to poop. But more than that, I needed to get out of this semi-public hospital bed and to a private space immediately, so I could allow this cosmic insight a moment to fully bloom. Time was against me. Anesthetized, I knew I was slipping toward, maybe even over, the falls past which I would forget everything of this experience until a groggy post-procedure awakening brought dull daylight and its senseless aches back to me. I had to somehow save the thought. I searched, but the bathroom gave up no markers, no specimen cup labels to write on. I wondered about tearing toilet paper into little letters, hiding them above the cabinet. But would I remember to return to read the message? With an increasingly calm desperation, I dug my nails into the flesh of my hand and repeated again and again the life-saving insight delivered during communion with the world that lay beyond pain. Please remember, please remember this thought.

When I regained consciousness, it was waiting for me like a friend who had lost patience, and now seemed much less attractive. What I had somehow stolen from the gods, secreted in my closed palm through a swim across the river Lethe, was this message: “Do Drugs.”

I had realized that analysis, working on the problem of myself both mentally and verbally, had won me no appreciable gains. Insight, I had. But relief, happiness, an improved outlook? Nothing I had done had really helped me feel better. Anesthesia instantly had. These aren’t the words of an addict coming on-line. I was a reluctant user of any substance. However, in the years following I forced myself to again undertake drug trials with my psychiatrists. Methodically, I worked through every class, waltzed backward through the eras of drugs, danced off-label with each oddball wallflower, ingested every twisted molecule to ever win over the FDA with a promise of psychiatric benefit and maybe some that merely had intrigued one of my more historically-curious doctors. When Eddie Haskell, MD wanted to resurrect a drug of the bad old days just to see what it’d do to a person, I was the patient with his hand out.

I overslept and didn’t sleep. I gained and lost a third of my body weight. My head felt like a styrofoam block, then like the slate of a blackboard being scraped with tableware. I was more or less charged, sweaty, sensitive to light, and shaky. Some drugs make you feel like Benjamin Braddock in his birthday diving suit. Others make you feel like an amnesiac idiot in Benjamin Braddock’s birthday diving suit. A common theme emerges. These substances could help me feel slower, distant from the world, claustrophobic, clammy, sensorily distorted. Sometimes, they dulled my anxiety, or dried my hair-trigger tear ducts, but they accomplished this through impairment, and very clumsily. I have never been drunk, but I think it’s like a drunk traffic cop: success in psych meds comes about by the stopping of certain avenues, slowing up of traffic, blocking lawful turns. And it’s sometimes noted in the overall impact that fewer crashes have occurred. To me this is not success. Impairment so far hasn't been healing for me. I want my turn at quoting the line, "I feel like myself again."

And so, my heart sinks at every day's new headline about psychedelics. If you follow health news at all, you know they are a hot topic, showing a ridiculous amount of promise. Despite fitting the diagnostic profile, my former home was far from anywhere with signups for studies. I reached out to several "clinics" offering psychedelic-assisted therapy. They struck me as resembling many legal weed shops--loads of young bros polishing their presentation and sanitizing an extortionate drug deal in hopes of financing a Tesla. With fees starting at 8x the plane ticket to administer and contextualize a drug that costs less than $20 a dose, I wouldn't credit their soft patter as containing much idealism.

And here I am--for other reasons besides. Yes, a part of me thought living here would put legal psychedelics within my reach, but I'm not seeing any opportunities. Now I'm kicking myself for never having tried to cultivate mushroom spores, never having ventured to ask acquaintances for a hand. I'm marooned here and psilocybin is about blow up in the States.

Hello everyone,

I recently got put on some SSRI for my worsening suicidal ideation and honestly I can't believe the difference it's made. It's like a version of myself that I find hard to believe existed, but can draw parallels with the version of me before I got depressed, etc.

I'm just curious how I should be viewing these changes in me: Are they really me without depression/anxiety or is it a more lurid exaggerated version of that?

Any other thoughts on SSRIs in general welcome! I'm interested in seeing Tildians' thoughts on them :)

I think those could be real useful especially now. Sometimes I want to share related stuff but they would not warrant a full thread .

It’s possible that they never existed and I’m delusional. In which case, I think they should be a thing.

Around 2 years ago, when I first made a reddit account, I spent a lot of time on AskReddit asking about 'why are women so hard to date' like a personification of the dunning-kruger effect (while I don't think I've really learned anything about dating and socialization since then, I have stopped thinking women don't share the same basic emotions and reactions as men and in general don't think they're so removed from guys). Given that and how little engagement my threads were getting (it's AskReddit, but I didn't know what I was expecting) I was basically ready to be made an incel. Thankfully someone snapped me out of it by calling 12-year old me a neckbeard, which terrified me away from touching dating for a few months at least.

PS: If the answer is "if you don't feel like this you're in trouble, people don't/shouldn't just stop developing like that", I won't be surprised.

I'm sure something everyone has wondered at this point is simply what the plan is after the lockdown. Out of what's circulating in public policy circles, Paul Romer's plan is the probably the one with the most appealing results

https://paulromer.net/covid-sim-part1/

Basically, mass random testing--specifically, 7% of the population is tested every day, or 21 million, selected randomly.

Of course, 21 million random tests is an absurd number. But if it could be done, people could to some extent resume life, if the simulations hold to reality.

On the other hand, plans like

https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/national-coronavirus-response-a-road-map-to-reopening/

https://ethics.harvard.edu/covid-19-response

Have a few things in common. For one, they all involve incredibly advance and detailed contact tracing. They rely on the proliferation of mass surveillance similar to HK, where all US citizens would have to install apps, for instance, that track their location and ping them when they have been in contact with a COVID19 positive patient.

They also involve extreme limitations on travel, and one of them even has the forced drafting of immune citizens into the medical and food industries.

It's estimated about 80% of the economy could continue, and they will last until the minimum of vaccine (18 months - 2 years) or 14-20 months (herd immunity is achieved).

What does everyone else think? What do you think we should do after the lockdown?

Have you ever really looked at what you eat? If you have, you may notice one common ingredient present in everything from vegan sauces to certain ketogenic foods. Taking those specific diets into consideration, the widely accepted figure for keto is <100 grams, and similar in the vegan sphere as well(Often times you'll see a quoted 30 grams, but the kicker always comes in the comments where someone says fruit based sugars don't count towards this. They do, very much so, count towards it). This is far, far, far too much sugar for any one human to be taking in a day. The FDA has no recommended figure for their DV scale of food labels, but other groups certainly do. The World Health Organisation recommends no more than 5% of daily calories be from sugar of all types. This is equivalent to 25 grams for a 2000 calorie diet. The American Heart Association recommends the same figures.

Now, you may be asking yourself, why would the AHA bother themselves with sugar? Certainly that's more for a diabetes association to study than a heart disease one? Well, it's because sugar is heavily linked to heart disease. From the source:

participants who took in 25% or more of their daily calories as sugar were more than twice as likely to die from heart disease as those whose diets included less than 10% added sugar

So, not only are you at risk for heart disease, but there are new studies that suggest alzheimer's is nothing more than a 3rd form of diabetes.

I'm not hoping for much in posting this, except that someone somewhere looks at their diet and resists the stranglehold sugar has on our present society.

Aphantasia is a condition where a person is unable to visualize images in their minds eye. If I tell you to think of a red apple, several people will visualize this apple and 'see' it. But those (like me) with aphantasia simply can't. Some of us have access to other senses within our mind (hearing, touch, smell, etc), some don't.

Do you have aphantasia? There's a simple test here.

In a similar vein, is anybody able to explain what visualizing looks like? Is it just like the sight I get from my eyes? Different?