#So I started heavily restricting the food I ate at home

[rubberduckyrye]

Google how to make yourself feel better when you're having a fit of depression without caving in to your emotional crutch on soda while also not feeling like you're restricting and accidentally reliving a food-related trauma that makes me feel worse about restricting--

[starrose17]

Lokius 'Passengers' AU

So I really want a Lokius AU to the movie Passengers.

Like, Loki has somehow snuck aboard the ship (named The TVA, of course) in a spare life pod without anyone noticing, but as it wasn’t properly configured to him it opens half way through the 200 year journey. He’s alone on this giant spaceship, no knowledge on how to get the pod working again (though he’s smart and he tries but nope), and with only minimal level pass to entertainment and food that he stole from another passenger before he went into suspended animation. 

At first it’s great, he was running away after all, and out here alone there was no one to hurt him. So he enjoys his time, plays the virtual computer games, breaks into the penthouse suite on the top deck and makes home there, gets into the space suit that’s tethered to the ship and goes for a float out in space where only he exists. Sure the same cereal every day for breakfast gets annoying, but at least he’s got the bar man to talk to, the robot behind the bar named Ob, even if he is a bit mental.

But after 2 years, it’s not fun anymore. He’s got the endless high scores on all the games, he’d rather eat his own hair then that same cereal again, he’s tired of his own voice echoing against the never ending metal hallways, and the space outside is just...cold. Empty.

Alone.

He’s lets himself go, he doesn’t care anymore, doesn’t shower, doesn’t shave, soon his beard is as tangled as his unwashed curly hair, and every day he screams at the life pod that brought him to his own silent hell. He’d tried every possible way to get into the restricted life pod section where all the crew were, but nothing would open those heavily enforced doors.

Ob’s a robot, he doesn’t understand, he doesn’t feel, and after drinking what must be half the contents of that bar Loki finds himself standing in the air lock, without the tethered suit, hand hovering over the button that would open those doors and suck him out into oblivion.

But he scares himself, and he drops the bottle held in his other hand and runs, back through the decks, through the life pod section, and in his haste trips over one of the many bottles surrounding his own pod. He tumbles and ends up splattered on top of another pod. Blinking through his drunken suicidal haze, he looks down at the grey-haired head beneath him.

All it took was that look for all those dark thoughts to disappear.

More under the cut...

He becomes rather obsessed with this passenger, this, ‘Mobius M Mobius’ written on the pod. He looks him up on the ships computer, the man was a divorced ex-jet ski salesman, ready to leave his life behind to start a new adventure out there in the unknown, wanting to write a book about it. 

Loki talks about him endlessly with Ob, who just stares at him smiling animatedly reminding him he told him this yesterday. And the day before that. And the week before that. In the end, it seemed even robots could get exasperated, as Ob finally suggests, 

“Why don’t you wake him up?”

Loki immediately refuses, he couldn’t do that, he couldn’t put someone in his position, alone out here for the rest of his life. But the idea was there now, and it ate away at him. He’d spend hours staring at Mobius in that pod, hands itching towards the controls, towards the “Emergency Revival” selection on the touch screen. He’d walk away, he’d walk back, he’d tell himself no, he’d dream about yes.

Eventually the loneliness starts to get at him again, and without even thinking of any consequences he can’t stand living like this anymore. He needs someone, anyone, please. He shaves off his beard, he showers for the first time in...when did he last shower? He makes himself look presentable and handsome then suddenly he’s pressing the button.

Bleary, but gorgeous blue eyes open, and suddenly Loki is faced with the inevitably of what he’d just done. Lies pour from his mouth, that there was a malfunction with the pods, that it seemed it was just the two of them, that he has no idea what had happened.

But this Mobius was a determined man, and before barely saying hello he was up out of the pod and down yanking out wires from the console. He wasn’t a mechanic but he knew a bit and was going to try and get it working again. Loki had tucked the few wires he’d cut out as he waited for Mobius to fully revive into the back pocket of his trousers. 

After some time, and with the help of Loki being nice and chatty and knowing more about the ship having been awake for longer, Mobius starts to relax, the initial fear and anger of knowing he was going to spend the rest of his life with just this curly haired man for company finally having to be accepted and put to one side.

Loki was so excited he couldn’t put it into words, he dragged Mobius everywhere, showed him the ship, got him playing as Player Two on all the games he’d grown so bored of, games that were now fun with him there. They drank at the bar together, making fun of Ob who didn’t understand he was being mocked and continued to smile autonomously, and talked about each others lives before, Mobius’ jet skis that he missed and Loki...well, Loki chose a set of lies and stuck to them.

Mobius was flabbergasted to find Loki had been eating the same breakfast and the same choice of 3 evening meals for 2 years, and got out his platinum access card that he'd saved up for years before embarking on this trip, and piled their table high with so much food Loki’s eyes practically bulged at the sight of it.

They floated around in space together, laughing, Loki having forgotten what his own laugh sounded like, and very much loving the sound of Mobius’. They’d sit together in the observation deck, side by side, watching through heavy filters as the ship passed by a nearby sun, and Loki would sit closer, one knee touching Mobius’, and Mobius wouldn’t move away.

Loki knew he’d fallen hard for Mobius, probably the moment he saw him really, the man had saved his life in a way Mobius would never know, so when Mobius knocked on the broken door of Loki’s penthouse suite, dressed in a smart dark suit and holding a bottle of champagne, asking Loki to join him for dinner, Loki could do nothing but grin.

It wasn’t long before they both ended up back at the penthouse, and both of their suits were discarded on the floor.

For a long time, everything was perfect. The food was perfect, the entertainment was perfect, the sex was perfect. Loki could not remember any point in his life where he’d been happier than stuck on this space ship now 97 years before landing, with a man so embedded into his heart he wasn’t sure if he could go just one day without being by his side.

Ob would serve them drinks with his ever-present grin, they’d swim naked in the pool with nothing but starlight coming in from the large windows to their space outside, and every night Loki would end up warm and sated and perfectly comfortable, wrapped up in those loving arms without a care in the world.

Loki could have spent the rest of his life without telling the man he truly loved how he really came to be awake on this ship. He’d pushed that knowledge far away deep inside him with all the other unpleasant secrets in his life. But then a meteor storm hits, and one little shitty meteor gets through the shields and knocks into something that starts making everything electrical, which is everything, go haywire. It doesn’t last long, the computer system was smart and had a way of fixing itself, but the disruptions went on for long enough that it caused Ob to start spurting out random conversations he’d had with Loki years ago, including suggesting that Loki wake up Mobius.

The held back fury in Mobius’ eyes as Loki approached him in the bar for their evening drink stops Loki in his tracks, wiping the grin from his face as he held onto the homemade ring in his pocket that he’d made from bits of scrap. He was going to ask tonight.

He'd never get a chance now.

He couldn’t lie now, and when Mobius asked him through suppressed rage if Loki had deliberately awoken him, deliberately stranded him here for the rest of his life, with no chance of getting home or to the colony or having any of his aspirations for his future come to light...Loki was silent for a moment, before the word “Yes” quietly passed his lips.

Mobius doesn’t hit him, he’s not that sort of man, but his rage comes out in full force and he yells, screams, throws a bar stool barely missing Loki’s head. He swears if he sees Loki again he’ll throw him out the airlock, to murder him just like Loki had done to him, before he smashes a glass at Loki’s feet and storms away, leaving Loki alone.

Loki is terrified, not just for the revelation of the truth, but what this would mean for him, for them, to be trapped on a ship not knowing if he’d wake up in the morning dead. One night that very thought almost came true, and Loki was awoken by Mobius straddling him where he lay and his fist punching into the pillow by his head as he yelled at him once more. Mobius wasn’t violent, he couldn’t hit him no matter how much he wanted to, so this was the only way to let out his frustration and pure anger.

Loki let him, awaiting for that fist to make contact, to hit his head and to be beaten to a pulp. When Mobius reached for the knife he had on him, part of him knowing he’d never use it but just so angry, holding it to Loki’s throat...only then did he stop.

Loki still hadn’t said a word.

“Why are you just lying there? Why aren’t you telling me stop?!” he demanded through panting breaths, but Loki just continued to stare up at him, eyes so terribly, terribly sad, and didn’t say a word.

He deserved it. After what he’d done, he deserved to be killed by the love of his life.

Mobius stared at him, and for a moment his own eyes flashed a mirror of Loki’s loneliness, before he let out a frustrated yell and throws the knife to the floor, getting up and disappearing as quickly as he came.

Loki doesn’t see him for a long time afterwards, except for meals, where they’re forced into the same room. Mobius no longer gives him any of his constantly changing and delicious food, and is stuck with the same sloppy cereal, looking utterly dejected. Mobius always takes his food somewhere else, away from him, and Loki could see how much Mobius still hated him, so never said a word.

Eventually Loki figures out how to get on the speaker system for the ship, and knowing Mobius is out there somewhere he starts to tell the truth. The real truth. About how he was the son of the famous war criminal Odin, the reason for half the wars on the ravished earth, but Loki wanted nothing to do with him anymore, so had run, run as far as he could, trying to escape his connection with him and so sneaking on board this ship that would take him billions of miles away to start a new life. That he woke up not through a mechanical fault, but because he wasn’t supposed to be there.   He told him how he’d tried to kill himself, how seeing Mobius saved his life, about how long he’d spent wondering if he could wake him up. He admitted he knew what he did was wrong, but he was so desperate, so desperately desperate, that he wasn’t thinking right. All he could think of was that a choice between eternal loneliness, or Mobius, he picked Mobius.

He knew it was wrong, knew it was selfish, and he was so so sorry, but as he was being honest, he’d do it again. He said he knew Mobius hated him now, and he had every right to, but Loki still loved him, forever would love him, and if there was any chance at all of reconciling this, to please, say something the next time they ran into each other. Please. Please. 

“Eternal loneliness is not a good prospect, believe me...I know.” he sobs.

But the only words Mobius says to him the next time they see each other, are said softly, and dangerously:

“You’re a murderer.”

And all hope is lost for Loki.

Months go by, and strange things keep happening on the ship, flickering lights, the little cleaning robots going haywire, the gravity going in the swimming pool area, nearly drowning Loki as he floated upwards in ball of water he couldn’t get out of.

He wished he had drowned.

Mobius still hadn’t said anything else, but when they did run into each other, Mobius would at least look back at him as they past, not that Loki had noticed as he kept his head bowed away in shame. More and more times Mobius’ eyes would linger on him, and more and more times it was less anger, more...something else, something calm.

Mobius had tried to imagine, after Loki’s speech over the speaker system, what it would have been like to be alone for so long. He couldn’t image it really. He’d spoken to the repaired Ob about it, about exactly the kind of hardship Loki had gone through, and Ob would tell him how tragically terrible Loki had looked for a long time, and how morally conflicted he’d been over waking Mobius up. When he asked Ob if he knew Loki had tried to kill himself, Ob had just shrugged and smiled as always,

“I’m glad he didn’t. Who was I going to make drinks for? I would be very lonely too.”

Something had been tugging inside Mobius for almost a year now, every time he saw Loki, and saw just how dejected he looked.  It was difficult to remain angry with the only other human being on the ship, and despite knowing what Loki had done, despite knowing that Mobius’ life was now permanently confined to these metal walls, he found himself...missing him. He missed their conversations, he missed the flirting, hell he missed that insufferable little sneer he did when he’d regain his high score from Mobius on one of the VR games. He missed the company. He missed his warmth in bed. Oh for goodness sake he missed that talkative obnoxious gorgeous little shit, and despite everything he still felt something for him. He’d loved him once, and it was still there, buried under alot of anger, but it was there.

He walked past Loki the next morning, holding a tray of bacon, eggs, sausages and toast with jam, placing the tray next to Loki’s pointless little cereal bowl and walking away without saying a word.

If he had turned around and seen that glimmer of hope in Loki’s eyes, he probably would have run back to him.

The electronic failures were getting worse, something truly wasn’t right, and it came to it that they were going to have to work together to find out what was wrong. For the first time they held a tentative conversation, and after a long search of the ship found the meteor from over a year ago and gone straight through the fusion engine, and not being repaired the damn thing was close to exploding. The release valve to vent the engine was smashed to bits, and knowing a bit about ships Loki knew there had to be a manual release from the outside.  Without even discussing it Loki puts on a space suit, Mobius asking what the hell he was doing.

“Well I can’t let you risk your life...I’ve done enough to you already.”

He pauses in putting on the helmet, quickly deciding to lean over to steal a kiss from Mobius before putting it on and picking up part of the heat shield off the engine that had broken. Mobius is rooted to the spot staring at him, before Loki heads outside the ship and down into the vent, releases the valve and uses the shield that barely covers his body as protection from the radiation that goes shooting past him. Mobius is yelling into his comm, telling Loki to get out of there, that he won’t survive this, that Loki was the one who woke him up he can’t leave him alone now, “Don’t leave me alone!”

The vent is too strong, too much, and eventually it blasts Loki away from the ship, heading off into space with a cracked visor, oxygen escaping fast. Mobius runs faster than ever before to the airlock, space suit on, Loki still slowly talking in his ear, saying he’s sorry for everything, that he wishes Mobius to be happy, to maybe try writing that book now, so when everyone else awakes they can read about the best passenger this ship will ever have. To know about the best man there ever was.

“SHUT UP LOKI!! I’m coming to get you! You think I’m gonna forgive you if you die I love you stay the fuck alive!!”

It was possibly the first time Loki had ever heard Mobius swear.

But the remaining space suit that Mobius uses is the one with the tether, and as he pushes himself off from the ship, floating quickly towards Loki who’s now quite far away, the tether pulls him short just inches from Loki’s outstretched hand. He can do nothing but watch that small, sad smile, obscured by the oxygen leaking from Loki’s helmet as he floats awa. 

“I love you...” Loki whispers, “and I’m sorry...for everything.”

“…..no.”

With fiercely determined eyes Mobius unhooks himself from the tether and cuts his own oxygen line, the releasing air pushing himself towards Loki, Mobius grabbing him and turning the line behind them to push them back towards the ship. By the time they get back inside and remove their helmets both are gasping for air, collapsing to the ground in a heaving heap. Loki then pushes the rest of the suit off him while Mobius is still on the ground, pounces on him, and kisses him hard. He pulls back quickly though, eyes asking if this is ok, and Mobius just cups the back of his head and brings him down for another kiss.

“We’re alive. And we’re staying that way. I love you.” Mobius grins.

They do the remaining repairs to the shield as best that can, and find themselves standing, hand in hand, in the main communal area that leads off to restaurants and clubs, Ob’s bar, and what would have been the night life of the ship.

“This place needs a little green, don’t you think?” Mobius asks.

In 95 years, the rest of the passengers and the crew would awake to a communal area filled with trees and flowers and small forest animals and birds, once all in suspended animation in the hold in a lot less complicated life pods, now all wild and free. And there, in a makeshift hut amongst the greenery, would lie a pile of books, now covered in dust, the series entitled;

‘For All Time – Always’ - by Mobius and Loki

[inlovewithhisblueeyes]

The Great Jewish Cook-off

Pairing: Walter Marshall x Jewish Reader

Prompt: Latkes from the 8 Days of Henry-kkah

Word Count: ~1.8k

Warnings: Mentions of sadness and depression in regards to the holidays and the current pandemic.

A/N: Happy Hanukkah. I wanted to get this done for the first day, but my depression reared it’s ugly head. I decided to start off this challenge by writing for my favorite bear. I’m feeling a bit homesick due to the fact I’m normally back home with my family at this time of year. So this piece reflects a bit of that.

A delicate blanket made of snowflakes had nestled itself over the streets of Minneapolis. Normally by the time Walter was evicted from his office at the station, this picturesque scene would have been turned into mucky slush. However, with the impending snowstorm on top of the current stay at home order, the snowy streets remained relatively undisturbed. Walking towards his car, he took in the sight before him; it was different to be caught up in it rather than watching this winter wonderland from his office window.

The tired detective let out a groan as he clamored into his freezing car. The sun was just beginning to set and bright oranges and reds danced across the wintery whiter stage that was this city. He quickly turned on the ignition and peeled out of his parking spot, eager to be out of the cold and in the arms of his girl. The ride home was rather uneventful due to the denizens of this icy city finally listening to restrictions set in place. At least, that’s what he had hoped. The amount of times Walter had been called to break up a party in the past few months would have astounded him had he not been dealing with humanity’s worst of the worst in homicide.

In addition, Faye had been participating in remote learning, which allowed her to blow up his phone throughout the day. It was bad enough that he had be relegated from homicide to deal with those covidiots, but having a stir-crazy teenager attached to her phone when she should be paying attention to her classes was surely wearing him down. He went from having a phone that could stay charged for a few days straight to having to charge it nightly due to his daughter’s antics. In hindsight, it was better than her spending her ample free time messaging strangers online. All he wanted now was a quiet night at home with his girlfriend; perhaps, cuddled up on the couch with some wine and watching whatever silly holiday movie piqued their interest.

The first thing he noticed as he pulled into the driveway was that your car was parked out front, yet the lights were off in the house. It was still rather light out so it wouldn’t have been the biggest deal in the world if Walter wasn’t a cop. Nevertheless, it caused the hairs on the back of his neck to stand up as he exited the vehicle. The curly haired man quickly removed his gun from his holster and began to walk towards the front door. With a swift turn of the door knob, he could tell that you had once again left the door unlocked. This was a continued point of contention in the relationship as the horrors of that dreadful day a few years back were ever present in his mind.

Granted, the two of you had not even met yet and most of the details of that brutal case were never to be disclosed to the public. Walter carefully opened the door and stepped into the house. He heard the crackle of the fire in the next room and quickly ascertained that his worst fears hadn’t come true. Sliding his gun back into the holster, Walter quietly toed off his boots and hung his jacket up in the closet. Then he took off his mask and set it on the table by the door. His sock covered feet padded against the hard wooden floor of the entryway as he made his way towards the living room. The electric fire was the only source of light in the room and he could scarcely make your sleeping form out on the couch.

It wasn’t like you to be asleep this early, but ever since the world shut down, things have been rather different around here. Walter silently leant down to give you a kiss on the cheek and to check to make sure you weren’t suffering from a fever. Grabbing his phone from his back pocket, he made his way over to the kitchen to get started on dinner. Just as he was about to go through the sea of texts from Faye, the detective noticed a faint smell of burnt food. He set his phone on the counter and quickly flicked on the lights.

Walter immediately saw the culprit of the smell sitting on the stove. The pan that was there had something black seared to its insides, yet it was too charred for him to tell further. Whatever you had made had clearly gone awry and you had quickly cleaned up almost all traces of your failed attempt. You were a good cook and always roped him into whatever cooking show was on tv; even Faye would join the two of you whenever she would stay over. You had spent your down time during the quarantine trying out new recipes; some were good enough to be added to the meal rotation, while others had failed to win approval across the board.

It was no bother to him to take your place as the cook tonight if it meant you had one less thing weighing you down. This time of year was hard on most people and adding in a pandemic only made things more difficult. Tossing the pan into the sink for a well deserved deep cleaning at a later time, Walter noticed his phone light up on the counter. Another text from Faye joined the countless others and now was as good a time as any to go through them.

Walter had to thank whoever blessed him with his daughter and her daily text spams. The mystery of the burned food had been solved without having to wake you. Clearly, you had a bit of trouble with the latkes, but luckily for you now he was home to assist in anyway you needed. Hanukkah dinner could be a team effort. The curly haired man made quick work of getting the pan you had been using clean before he made his way over to the couch you were on. Getting down on bended knee in front of your sleeping form, he gently placed a hand on you to wake you up.

“Sweetheart…would you consider rejoining the land of the living?” He whispered.

“Too cozy,” you grumbled as you pulled an arm up to cover your eyes.

“I bet you are, but you won’t be if I take this blanket,” Walter chuckled.

That got you to sit up and stare blearily at him. “You wouldn’t dare let me freeze” you replied to which he raised an eyebrow at you as if to say try me.

You sighed heavily and pulled the blanket off you before folding and returning it to its spot over the back of the couch. Your bear of a man sat down beside you and gently pat his thigh, the universal signal for you to come cuddle up on his lap. You eagerly shot up and made yourself cozy on his lap, burying your face in his neck and breathing him in. His hand came up to slowly stroke your back as the two of you cuddled in silence.

“What’s on your mind, love?” He questioned as he kissed the top of your head.

You tried to hold back the tears that were eager to pour out, “I miss my family, Walt. I’m so used to spending at least some of the holidays with them. Then my cousins decided to have a latke cook-off since we can’t get together and I burned them. I have no idea how I did it. It was awful and it made me wish that my gram was here to help me fix it. B-b-but she’s back home and I’m here and I don’t know when I’ll get to cook with her again.” The last part came out in as sob.

“Shhhhh honey. Shhhh. It’s ok,” Walter murmured into your hair and he hugged you tightly as you cried into his neck.

It took a few minutes for all your sadness and frustration to be sobbed out. The detective remained the strong beacon of light that his girl needed to get through this storm of emotions. He whispered his love and praises into your hair, never letting go of you even for a second. You needed to get everything out that you been bundling up in inside. When the last remaining tears had fallen and your sniffles had abated, you slowly lifted your head to look at him.

“Well I think together we can try and kick those cousins of yours’ arses, sweetheart. What do you say?”

“I’d say let’s try to save Hanukkah.”

“Good. Up we get,” Walter said, giving a small swat to your butt.

You quickly clamored off of his lap and hurried into the kitchen to get out the supplies. Walter followed after you and waited for further instructions. The two of started cleaning and shredding the potatoes. You even turned it into a game to see who shred the most potatoes the fastest and it turned out a tie. Soon you added the rest of the ingredients to the bowl while he heated the pan. Walter and you worked together as a perfect team; joking around and laughing as you fried the latkes.

Walter set the table as you continued to cook up you Hanukkah meal. He grabbed the applesauce and ketchup since that what you recommended to accompany them. When you had finally finished cooking the last few and added them to the growing pile, you took the precious cargo over to your eager boyfriend. Each latke turned out a perfect golden brown that was hard on the outside and softer in the center. With the first bite, the two of you moaned at the salty, oily goodness.

“Now you see why we only make them once a year,” You hummed in between bites.

“I do indeed. Faye asked you to save her some.”

“Well we did make enough to feed an army. The only issue is you big guy,” You teased,” But yes I can save her some.”

You finished the latke you were on and padded over to the kitchen to grab a container before returning. You carefully placed the latkes inside and headed back to the kitchen to stick them in the freezer for the next time Faye was over. The two of you contentedly ate as many latkes as your stomachs could handle. With your stomachs and hearts full, the table was cleared and you both returned to curl up by the fire.

“Hey Walter,” You started, smiling up at him.

“Yes, love.”

“Thank you.”

[dah-knee]

I’m just gonna do this whole thing. Because I’m bored.

1. I’m 135 lbs. my ugw is 122-127.

2. I’m 5’6. I love my height. Being taller makes burning calories easier. I also like being the average height for a girl

3. Too lazy to put a picture but Kendall J is my thinspiration. I fucking hate her. But she’s so pretty. I hate it

4. I don’t really have any fears abt weight loss. I guess gaining it back LMFAO

5. I honestly do wanna lose weight for me. I just wanna look nice naked LOL and I’m into fashion, so having everything look nice is a plus.

6. I don’t reallyyyyy binge tbh. I don’t restrict heavily AT ALL. I don’t even have an ED, just a bad relationship with food. I actually eat about 2200 calories a day and exercise off 750 of them. I hav an Apple Watch so burning off 750 is just routine. I just eat 2200 to maintain in a calorie deficit without slowing down my metabolism too bad. When I do binge, it’s on sweet stuff. It happens randomly tbh, or when my mom has mad something she really wants me to try.

7. My mom knows I’m constantly trying to lose weight and doesn’t really care. She cares enough to make sure I’ve eaten though. My dad doesn’t know. He knows I don’t like how I look though. He’s always super kind and tells me I’m beautiful though😢

8. My mom and sister made a ton of negative comments on my weight about a year and a half ago. Not anymore though. An old friend also said something. Those things really did stick with me.

9. My workout routine is SUPER simple. Maybe: run in the morning and burn off 100 calories. If I have school/work that’s another 300/400. Run at night and burn about 200. Everyday tasks totals up to about 100 too. On weekends I run a little more to makeup for being at home all day. I have a treadmill. I also have a gym membership but I don’t use it much anymore tbh. Thinking of canceling it.

10. The hardest thing I gave up is 100% chips and Nutella. God do I miss them.

11. I don’t have a favourite thinspo blog because I’m not consistent on here lol.

12. I eat a yogurt parfait/ smoothie and lunch and dinner are totally random.

13. I’m losing weight a healthy way. I’ve done heavy restriction of 1100 and gained ALL my weight back. Eating 1600 keeps the weight off.

14. My UGW is 122-127. Hoping by this Christmas and if anything backfires DEFINITELY before I start University in Sept.

15. I would not consider vegan Or vegetarianism. I love chicken too much and think it’s an amazing source of protein.

16. Decided to lose weight around July 2020.

17. I do jot have an eating disorder because I eat enough.

18. My weakness is chocolate bars. My dad has always bought one a week for me since I was kid. I hold it to close to my heart to not eat it.

19. Last time I ate fast food was… yesterday LOL

20. I don’t believe in diets.

21. LITERALLT everything. But typically I’m a size medium and a size 6/8 in pants.

22. My lowest was 130. I gained due to heavy restrictions.

23. Originally the media did not play a Role, but now it does.

24. Don’t like the pro terms at all.

25. Never purged I don’t wanna ruin my teeth.

26. JAWLINES AND SKINNY LEGS. God those both excite for hitting my ugw

27. I do t really “deal” with being around food. I like good lol

28. Don’t care much for the gap. Just wanna be skinny. Gap would be nice tho

29. Everyone’s beautiful. Confidence yet humbility is especially beautiful

30. Fact about me: I love interior design!

[petulantskeptic]

Death of the calorie

For more than a century we’ve counted on calories to tell us what will make us fat. Peter Wilson says it’s time to bury the world’s most misleading measure BY PETER WILSON The first time that Salvador Camacho thought he was going to die he was sitting in his father’s Chrysler sedan with a friend listening to music. The 22-year-old engineering student was parked near his home in the central Mexican city of Toluca and in the fading evening light he didn’t notice two tattooed men approach. Tori Amos’s hit, “Bliss”, had just started playing when the gang members pointed guns at the young men. So began a 24-hour ordeal. Strong willed and solidly built, Camacho was singled out as the more stubborn of the pair. He was blindfolded and beaten. One robber eventually threw him to the ground, put a gun to the back of his head and told him it was time to die. He passed out, waking in a field with his hands tied behind his back, almost naked. Camacho survived but, traumatised, he sank into depression. Soon he was drinking heavily and binge eating. His weight ballooned from a trim 70kg to 103kg. That led to his second near-death experience, eight years later, in 2007. He remembers waking up and blinking at bright lights: he was being wheeled on a stretcher into a hospital emergency ward, with an attack of severe arrhythmia, or irregular heart beat. “A cardiologist told me that if I didn’t lose weight and get my health under control I would be dead in five years,” he says. That second crisis forced Camacho belatedly to deal with the trauma of the first. To help with what he now understands was post-traumatic stress disorder, he started having counselling and taking anti-depressants and anti-anxiety drugs. To address his physical health, he tried to lose weight. This effort propelled him to the centre of one of the most fraught scientific debates of our age: the calorie wars, a fierce disagreement about diet and weight control. Today, more than a decade after his cardiologist’s stark warning, Camacho lives in the Swiss city of Basel. He is relaxed and confident, except when two topics come up. When he recounts his kidnapping his gaze drops, his smile vanishes and he becomes noticeably quieter, although he says his panic attacks have virtually disappeared. The other touchy topic is weight control, which causes him to shake his head in anger at what he and millions of other dieters have gone through. “It’s just ridiculous,” he says with exasperation and a touch of venom. “People are living with real pain and guilt and all they get is advice that is confused or just plain wrong.” The guidance that Camacho’s doctors gave him, along with a string of nutritionists and his own online research, was unanimous. It would be familiar to the millions of people who have ever tried to diet. “Everybody tells you that to lose weight you have to eat less and move more,” he says, “and the way to do that is to count your calories.” At his heaviest, Camacho’s body-mass index – the ratio of his height to his weight – reached 35.6, well above the 30 mark that doctors define as clinically obese. Most government guidelines indicated that, as a man, he needed 2,500 calories a day to maintain his weight (the target for women is 2,000). Nutritionists told Camacho that if he ate fewer than 2,000 calories a day, a weekly “deficit” of 3,500 would mean that he would lose 0.5kg a week. With a desk job as a planning engineer in a Mexican hospital, he knew it would take real discipline to trim his pudgy frame. But as his kidnappers had quickly realised, he is an unusually determined character. He began getting up before dawn each day to run 10km. He also started accounting for every morsel of food he consumed. “I filled in Excel spreadsheets every night, every week and every month listing everything I ate. It became a real obsession for me,” says Camacho. Out went the Burger King Whoppers, fried tacos packed with pork and cheese, and tortas (Mexican sandwiches filled with meat, refried beans, avocado and peppers). Out too went his usual steady flow of beer and wine. In came carefully measured low-fat cheese and turkey sandwiches, salads, canned peach juice, Gatorade and Coke Zero, with three Special-K low-calorie diet bars a day. “I was always tired and hungry and I would get really moody and distracted,” he says. “I was thinking about food all the time.” He was constantly told that if he got the maths right – consuming fewer calories than he burned each day – the results would soon show. “I really did everything you are supposed to do,” he insists with the tone of a schoolboy who completed his homework yet still failed a big test. He bought a battery of exercise monitoring devices to measure how many calories he was expending on his runs. “I was told to exercise for at least 45 minutes at least four or five times a week. I actually ran for more than an hour every day.” He kept to low-fat, low-calorie food for three years. It simply didn’t work. At one point he lost about 10kg but his weight rebounded, though he still restricted his calories. Dieters the world over will be familiar with Camacho’s frustrations. Most studies show that more than 80% of people regain any lost weight in the long term. And like him, when we fail, most of us assume that we are too lazy or greedy – that we are at fault. As a general rule it is true that if you eat vastly fewer calories than you burn, you’ll get slimmer (and if you consume far more, you’ll get fatter). But the myriad faddy diets flogged to us each year belie the simplicity of the formula that Camacho was given. The calorie as a scientific measurement is not in dispute. But calculating the exact calorific content of food is far harder than the confidently precise numbers displayed on food packets suggest. Two items of food with identical calorific values may be digested in very different ways. Each body processes calories differently. Even for a single individual, the time of day that you eat matters. The more we probe, the more we realise that tallying calories will do little to help us control our weight or even maintain a healthy diet: the beguiling simplicity of counting calories in and calories out is dangerously flawed. The calorie is ubiquitous in daily life. It takes top billing on the information label of most packaged food and drinks. Ever more restaurants list the number of calories in each dish on their menus. Counting the calories we expend has become just as standard. Gym equipment, fitness devices around our wrists, even our phones tell us how many calories we have supposedly burned in a single exercise session or over the course of a day. It wasn’t always thus. For centuries, scientists assumed that it was the mass of food consumed that was significant. In the late 16th century an Italian physician named Santorio Sanctorius invented a “weighing chair”, dangling from a giant scale, in which he sat at regular intervals to weigh himself, everything he ate and drank, and all the faeces and urine he produced. Despite 30 years of compulsive chair dangling, Sanctorius answered few of his own questions about the impact that his consumption had on his body. Only later did the focus shift to the energy different foodstuffs contained. In the 18th century Antoine Lavoisier, a French aristocrat, worked out that burning a candle required a gas from the air – which he named oxygen – to fuel the flame and release heat and other gases. He applied the same principle to food, concluding that it fuels the body like a slow-burning fire. He built a calorimeter, a device big enough to hold a guinea pig, and measured the heat the creature generated to estimate how much energy it was producing. Unfortunately the French revolution – specifically the guillotine – cut short his thinking on the subject. But he had started something. Other scientists later constructed “bomb calori­meters” in which they burned food to measure the heat – and thus the potential energy – released from it. The calorie – which comes from “calor”, the Latin for “heat” – was originally used to measure the efficiency of steam engines: one calorie is the energy required to heat 1kg of water by one degree Celsius. Only in the 1860s did German scientists begin using it to calculate the energy in food. It was an American agricultural chemist, Wilbur Atwater, who popularised the idea that it could be used to measure both the energy contained in food and the energy the body expended on things like muscular work, tissue repair and powering the organs. In 1887, after a trip to Germany, he wrote a series of wildly popular articles in Century, an American magazine, suggesting that “food is to the body what fuel is to the fire.” He introduced the public to the notion of “macronutrients” – carbohydrates, protein and fat – so called because the body needs a lot of them. Today many of us want to monitor our calorie consumption in order to lose or maintain our weight. Atwater, the son of a Methodist minister, was motivated by the opposite concern: at a time when malnutrition was widespread, he sought to help poor people find the most cost-effective items to fill themselves up. To see how much energy different macronutrients provided to the body, he fed samples of an “average” American diet of that era – which he believed to be heavy in molasses cookies, barley meal and chicken gizzards – to a group of male students in a basement at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. For up to 12 days at a time a volunteer would eat, sleep and lift weights while sealed inside a six-foot-high chamber measuring four feet wide by seven feet deep. The energy in each meal was calculated by burning identical foods in a bomb calorimeter. The walls were filled with water, and changes in its temperature allowed Atwater to calculate how much energy the students’ bodies were generating. His team collected the students’ faeces and burned that too, to see how much energy had been left in the body in the digestion process. This was pioneering stuff for the 1890s. Atwater eventually concluded that a gram of either carbohydrate or protein made an average of four calories of energy available to the body, and a gram of fat offered an average of 8.9 calories, a figure later rounded up to nine calories for convenience. We now know far more about the workings of the human body: Atwater was right that some of a meal’s potential energy was excreted, but had no idea that some was also used to digest the meal itself, and that the body expends different amounts of energy depending on the food. Yet more than a century after igniting the faeces of Wesleyan students, the numbers Atwater calculated for each macro­nutrient remain the standard for measuring the calories in any given food stuff. Those experiments were the basis of Salvador Camacho’s daily calorific arithmetic. Atwater transformed the way the public thought about food, with his simple belief that “a calorie is a calorie”. He counselled the poor against eating too many leafy green vegetables because they weren’t sufficiently dense in energy. By his account, it made no difference whether calories came from chocolate or spinach: if the body absorbed more energy than it used, then it would store the excess as body fat, causing you to put on weight. That idea captured the public imagination. In 1918 the first book was published in America based on the notion that a healthy diet was no more complicated than the simple addition and subtraction of calories. “You may eat just what you like – candy, pie, cake, fat meat, butter, cream but count your calories!” wrote Lulu Hunt Peters in “Diet and Health”. “Now that you know you can have the things you like, proceed to make your menus containing very little of them.” The book sold millions. By the 1930s the calorie had become entrenched in both the public mind and government policy. Its exclusive focus on the energy content of food, rather than its vitamin content, say, went virtually unchallenged. Rising incomes and greater female participation in the workforce meant that by the 1960s people were eating out more often or buying prepared food, so they wanted more information about what they were consuming. Nutritional information on foodstuffs was widespread but haphazard; many items carried outlandish claims about their health benefits. Labelling became standardised and mandatory in America only in 1990. The emphasis and use of this information shifted too. By the late 1960s, obesity was becoming a pressing health concern as people became more sedentary and started eating highly processed foods and lots of sugar. As the number of people who needed to lose weight grew, changing diets became the focus of attention. So began the war on fat, in which Atwater’s calorie calculations were an unwitting ally. Because counting calories was seen as an objective arbiter of the health qualities of a foodstuff, it seemed logical that the most calorie-laden part of any food item – fat – must be bad for you. By this measure, dishes low in calories, but rich in sugar and carbohydrates, seemed healthier. People were increasingly willing to blame fat for many of the health ills of modern life, helped along by the sugar lobby: in 2016, a researcher at the University of California uncovered documents from 1967 showing that sugar companies secretly funded studies at Harvard University designed to blame fat for the growing obesity epidemic. That the dietary “fat” found in olive oil, bacon and butter is branded with the same word as the unwanted flesh around our middles made it all the easier to demonise. A us Senate committee report in 1977 recommended a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet for all, and other governments followed suit. The food industry responded with enthusiasm, removing fat, the most calorie-dense of macronutrients, from food items and replacing it with sugar, starch and salt. As a bonus, the thousands of new cheap and tasty “low-cal” and “low-fat” products which Camacho used to diet tended to have longer shelf lives and higher profit margins. But this didn’t lead to the expected improvements in public health. Instead, it coincided almost exactly with the most dramatic rise in obesity in human history. Between 1975 and 2016 obesity almost tripled worldwide, according to the World Health Organisation (who): nearly 40% of over-18s – some 1.9bn adults – are now overweight. That contributed to a rapid rise in cardiovascular diseases (mainly heart disease and stroke) which became the leading cause of death worldwide. Rates of type-2 diabetes, which is often linked to lifestyle and diet, have more than doubled since 1980. It wasn’t only wealthy countries that saw such trends. In Mexico, middle-class urban families such as Camacho’s got fatter too. As a child Camacho was fit and loved playing football. But at the age of ten, in 1988, he was one of many young Mexicans who started stacking on weight as increasing trade with America saw cheap sweets and fizzy drinks flood the shops, a process known as the “Coca-colonisation” of Mexico. “There were suddenly all these flavours you had never tasted, with chocolates, candies and Dr Pepper,” Camacho remembers: “Overnight I got fat.” When his uncles teased him about his bulging waistline, he cut back on sweets and stayed in good shape until his kidnapping 12 years later. Other Mexicans just kept bulking up. In 2013 Mexico overtook America as the most obese country in the world. To combat this trend, governments worldwide have enshrined calorie-counting in policy. The who attributes the “fundamental cause” of obesity worldwide to “an energy imbalance between calories consumed and calories expended”. Governments the world over persist in offering the same advice: count and cut calories. This has infiltrated ever more areas of life. In 2018 the American government ordered food chains and vending machines to provide calorie details on their menus, to help consumers make “informed and healthful decisions”. Australia and Britain are headed in similar directions. Government bodies advise dieters to record their meals in a calorie journal to lose weight. The experimental efforts of a 19th-century scientist stand barely changed – and are barely questioned. Millions of dieters give up when their calorie-counting is unsuccessful. Camacho was more stubborn than most. He took photos of his meals to record his intake more accurately, and would log into his calorie spreadsheets from his phone. He thought about every morsel he ate. And he bought a proliferation of gadgets to track his calorie output. But he still didn’t lose much weight. One problem was that his sums were based on the idea that calorie counts are accurate. Food producers give impressively specific readings: a slice of Camacho’s favourite Domino’s double pepperoni pizza is supposedly 248 calories (not 247 nor 249). Yet the number of calories listed on food packets and menus are routinely wrong. Susan Roberts, a nutritionist at Tufts University in Boston, has found that labels on American packaged foods miss their true calorie counts by an average of 8%. American government regulations allow such labels to understate calories by up to 20% (to ensure that consumers are not short-changed in terms of how much nutrition they receive). The information on some processed frozen foods misstates their calorific content by as much as 70%. That isn’t the only problem. Calorie counts are based on how much heat a foodstuff gives off when it burns in an oven. But the human body is far more complex than an oven. When food is burned in a laboratory it surrenders its calories within seconds. By contrast, the real-life journey from dinner plate to toilet bowl takes on average about a day, but can range from eight to 80 hours depending on the person. A calorie of carbohydrate and a calorie of protein both have the same amount of stored energy, so they perform identically in an oven. But put those calories into real bodies and they behave quite differently. And we are still learning new insights: American researchers discovered last year that, for more than a century, we’ve been exaggerating by about 20% the number of calories we absorb from almonds. The process of storing fat – the “weight” many people seek to lose – is influenced by dozens of other factors. Apart from calories, our genes, the trillions of bacteria that live in our gut, food preparation and sleep affect how we process food. Academic discussions of food and nutrition are littered with references to huge bodies of research that still need to be conducted. “No other field of science or medicine sees such a lack of rigorous studies,” says Tim Spector, a professor of genetic epidemiology at Kings College in London. “We can create synthetic dna and clone animals but we still know incredibly little about the stuff that keeps us alive.” What we do know, however, suggests that counting calories is very crude and often misleading. Think of a burger, the kind of food that Camacho eschewed during his early efforts to lose weight. Take a bite and the saliva in your mouth starts to break it down, a process that continues when you swallow, transporting the morsel towards your stomach and beyond to be churned further. The digestive process transforms the protein, carbohydrates and fat in the burger into their basic compounds so that they are tiny enough to be absorbed into the bloodstream via the small intestine to fuel and repair the trillions of cells in the body. But the basic molecules from each macronutrient play very different roles within the body. All carbohydrates break down into sugars, which are the body’s main fuel source. But the speed at which your body gets its fuel from food can be as important as the amount of fuel. Simple carbohydrates are swiftly absorbed into the bloodstream, providing a fast shot of energy: the body absorbs the sugar from a can of fizzy drink at a rate of 30 calories a minute, compared with two calories a minute from complex carbohydrates such as potatoes or rice. That matters, because a sudden hit of sugar prompts the rapid release of insulin, a hormone that carries the sugar out of the bloodstream and into the body’s cells. Problems arise when there is too much sugar in the blood. The liver can store some of the excess, but any that remains is stashed as fat. So consuming large quantities of sugar is the fastest way to create body fat. And, once the insulin has done its work, blood-sugar levels slump, which tends to leave you hungry, as well as plumper. Getting fat is a consequence of civilisation. Our ancestors would have enjoyed a heavy hit of sugar perhaps four times a year, when a new season produced fresh fruit. Many now enjoy that kind of sugar kick every day. The average person in the developed world consumes 20 times as much sugar as people did even during Atwater’s time. But it is a different story when you eat complex carbohydrates such as cereals. These are strung together from simple carbohydrates, so they also break down into sugar, but because they do so more slowly, your blood-sugar levels remain steadier. The fruit juices that Camacho was encouraged to drink contained fewer calories than one of his wholegrain buns but the bread delivered less of a sugar hit and left him feeling satiated for longer. Other macronutrients have different functions. Protein, the dominant component of meat, fish and dairy products, acts as the main building block for bone, skin, hair and other body tissues. In the absence of sufficient quantities of carbohydrates it can also serve as fuel for the body. But since it is broken down more slowly than carbohydrates, protein is less likely to be converted to body fat. Fat is a different matter again. It should leave you feeling fuller for longer, because your body splits it into tiny fatty acids more slowly than it processes carbohydrates or protein. We all need fat to make hormones and to protect our nerves (a bit like plastic coating protects an electric wire). Over millennia, fat has also been a crucial way for humans to store energy, allowing us to survive periods of famine. Nowadays, even without the risk of starvation, our bodies are programmed to store excess fuel in case we run out of food. No wonder a single measure – the energy content – can’t capture such complexity. Our fixation with counting calories assumes both that all calories are equal and that all bodies respond to calories in identical ways: Camacho was told that, since he was a man, he needed 2,500 calories a day to maintain his weight. Yet a growing body of research shows that when different people consume the same meal, the impact on each person’s blood sugar and fat formation will vary according to their genes, lifestyles and unique mix of gut bacteria. Research published this year showed that a certain set of genes is found more often in overweight people than in skinny ones, suggesting that some people have to work harder than others to stay thin (a fact that many of us already felt intuitively to be true). Differences in gut microbiomes can alter how people process food. A study of 800 Israelis in 2015 found that the rise in their blood-sugar levels varied by a factor of four in response to identical food. Some people’s intestines are 50% longer than others: those with shorter ones absorb fewer calories, which means that they excrete more of the energy in food, putting on less weight. The response of your own body may also change depending on when you eat. Lose weight and your body will try to regain it, slowing down your metabolism and even reducing the energy you spend on fidgeting and twitching your muscles. Even your eating and sleeping schedules can be important. Going without a full night’s sleep may spur your body to create more fatty tissue, which casts a grim light on Camacho’s years of early-morning exertion. You may put on more weight eating small amounts over 12-15 hours than eating the same food in three distinct meals over a shorter period. There’s a further weakness in the calorie-counting system: the amount of energy we absorb from food depends on how we prepare it. Chopping and grinding food essentially does part of the work of digestion, making more calories available to your body by ripping apart cell walls before you eat it. That effect is magnified when you add heat: cooking increases the proportion of food digested in the stomach and small intestine, from 50% to 95%. The digestible calories in beef rises by 15% on cooking, and in sweet potato some 40% (the exact change depends on whether it is boiled, roasted or microwaved). So significant is this impact that Richard Wrangham, a primatologist at Harvard University, reckons that cooking was necessary for human evolution. It enabled the neurological expansion that created Homo sapiens: powering the brain consumes about a fifth of a person’s metabolic energy each day (cooking also means we didn’t need to spend all day chewing, unlike chimps). The difficulty in counting accurately doesn’t stop there. The calorie load of carbohydrate-heavy items such as rice, pasta, bread and potatoes can be slashed simply by cooking, chilling and reheating them. As starch molecules cool they form new structures that are harder to digest. You absorb fewer calories eating toast that has been left to go cold, or leftover spaghetti, than if they were freshly made. Scientists in Sri Lanka discovered in 2015 that they could more than halve the calories potentially absorbed from rice by adding coconut oil during cooking and then cooling the rice. This made the starch less digestible so the body may take on fewer calories (they have yet to test on human beings the precise effects of rice cooked in this way). That’s a bad thing if you’re malnourished, but a boon if you’re trying to lose weight. Different parts of a vegetable or fruit may be absorbed differently too: older leaves are tougher, for example. The starchy interior of sweetcorn kernels is easily digested but the cellulose husk is impossible to break down and passes through the body untouched. Just think about that moment when you look into the toilet bowl after eating sweetcorn. As with so many dieters, Camacho’s efforts to accurately track his calories “in” were doomed. But so too were his attempts to track his calories “out”. The message from many public authorities and food producers, especially fast-food companies that sponsor sports events, is that even the unhealthiest foods will not make you fat if you do your part by taking plenty of exercise. Exercise does, of course, have clear health benefits. But unless you’re a professional athlete, it plays a smaller part in weight control than most people believe. As much as 75% of the average person’s daily energy expenditure comes not through exercise but from ordinary daily activities and from keeping your body functioning by digesting food, powering organs and maintaining a regular body temperature. Even drinking iced water – which delivers no energy – forces the body to burn calories to maintain its preferred temperature, making it the only known case of consuming something with “negative” calories. A popular expression in English tells us not to “compare apples and oranges” and assume them to be the same: yet calories put pizzas and oranges, or apples and ice cream, on the same scale, and deems them equal. After three years of dedicated calorie-counting Camacho changed tack. While recovering from running the 2010 marathon in San Diego he took up Crossfit training, an exercise regime that includes high-intensity training and weightlifting. There he met people using a very different method to control their weight. Like him, they exercised regularly. But rather than limiting their calories, they ate natural foods, what Camacho calls “stuff from a real plant, not an industrial plant”. Fed up with feeling like a hungry failure, he decided to give it a go. He ditched his heavily processed low-calorie products and focused on the quality of his food rather than quantity. He stopped feeling ravenous all the time. “It sounds simple but I decided to listen to my body and eat whenever I was hungry but only when I was hungry, and to eat real food, not food ‘products’,” he says. He went back to items that he’d long banned himself from eating. He had his first rasher of bacon in three years and enjoyed cheese, whole-fat milk and steaks. He immediately felt less hungry and happier. More surprising, he quickly began to lose his extra fat. “I was sleeping so much better and within a couple of months I stopped the depression and anxiety medication,” he says. “I went from always feeling guilty and angry and afraid to feeling in control of myself and actually proud of my own body. Suddenly I could enjoy eating and drinking again.” The weight stayed off and in 2012 he moved to Heidelberg in Germany, a world away from the hectic streets of Mexico, to study for a masters degree in public health. “The idea hit me that I could combine my own experience with academic work to try to help other people overcome these various barriers that I had found.” After his masters he embarked on a doctorate on how to tackle obesity in Mexico. Today he is married to a German scholar, Erica Gunther, who has studied food systems around the world. Their diet includes things he used to shun, such as egg yolks, olive oil and nuts. Two days a week the couple stick to vegetarian meals but otherwise he devours steak, kidneys, liver and some of his favourite Mexican dishes – barbacoa (lamb), carnitas (pork) and tacos with grilled meat. His wife enjoys making a traditional Mexican sweet pastry called pan de muerto (bread of death). “Before I would have run an extra two hours to compensate for eating that but now I don’t care, I just make sure it is a treat, not an everyday thing.” Having spent years trying to forgo alcohol, he has a glass or two of wine several times a week, and goes for a beer with friends from his gym. Sweating through three or four workouts a week, he is as well-muscled as a professional rugby player. A stable 80kg, he has very little body fat, though he is still considered overweight by the body-mass-index charts, which rate many beefed-up professional athletes as too heavy. The only relapse of anxiety he suffers nowadays happens when he hears Tori Amos singing “Bliss” – the song playing when he was kidnapped – which he says “is a real pity because it’s a great song”. Today Camacho could be described as a calorie dissident, one of a small but growing number of academics and scientists who say that the persistence of calorie-counting compounds the obesity epidemic, rather than remedying it. Counting calories has disrupted our ability to eat the right amount of food, he says, and has steered us towards poor choices. In 2017 he wrote an academic paper that was one of the most savage attacks on the calorie system published in a peer-reviewed journal. “I’m actually embarrassed at what I used to believe,” he says. “I was doing everything I could to follow the official advice but it was totally wrong and I feel stupid for never even questioning it.” Given the vast evidence that calorie-counting is imprecise at best, and contributes to rising obesity at worst, why has it persisted? The simplicity of calorie-counting explains its appeal. Metrics that tell consumers the extent to which foods have been processed, or whether they will suppress hunger, are harder to understand. Faced with the calorie juggernaut, none has gained wide acceptance. The scientific and health establishment knows that the current system is flawed. A senior adviser to the un’s Food and Agriculture Organisation warned in 2002 that the Atwater “factors” of 4-4-9 at the heart of the calorie-counting system were “a gross oversimplification” and so inaccurate that they could mislead consumers into choosing unhealthy products because they understate the calories in some carbohydrates. The organisation said it would give “further consideration” to overhauling the system but 17 years later there is little momentum for change. It even rejected the idea of harmonising the many methods that are used in different countries – a label in Australia can give a different count from one in America for the same product. Officials at the who also acknowledge the problems of the current system, but say it is so entrenched in consumer behaviour, public policy and industry standards that it would be too expensive and disruptive to make big changes. The experiments that Atwater conducted a century ago, without calculators or computers, have never been repeated even though our understanding of how our bodies work is vastly improved. There is little funding or enthusiasm for such work. As Susan Roberts at Tufts University says, collecting and analysing faeces “is the worst research job in the world”. The calorie system, says Camacho, lets food producers off the hook: “They can say, ‘We’re not responsible for the unhealthy products we sell, we just have to list the calories and leave it to you to manage your own weight’.” Camacho and other calorie dissidents argue that sugar and highly processed carbohydrates play havoc with people’s hormonal systems. Higher insulin levels mean more energy is converted into fat tissues leaving less available to fuel the rest of the body. That in turn drives hunger and overeating. In other words the constant hunger and fatigue suffered by Camacho and other dieters may be symptoms of being overweight, rather than the cause of the problem. Yet much of the food industry defends the status quo too. To change how we assess the energy and health values of food would undermine the business model of many companies. The only major organisation to shift the emphasis beyond calories is one dedicated to helping its customers slim down: Weight Watchers. In 2001 the world’s best-known dieting firm introduced a points system that moved away from focusing exclusively on calories to also classifying foods according to their sugar and saturated fat content, and their impact on appetite. Chris Stirk, the firm’s general manager in Britain, says the organisation made the change because relying on calories to lose weight is “outdated”: “Science evolves daily, monthly, yearly, let alone since the 1800s.” Many of us know instinctively that not all calories are the same. A lollipop and an apple may contain similar numbers of calories but the apple is clearly better for us. But after a lifetime of hearing about the calorie and its role in supposedly foolproof diet advice we could be forgiven for being confused about how best to eat. It’s time to lay it to rest.

[notiimu]

Hunger

“Joël M. Lambert.” The doctor’s words echoed in the otherwise quiet doctor’s office. “Yes sir.” The man in front of the doctor spoke. The man looked frail. He had a thin frame and unusually silky hair. The man’s eyes were slightly bloodshot and he was sweating quite heavily. The doctor looked back to his documents as he spoke again. “What brings you here?”

The man swallowed before he began to talk again. “I’m... Hungry. Constantly.” He explained. “No matter how much I eat, I keep on being hungry.” The doctor jotted down the man’s words. “Could you describe your eating habits?” The doctor continued. The man, Joël, stayed quiet for a while, as if he was ashamed of what he was about to tell. “I eat a lot.” He started, “I have six big meals a day and I snack a lot during the day. It just doesn’t satisfy me like it should.” Joël looked down in shame. The doctor just took notes. “That sounds like an odd case...” He muttered before facing the frail man in front of him again. “We’re going to have to run some tests on you so we can find out what causes this.” He explained, “We’ll get your blood drawn today, but I would like to keep you here for a while so we can take some scans and test your thyroid.” The doctor explained. Joël, relieved, thanked the doctor. Maybe now he would finally find out what caused this nagging hunger! The doctor gave him directions to where he could get his blood drawn before sending him on his way. “I’ll see you back tomorrow.” They shook hands before they parted ways. The doctor moving on to the next patient, and Joël to the next doctor.

 The day after, Joël returned to the hospital. He met with his doctor again, who took him to his room. “This is where you’ll be staying for now.” The doctor explained him. “We’ll do our best to find out what’s bothering you as soon as possible.” This assured Joël, who thanked the doctor before entering his room. The room was small, but big enough to at least fit four beds and a few lockers. The only problem Joël saw was the lack of anything to store food in. But it was a hospital, after all. They would probably bring it to him, right? “Make yourself at home for now, We’ve scheduled a thorough examination in an hour.” With those words, the doctor left Joël in his room. Joël went to unpack his stuff in the locker assigned to him, looking forward to the examination as well as wondering if he would get any nice roommates. It would be a little lonely to be here all by himself, after all. The room suddenly filled with a loud rumbling noise. Ah, there it was, the hunger. Joël’s jaws started making a swallowing motion and he started to belch noisily. He needed food, he thought. An hour passed, and the doctor has returned to Joël’s room to escort him to the examination room. When he opened the door, he saw the state Joël was in. He was sweaty, drooling and looking for food. The room smelled heavily of body odor, which was logical considering how much the patient was sweating. The doctor cleared his throat, alerting the frail man of his presence. He looked his way, wiping some drool off his chin. “Can I perhaps eat something before the examination?” He asked calmly. The doctor looked at Joël in silence for a bit before he nodded. “I’ll ask the nurse to bring you some food there.” He told him. This was an unusual request, but they couldn’t have the patient act the way he was during the entire examination. “For now, please, follow me.” Joël obeyed, following the doctor calmly as he kept making swallowing motions as they went.

 There were two doctors waiting on them in the examination room. The two greeted the other doctor and their patient. As they began examination, the room filled up with the stench of sweat. Though it didn’t bother the two doctors examining Joël, the other doctor could barely stand it. The doctors focused mostly on the movement of the jaw and the patient’s swollen throat. “For how long have you had these complaints?” One of the doctors asked. Joël shrugged. “Since I was a small child, I think.” He explained. “My mother always complained about my appetite.” He chuckled. The other doctor wrote his response down. “By the time I was sixteen, I could eat a meal meant for six people and still not be satisfied.” He added.  As they went on with their examination, they found Joël was underweight, but had a lot of loose skin around his waist. “Was there a period in your life where you were overweight?” One of the doctors asked. “No.” Joël responded, “I have always been on the skinny side.” The doctors wrote it down. “Any digestive issues?” The other asked. This question seemed to make the skinny man rather uncomfortable. “Yes.” He responded eventually. “I am able to eat about anything, even non-edible things, without any issue.” He looked down. “And, well...” The patient fiddled with his hands and cleared his throat. “I got a chronic case of the runs.” He muttered. The doctors both nodded as they wrote it down. The frail man looked up in excitement when a nurse came in with food. Though it was a full meal for a grown adult, Joël found the amount to be a bit underwhelming. The doctors took this as their que to leave the room for a while and discuss.

 “I suspect Grave’s disease.” The first doctor spoke. “No, I don’t think it is. His diet is pretty abnormal.” The other doctor responded. “Not to mention he only checks two of the boxes for that.” The first doctor sighed and agreed. “Whatever it is, it’s most definitely hyperthyroidism. I want to run some blood tests.” “I agree. I think we should-“ Their discussion was cut short by the nurse, who came back outside, gagging. When asked what’s wrong, she looked at them with wide eyes. “It smells absolutely rancid in there.” She explained. “I don’t know what it is, but that man smells horrible.” The doctors exchanged looks before going back inside. As described, they were hit with a foul stench the moment they opened the door. They were surprised to find Joël having already finished his meal. “It might be a little rude to ask, but is there more?” He asked innocently. One of the doctors started speaking again, trying not to gag. “I think we gathered enough information for today.” The doctor managed to speak. Joël was escorted back to his room quickly before the examination room would be cleaned. The patient obviously was embarrassed by the ordeal, but didn’t want to speak up.

 After a week of research, examining and testing, the hospital had decided to put Joël on a controlled diet. His food intake would be reduced to 5 meals and two snacks a day, and slowly become less and less, until he would eventually go down to a healthy 3 meals and 2 snacks a day. As they progressed this, Joël started to show odd behaviors. Sometimes, he would sneak out of his room to go rummage through the trash, steal food from the cafeteria and sometimes eat from the plants that stood around the hall. The doctors could tell Joël wasn’t taking the treatment well, and decided they needed to take action. “It’s his thyroid. He needs medication.” One of the doctors suggested. “If it was just his thyroid, it wouldn’t explain the stench and the loose skin.” The other argued. Truly, the doctors were lost on what to do at this point. For now, they decided to give Joël medication to see how that would work for him. If they tackled one issue, it might just be easier to take on the other issues.

 The doctor, who had been on this case since the beginning, was assigned to bring Joël his first dose of the medication. Both to explain the treatment as well as see if he would even take it. The doctor opened the door after knocking, only to see the patient picking his teeth. He stood by the bin, which made the doctor assume he had been rummaging through the trash again. “Joël, I have good news for you.” He started. “You’re taking me off the diet?” Joël asked, hopeful. “No, but we do have these pills here.” The doctor showed Joël a bottle of pills, to great and clearly visible disappointment of the man. “I’m sorry, Joël, but the diet is necessary to help you recover your weight at a regular pace once we stabilize your thyroid.” The thin man looked down, understanding the reasoning, but being disappointed nonetheless. “If I take those pills, the hungry feeling will go away, right?” He asked. “Sort of.” The doctor responded. “They help your thyroid make the right amount of hormones again, so you won’t feel hungry all the time anymore.” The doctor explained as his patient listened carefully. “However, you will still feel hungry when you need to, like any healthy person.” Joël nodded, understanding. “I hope so. I’ve been so hungry, it’s almost unbearable.” He explained his doctor, who was glancing over at the trash can. “Have you been eating from there again? You were picking your teeth next to it when I came in.” The doctor asked. The bin was almost empty, except for what seemed to be a few tissues and some hair. “Oh, that. Well, you guys have a mouse problem. Or, well, had. You had one.” The frail man rubbed the back of his neck. “I was hungry and wasn’t thinking, so I took care of it.” The doctor looked back at his patient in horror. “You ATE mice?” He asked in shock. “Well, how else would I have done it?” The man responded. “Alright, you’re coming with me.” The doctor sighed. He had to get his patient checked again.

 Once again declared free of parasites, Joël was put back in his room. The hunger was slowly getting to him over time, as the pills didn’t seem to work for him and his diet was still very restricted. The constant swallowing motion of his throat, the belching and the chewing motions without anything to chew, started to hurt the young man. His teeth got damaged from all the grinding and the excessive drooling had left him feeling dehydrated. His room reeked bad enough for people to no longer want to come in, leaving Joël to feel isolated. He started contemplating if staying here was such a good idea after all. Surely, the doctors tried, but the treatment made him feel like he was going crazy. Joël spent the next days trying to chase whatever found itself in his room to eat, begging the doctors and nurses for more food, which he was denied. Still taken over by hunger, the frail man decided he needed to take drastic measures as he felt like he could no longer take the state he was in. He opened the door, which only was still unlocked so he could leave to go to the toilet, and went to the front desk, his eyes darting left and right, completely bloodshot as he walked the hallway, drooling as he went.

 “I want to quit my treatment.” The thin man demanded once at the desk. The hospital worker raised an eyebrow. “May I have your name?” She asked, half interested. “Joël Maxim Lambert.” The man responded as he wiped the drool from his face. “Date of birth?” The woman asked, typing in his name. “October 11th, 1993.” He managed to speak in between swallowing. “Let’s see... Joël Lambert... You’re here for extended research on your condition, it says.” The woman read out loud, pressing a button under her desk. “Yes, I am.” The young man responded. “I want to quit it. It’s done nothing for me other than make my issues worse.” He explained. “Anything you could possibly do for me?” His tone was desperate. The woman just shook her head as three large men appeared behind Joël. “You have to stay here until you’re discharged by the doctors. I can’t do much for you. I’m sorry.” The woman informed him. “Sorry sir, but you need to go back to your room.” One of the large men spoke. “No. No, I’m not going back!” Joël spoke, still drooling heavily as he grinded his teeth in a chewing motion. Not listening to the fragile looking man, the three men restrained the fighting patient and carried him back to his room.

 It’s been three days since Joël tried to escape his personal torture, as he liked to call it. The door was now locked and he was given a port-a-potty since his access to a regular toilet was denied. The other three beds in his room were removed to prevent him from eating them. As weird as it sounds, he had tried it. Now, with his lacking diet, he had resorted to eating the only thing he could. Gross, but to him, necessary. Though the food he’d eat would still be enough for two average people to survive, for him, it wasn’t enough. Here he was, a man in his mid-twenties, no family to contact, out of a job, literally eating his own shit. God, he hated it here. He jolted up when he heard the door unlock and open. The doctor stood there with an unfamiliar man. “Joël, I’d like you to meet Dr. Dubois. He’s a psychiatrist.” Joël wiped some drool off his chin with his left hand before shaking the other man’s hand with his right hand. “Hello there, I heard it wasn’t going too well with you, so I came to have a talk.” Dr. Dubois told Joël, who seemed thankful to finally have some human contact for a while. “Would you like to talk here, or would you like to come to my office to talk?” He then suggested. The thin man sighed with a smile. “It’s cause it smells here, huh?” He asked the psychiatrist, who shrugged in response. “Let’s do it in your office then.” He responded, just wanting to get out of this room for a bit.

 “So, why don’t we start with telling something about yourself?” Dr. Dubois asked. The frail looking man nodded in response, clearing his throat. “Well, I’m Joël Lambert, I’m 25 years old and I come from France. I moved not too far from here in 2016.” He explained. “You’ve only lived here for two years, then?” Joël nodded in response. “My parents wanted me out as quick as possible. I made some money doing some shows on the internet and I used it to move here.” “What kind of shows?” Dr. Dubois asked, jotting down the conversation on his notepad as they went. “Me stuffing my face with food, mostly. I have an unusual appetite, which is why I’m here in the first place.” The psychiatrist wrote it all down. “How do you like it here?” He then asked. Joël fell silent, looking offended at the question. “Gee, they locked me up and are basically starving me, I haven’t heard anything of a treatment for the past two weeks and my hunger is driving me nuts. Obviously I must love it here.” He responded sarcastically. “And how does that make you feel?” Dr. Dubois added. The other man just huffed. “It makes me feel forgotten. I want to be treated for my hunger and I’m fairly sure a simple diet is not going to work.” He crossed his arms. “They said it’s my thyroid, but they have stopped giving me the pills they prescribed me because they fear I might overdose.” The other man nodded, writing it all down. “I think I understand it now.” He spoke as he nodded. “Would you like to stop your treatment?” That question sparked joy to Joël, whose eyes lit up as he heard it. “Yes! Are you able to help me with that?” He exclaimed excitedly. “I can give it a try. I can get more done than a patient, but I’m not promising you anything yet.” Dr. Dubois responded. “Thank you! Thank you so much!” Joël threw himself onto the larger man in front of him, hugging him gleefully. Dr. Dubois was caught off guard, not noticing the patient had snatched his keycard. He eventually managed to pry the thin man off of him. “I’ll do my best for you.” He reassured him. Afterwards, the two sat together for a while to talk about his mental state a bit more until the psychiatrist was out of time and Joël had to return to his room.

 Some days passed, and Joël had managed to keep the keycard hidden. Hopefully, they haven’t disabled the card yet, as this might just be his way to finally not be hungry for a night. All it took was negligence from one of the staff members, and Joël was out. Stupidly, one of the cleaners forgot to lock the door back up after cleaning the patient’s room. This, he felt, was his que. At a little past midnight, he snuck out of his room, keycard in hand. It was now that he was thankful for both his light frame and the loose skin, as the first made sneaking around easier, and the latter made hiding the keycard easy. Eventually, Joël reached the staff room and stole a spare key to his room. If they didn’t suspect him even being able to get out, they had no reason to expect he was the one who had the key. From there, the man thought about what to do next. He couldn’t raid the canteen, that was too obvious and the area was secured. He looked around, seeing another door that lead somewhere else. He approached the door, curious to what was inside. After opening the door with the key card, het was met by a flight of stairs. He climbed down to be met by a short hallway with only two doors. One was an elevator door, and the other one was a door which seemed to lead to a room. He approached it, opening the door with the key card to see what was inside.

 Joël found himself in the middle of a morgue. At first it slightly disturbed him, but what disturbed him more was the thought of laying here himself one day if he didn’t take measures into his own hands regarding his diet. Between this and eating his own shit until he died, he would much rather have any nutrients left by those that wouldn’t need it anymore anyway. He took a walk around the morgue, trying to see if there was anything that wouldn’t be suspicious if it were to be missing. Eventually, he spotted a bin labelled “Bio waste”. He carefully opened it, being met by both a slight stench and a bunch of fresh and almost fresh amputated limbs and organs, discarded to be incinerated later on. Kinda creepy, he thought, but it would probably taste better than his own feces. After making sure no one was around, he took a trash bag from one of the drawers and stuffed it with some limbs and organs. After filling it halfway, he tied it shut to make sure he could hide it. It might not be much food-wise, but it was more and better than what he had. Now to get back to his room and start feasting in peace.

 The thin man managed to go undetected for the night, now feasting on his newly acquired midnight snack. The taste of flesh was... Nice. For a change, he thought. Though he still found the meat rather dry, as it was mostly drained from the blood that used to be in it. Nevertheless, he munched away happily, stuffing his face with his new favourite snack as he left nothing but the bones. Finally, he felt close to satisfied for the first time since he was put on the diet. He stuffed the bones back into the bag, which he then hid under his mattress to dispose of on his next trip. He repeated his new found snack run every night for the next two weeks, until the doctor finally started a new way of treatment.

 “After some discussion with your psychiatrist as well as with some other medical professionals, I have decided to add some more food to your diet.” The doctor announced. Joël was indifferent about the announcement, both because he had become desensitized about eating human meat over the past week and didn’t mind it at all anymore, actually, he was craving the taste right now, as well as the fact all he wanted was to get out of here. But he thought some extra food was always a nice addition. “On top of that,” The doctor continued, “We’ve decided to prescribe you a medication cocktail of mood stabilizers and antidepressant to help you cope.” He handed the still very thin man the bottle of pills as he explained how to take them. At last, his treatment would continue. Through his swallowing and chewing motion, he thanked the doctor. After all, he might actually start having a life if this treatment helped! The first two days went well, but Joël started having bad, intrusive thoughts. Sometimes, he started doing things he didn’t even realize he was doing, like kicking the door or hitting the walls whilst blankly staring ahead. The doctors started adjusting his medication, which didn’t seem to work. Joël started scratching at his face and taking even more from the morgue at night. No longer satisfied with just the bio waste bin, which was also thinning out now, he turned to the bodies laying in the morgue themselves. First, he just ate parts he thought that could be missed, then it became more, eventually getting to the point it no longer could be missed. With his mental state deteriorating and his hunger growing, Joël started to feel as if he was starting to lose control of himself, his actions and his thoughts. He longed for more. He longed to eat and to not feel this nagging hunger anymore. This hospital was restraining him, he felt.

 At some point, Joël had developed a taste for the fresher meat. His taste, in his words, refined to long for the juices and blood that the fresh meat provided. His drooling and swallowing motions became worse every time he’s had it, longing for more. The day old meat started to become less and less satisfying. He needed something more fresh. Something he could bring with him easily so no one would notice. But it had to be fresh. He needed it to be fresh. One day, he’ll get his satisfaction. One day, his hunger will be gone. Patience... He needed to be patient.

 After god knows how long on the medication cocktail and endless trips to the morgue, he overheard a conversation between his psychiatrist and doctor. They saw no other option but to lock him up, they said, having noticed his mental health spiraling to an all-time low, along with the scarring caused from scratching at his face. It was then Joël saw no other option. He had to escape that night. Flee this hellhole that pretended to help people! He grinded his teeth as he drooled, his long, ginger hair hanging in his face, sticking to it here and there thanks to the drool and blood on his face. He didn’t move a muscle until his next meal, only to take on that same position again. The once desperate, shy and friendly Joël he once was seemed to have completely disappeared and has made way for a bitter, inconsiderate man driven by hunger and a broken mind. He waited until nightfall before he finally stood up again, now covered in sweat and his own saliva, his face still red and bloody from all the scratching. He wiped his wet hair out of his wet, sweaty face and unlocked his door. The hungry man made his way down the hallway one last time, not bothering to clean up the bones from his last trip to the morgue this time. He craved it. Food. Meat. Hunger... He felt nothing else but hunger and the desire to leave this confined space. Oh, how he hated not being able to leave this tiny room for so long. His teeth grinded together as he scanned the area, skipping the morgue this time. He didn’t want any more of that rotten stuff! He wanted something fresh. He demanded something fresh! He made his way to the floor below, leaving a trail of drool as he went. He looked around, finding a sign that pleased him. He smirked as he followed the arrows, preparing himself for a nice last meal before finally leaving this wretched place.

 The door opened easily with the keycard. There, in front of him, lay multiple new born children. He looked around, seeing the nurse fast asleep. He decided to let her live for now. He’d have a hard time taking her with him, after all, and he’d like to enjoy his meal in peace, away from the place that caused him all this pain in the first place. He swiftly left the place with two infants, quietly escaping the hospital using the fire escape exit. Feeling the fresh air on his skin for the first time again, he smirked, drooling over the two infants who promptly started wailing. “Shhh... Hush now, little ones...” Joël spoke, his voice soft and cracking. He wasn’t crying, however. He was almost... Laughing. “Hush now... Soon you can go back to sleep...”

   We’re interrupting the regular program to warn all citizens of an escaped mental patient by the name of Joël Maxim Lambert. This man is the main suspect in the current events of the murder cases as of late. If you see this man, do not approach him, do not attempt to speak to him and avoid any contact with the man. Contact your authorities immediately and relocate to a safe location. This man is said to have cannibalistic tendencies and allegedly kidnapped two young infants from the hospital in [REDACTED], authorities say. If you are in this area, lock your doors and windows at night and avoid low populated places at all cost. We thank you for your cooperation.

[themirthfulroadrunners]

D.C. - His and Hers

Debbie’s View of Planet D.C. & Beyond:

Unlike Sparky, (read below) I am not steeped in the subjects of history and politics. When in a so dedicated place, I tend to look for other things that attract my interest, and in many cases, find bits to point and laugh at.

 As Wayne describes below, our visit to the nation’s capital/capitol was done in very unique societal circumstances which was actually fine and dandy with moi. I loved the fact that most tourists chose to stay away and await a future time when normality returns, if there even is so much as a hope for such. The fact that we could drive our car safely and efficiently into and around the Mecca of Democracy and Tourist Magnet thrilled me.

 We did, however, take a ride on the city’s Metro train. At one point, we were the only riders in our particular car. Zounds! The train was clean and felt very safe, affording us several minutes to watch our fellow man going through the paces of what was likely an ordinary day in the life (I read the news today, oh boy …). I didn’t capture any funny or blog-worthy vignettes from these rides but low-drama is desirable on subways anyway, especially in these politically-charged times.

 East Coast food disappointed both of us. Maybe we merely chose wrongly, but we awarded zero 5 star reviews. In the category of Grossest Thing EVER there is Scrapple. Feeling a bit uncharacteristically adventurous, Wayne ordered some with his breakfast at an Annapolis, MD deli (Chick & Ruth’s Delly). Myself, apparently osmosing some of the above-mentioned adventurousness, tasted one bite. My taste buds immediately sounded an alarm, sorta like the one that the robot in Lost in Space blared continuously to Will Robinson: WARNING!! DANGER!! Every part of my being wanted the hateful stuff REMOVED FROM THE AREA IMMEDIATELY. A gag SO wanted to happen, but I comported myself as a lady should when in public and the alien substance safely went down the correct cavity, followed by a long gulp of water. You’ll have to Google scrapple’s recipe, but when asked, our waitress replied that it is made from “pig.” Most everything else I tasted in this region was bland, but that beats gag-worthy, huh?

The offensive scrapple is the brown block on the upper plate. Closer plate is a ginormous crab cake.

Annapolis was, um, Claustrophobia Central, at least to me. Beautiful and historic houses, but streets about 6 inches wide with parking on BOTH SIDES had me holding my breath to somehow magically shrink our Ford Edge to Matchbox Car size in order to squeeeeeeeze through. Streets everywhere, going every which way. They’ve never heard of an urban grid, I guess, but these neighborhood houses are roughly 400 years old. Apparently, SUVs were much smaller back then.

 Delaware was a destination one day, just because, why not? We get a kid’s kick out of dipping into nearby states merely to check them off the list. So … we went there, ate lunch, went back to Maryland where we were house sitting. Sorry, nothing of interest that would fill up a paragraph.

 D.C. was heavily guarded, or at least it sure looked that way to me. Very understandable in light of January 6, but access was almost not to be had, though we did see all the pertinent exteriors and the monuments. We did enjoy a boat ride on the Potomac, past the infamous Watergate Building and a couple more sites of interest to politics/history junkies, blah blah. Not technically D.C. but we walked a bit in Arlington National Cemetery. Barricades kept us from actually seeing JFK’s grave, but we did see the eternal flame, which is kinda the bigger icon, at least to this Baby Boomer.

The Watergate Office Building

Robert E Lee’s home in the background.

Our housesit was in a tiny burg on the west coast of the Chesapeake Bay. It is very low there, just plain swampy in some areas. We had one unseasonably warm day before a storm when the humidity rivaled anything I’ve felt in Arkansas. The trees in the region are rather unimpressive in circumference, but grow to towering heights, making me fear a bit for their sturdiness during a very windy day/night. Maybe they’re slender but elastic; there was no news of massive tree loss afterwards.

That’s it for me, folks. Take it away Sparky …

 Wayne’s take on Washington D.C. –

           This was my third trip to D.C., and somewhat disappointing in that our visit was while Covid19 limits were still in place, and it followed the January 6 insurrection.

      We were restricted not only from visiting and touring the Capitol, but even from getting close enough to have truly said we were there. Thank you very much you “Big Lie’ Insurrectionists.

I can’t/won’t say that I’m proud to be an American because after all, that is just a matter of the fortunes of birth. I could just as well have been born to anyone else, anywhere else on the planet. I have done nothing American to be proud of, even if pride was a notable quality. I have voted, and I have honorably served in the United States military. So there is that.

           The Capitol building is where our elected representatives decide whether to go to war, or not, who does, or does not, get healthcare protections, who pays taxes, and who does not, whether we protect the environment, or not. This is where our representatives determine who won our democratically elected president. And thanks to the battle of January 6, democracy prevailed over autocracy. The flag above the Capitol is the one that all flags flown from every Post Office to every front porch represents. This is the flag of our nation. This is the flag of America.

           The White House has been the home of our elected leader for well over two hundred years, the virtual leader of the free world for a century. It was burned up in 1814 by the soldiers of England, our present greatest ally. Residents of the White House have ranged from the awe-inspiring to the heinous. Andrew Jackson defied the Supreme Court, refusing to comply with their ruling on the Cherokee Indians, and then compelled all Indians to forfeit their lands, despite legal treaties and in many cases total adoption of the American culture, and to remove themselves to the Oklahoma Territory. Other presidents started wars while yet others saved our country, and even the world with military involvements. Our president(s) live/lived here.

           We toured all the memorials – memorials to our national heroes, and to the servicemen who fought and died in our wars. I expect most of our true heroes remain unsung. Some might say that too many of our infamous remain unhung.

Forrest Gump’s spot

Supreme Court Building          

America Bless God

[aquietwritingcorner]

Moms Made Fullmetal 2020 Day 3

Word Count: 3928 Author: Katie/Ally; RealityBreakGirl Rating: T Characters: Riza Hawkeye, Edward Elric, Alphonse Elric, Roy Mustang Prompt:  Disappointment or Apologies or Grounded Summary: The boys are grounded. A mission is underway. The boys un-ground themselves. And Riza will do whatever it takes to protect her two boys.

Disappointment/Apologies/Grounded

“I can’t believe he-he—He grounded us!”

Edward’s complaint sounded loudly in the car, and if Riza Hawkeye was a more expressive woman, she would have sighed at it.

“He grounded us! Like we were—Like we were kids or something!”

“Um, but you know, we are kids, Brother.”

“Th—That’s not the point! He shouldn’t be able to ground us!”

This was shaping up to an epic rant, and it honestly wasn’t one that Riza was in the mood for. “The Colonel has his reasons,” she said, hoping to cut off the rant. “Please accept that, Edward.”

“Reasons to treat us like kids?!” Edward shot back.

“Um, it does seem a bit of an overreaction, to be truthful, Lieutenant,” Alphonse said. “We fixed all the damage we caused.”

“I understand that,” she replied evenly, “but remember that the Colonel has more information then you do, and a better read on the situation beyond you two and your mission. You need to trust him sometimes.”

“But pulling our traveling privileges!” Edward clearly wasn’t finished protesting. “He just wants to keep me around here to show off when the generals come through.”

Riza huffed, a little bit exasperated. “Edward, would you please just accept that he’s trying to help you? Your last mission caused far too much property damage. Eyes are on you. You have enemies. It’s not a bad thing to lay low for a bit.”

“Tch. Whatever.” Edward was clearly not having any of this, too angry at the colonel to want to consider any other perspective.

“It’s just hard, ma’am,” Alphonse tried to take up for his brother. “We’re not used to staying in one place for long, especially when its our research on the line. And it does seem like the Colonel’s decision was a bit of an overreaction.”

She pulled the car to a stop in front of the hotel the boys were staying at, and put it in park, turning to where she could look at both of them easier. “Boys, listen. I understand your frustration. I really do. But please believe me when I say it’s for the best. Go inside, go to your room, and relax a little. And please trust us.”

“Its not you I’ve got a problem with,” Edward said, but he got of the car anyway, Alphonse not far behind him. “Fine. We’ll go to our room tonight. We’ll do some research tomorrow. Happy?”

“I’m satisfied for now,” Riza replied. “As long as you keep to that.”

There was a little something that went through Edward’s eyes then, something that, she could tell, he was fighting in himself with. She didn’t let her gaze waver from him. Finally, he looked away.

“Yeah. See you in the morning, I guess.” He was still not happy, but Riza would take it.

“Yeah, bye Lieutenant Hawkeye,” Alphonse said, a bit more at ease then his brother. “Have a good evening.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow, boys,” She replied. “Have a good evening yourselves.”

For a moment they stood there, as if expecting her to drive off. When they realized that she wasn’t, they turned, making their way inside the hotel. Riza waited for a few moments, just to make sure that they stayed inside, and then put the car in drive and left. Now that the Elrics were safe, she needed to focus on the mission at hand.

The brothers had come back at possibly the worst time ever, and with far too much attention on them. The brothers had inadvertently and unknowingly disrupted the supply chain for the black-market suppliers three times in the past two months. This last debacle had taken down one of the major underground warehouses for goods and had gained the brothers some powerful enemies. On top of that, the boys had returned to Central, where many of the main players in the black market had come together to meet. The team had been on this for months and was looking to make a big move to capture these leaders. But with the Elrics back in town and they having unwittingly made enemies of these powerful men, the attention was starting to shift to them. Normally getting them out of town would be a viable option, but with the current influx, Mustang had been worried that it would bring more attention to Ed and Al and make them more of a target.

No, the best thing to do was for them to lay low, and the best way to make that happen was to restrict their privileges. The option of telling them had come up, but the whole team agreed that it wouldn’t keep them out of trouble, it would just involve them more and that the opposite of what they wanted. This was a very precise operation, and they boys weren’t know for being very precise in their dealings with people.

Riza parked the car a few blocks away from the rendezvous point, quickly removing her uniform jacket, and bottoms, and slipping a skirt on instead, and taking her hair down, and put them and her service holsters and weapons the bag she had brought with her. In the dark her boots would do as far as footwear went, and she tucked some food on top of the clothing and weapons in her bag, making it look a little less suspicious. She headed out then, making her way towards the apartment they had all agreed to meet at.

Everyone else was already there, and the plan, which had been weeks in the making, was gone over while they all ate. Riza was, as expected, stationed in a nearby tower where she could see the whole area. She would be their eyes and ears, as well as their protection. The minute people started to leave the building, her job was to find their main targets and take them down—preferably without killing them, of course, but if it was necessary, she had been given the clearance to do so. It was all set up, it was all ready, and all they had to do was get in position.

A few more details, the suiting up and gathering of items, and the team was leaving in staggered exits. There were others on standby, of course, as this was far too large of a group and too big of a job for their six members to handle alone. But of course, they weren’t all of the men under Mustang’s command, just his most trusted ones, and more stood ready to move on command. There were lots of moving parts to this plan, and they needed to be able to stay within a certain margin of error.

It didn’t take Riza long to get to her sniper’s nest once she left, and she settled in quickly and nicely, able to see most of the building. She watched the patterns of the guards, saw people arriving, and, along with the other spotters, called in what they saw. Quietly, the teams moved in, ready to make the bust. It was almost time. There was no turning back now, no matter what happened.

Riza waited, quiet and still in the silence, only turning to look at movement here and there through her scope. Mostly it was guards, the occasional dog, or one of their own men. But her heart dropped to her stomach when she caught sight of something completely different.

Edward and Alphonse.

Mentally she cursed. What were they doing here? Clearly, they were sneaking around, but she doubted they had any idea of what they were about to stumble into. Not good, not good at all. Both boys had a large target on their backs, and they way that Edward tended to react to situation, while often useful, would also upset the entire operation. There was no way to warn the colonel. He didn’t have a radio with him, nor did most of the teams going in. She would have to take care of this herself. She didn’t see another choice.

“Ed and Al are here. Solow, Neason, come take over my position. I’m going after them.”

She heard the surprise and the responses from the other end, and then she slipped off her headset, only taking the time to make sure she was as armed as possible before she slipped down the stairs.

Although it wouldn’t have surprised many people, most didn’t realize just how good at being stealthy Riza was. Borne from years of sneaking around her own home to avoid her father, as well as years of hunting, stealth had come easily to her in her military training. It wasn’t a skill she always utilized, but she had it, nonetheless. Now it was put into use as she slipped down and away, going towards the building and her last sighting of the Elric brothers. Maybe she could catch them before everything went sideways—because she was convinced that it would go sideways now.

And it did.

She heard the shouts of surprise first, and then of civilians giving orders. She heard the telltale clap and ring of alchemy, and she emerged into the room just in time to see everything go wrong.

At least twenty men were in the room, several already firing at Ed and Al. She could hear the bullets ding off of Al’s armor even as Edward raised a wall to protect them both. Unfortunately, it happened at the same time that the explosions were set to block off the men’s path out one side of the building—and Ed’s wall was blocking off the entrance that the teams were planning on using to enter. There was no back up, and Ed and Al were between these dangerous men and their only exit.

She would have to do something about that.

She pulled her rifle amidst all the chaos. These were her boys. Ed and Al were her boys, and she was going to everything she could to protect them. One, two, three shots. One, two, three men down. It garnered her attention, though, and she had to move and move quickly. She dodged heading low zigzagging her way across and shooting as she went. These men were heavily armed, and they were one woman and two alchemists. She took out a few of them, but there were more of them coming at her, firing at her.

“Lieutenant!?” she could hear Ed’s surprised from across the room.

“Hunker down!” she called back, hoping that he’d listen.

She winced and stumbled as she felt a bullet graze her arm, and it stung like it was on fire, but she had more important things to worry about. While she was sure that the colonel and the teams were already working to find an alternate way around, she wasn’t sure that there was that much time. Some of the men in the room had decided to physically take on Edward and Alphonse and, while she knew they could hold their own in a fight, these men were big and played dirty.

And that was when she caught it.

This room was large and had an odd sort of decoration that went around the top. It was big enough for someone to stand on—or to snipe from. And there was a sniper up there.

No. No. Not her boys. She wouldn’t allow it!

There was a ping as the bullet struck Alphonse’s head, and she was certain that he would have a dent in it when they took time to look. She heard him protest, but she had to fight off the man in front of her. He had gotten too close for her to use her guns, was trying to keep her from moving forward physically, and made it so she wasn’t able to take down the sniper. Fortunately, Riza was no slouch in hand to hand, and Alphonse was no fool. He had moved to protect his brother better.

But these boys were her boys, were her responsibility, and she wasn’t going to let this thug or any other stand in her way. She wasn’t just the Hawk’s Eyes anymore, she was a vengeful Mother Hawk who was going to protect her young no matter who got in her way. It meant that she took some good blows here and there, but she worked to drop or otherwise incapacitate the men between her and her boys.

Suddenly a man was being kicked out of her face by a black and red figure, and the sound of clanking wasn’t far behind him

“Lieutenant! What are you doing here?”

“You were supposed to stay at the hotel!” She snapped back at him. Where had the sniper moved to?

“We’re not kids! We had a lead and we followed it!” Edward snapped back.

“You followed it into a military operation!” she said. “We need to l—”

She paused, spotting the sniper and realizing that Ed had put himself right into his sights when he came to assist her. Riza cursed out loud this time, and she moved, only hoping that whatever gun that sniper had, it wasn’t a proper sniper rifle, with proper sniper ammo. Her attention was fully on protecting Edward, not even paying the least bit of attention to whatever he might have been saying.

“Not my boy!” she snarled out.

In one fluid motion she stepped in front of Edward, using her momentum to shove him behind the wall he had erected earlier. Her had was reaching for one of her guns, but there was no time. The bullet pierced her side, and she went down with a cry. Simultaneously there was a blast from one of the blocked entrances and fire spilled out into the room, close enough that the flames licked at her arms. She cried out again, and for a moment, the world was a dizzying blur of pain, flame, shouts and smoke.

Then suddenly, something was blocking her from all of that, and a distressed young face appeared over her.

“Lieutenant! Lieutenant, hang on!”

“Is she--?”

“We—we gotta get her out of here, Al! She needs help!”

Riza reached up to grab at Ed’s sleeve, grasping it hard. She ignored the burns on her arm. “Hunker…. Down…” she said again.

“But you need—” he tried to protest.

Riza could still hear the fighting going on. It wouldn’t be safe to leave now. But through the pain, the only words she managed to get out again were “Hunker down!”

He hesitated for a moment, and then his coat was off of him, and pressing into her side. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he was saying. “I can’t help the burns, but I can try this! I’m sorry!”

Riza swallowed, and closed her eyes for a second, trying to hear how the battle was going. It sounded like it was winding down, and it should have, with all of the soldier that they had brought with them. Footsteps sounded, coming around the wall, and Riza forced her eyes open again, grabbing Ed’s head and pushing it down protectively, even as she pulled out a gun to aim at the intruder. Edward gave a startled sort of squawk at this, but she didn’t care. A startled Alphonse tried to reach for her, but she wasn’t having it.

She fired off a warning shot as whoever it was approaching. “Stay away from my boys!” she snarled out again.

The footsteps stopped. “Lieutenant?”

“Colonel.”

And just like that, all of the fight was gone out of her. The gun clattered to the ground and she allowed Edward up even as she sank back down. The voices around her grew frantic again, but she was having trouble concentrating on them through the pain she was in. She reached for Roy’s arm, holding onto his sleeve. “Keep them safe. Keep my boys safe…”

The next thing that Riza was aware of was waking up in a haze of drug-induced fuzziness. She blinked a little, trying to make sense of things. It took her a second to realize that she was in a hospital bed, and that she had dulled pain in her side and on her arms.

“Riza?”

That voice was familiar, and it took her a moment to place it in the drug-addled brain. She turned her head slowly to see Roy looking at her with concern.

“Roy?” she asked and then, after a moment, “sir.”

He shook his head. “It’s alright its just the two of. Are you finally with me?”

She blinked at him. “What?”

“Well, you’ve woken up a little before, but always slipped right back into sleep.” He smiled at her. “It’s kinda cute.” Riza scowled at him, and he laughed. “Alright, alright, you’re back with me.”

She took a moment to look down at herself, noting the bandages on her arms and the pain in her side. “What happened?” she asked. “How am I?”

“You took a bullet to the side, Riza, from a rifle. But you stopped it from getting Edward. That’s why your side hurts. As for you arms, one small part is from a bullet that grazed you. But the rest is my fault, I’m afraid. I didn’t know you were there, and you ended up in the way of some of my flames when I used them to burst in the door. They had to do surgery on your side. You’ve been out for about and day and you’re going to be in here for a least a week.”

“Oh.” She said, scowling a bit at the thought of a week in the hospital. But then another thought occurred to her. “The boys?”

“Safe. Both of them are safe. Turns out that some information had been planted to draw them to those black-market dealers. That’s why they ended up there. Speaking of,” he looked up and towards the door. “They’ve been worried sick. Do you feel up to having visitors?”

Riza answered with little hesitation. “Yes,” she said. She wanted to see that they were alright with her own two eyes.

Roy nodded and stood, heading towards the door. Riza didn’t pay much mind to what was going on until she heard a voice.

“Lieutenant Hawkeye?”

She blinked for a second, and then look up to see the uncertain faces of Edward and Alphonse (well, Alphonse’s body language) greet her.

“Boys,” the word fell from her lips, a little more relieved then she meant for it to sound. Oh well.

They seemed to perk a little at her response, looking encouraged by it, and came further into the room.

“Lieutenant! We’re so glad you’re awake!” Alphonse’s voice was enthusiastic, although quiet. “How do you feel?”

She was quiet for a moment. “Numb,” she finally said. “But I think that’s the pain medicine. Pretty sure when that’s out of my system my side and arms are gonna feel awful.” The boys exchanged guilty looks, and, even medicated, it didn’t escape her sharp eyes.  “How are you two?”

“Oh, um brother is going to have to figure out how to get this dent out of my head,” Alphonse said, bending to show her an area of his helmet that had a good dent in it. “But other than that, I’m fine!”

“I’m alright too. Just the usually bumps and scrapes.” Edward frowned. “It would have been a lot worse if it wasn’t for you.” He looked at her, his eyes full of guilt. “I—Lieutenant, I just—I—”

Riza shook her head. “If you’re going to apologize for me getting hurt, protecting you, don’t. I made that choice and I’d make it again. You do not need to feel guilt or feel bad about that.”

“But if it wasn’t for us being there, you wouldn’t be hurt like this!” Edward said, emotions and thoughts he’d clearly been dwelling on coming out. “You wouldn’t have taken that bullet for me, and you wouldn’t have nearly bleed out or gotten your hands burned! Mustang explained what the plan was! You would have been safe up in that tower! And just—we really—” he wasn’t looking at her anymore, his shoulders tight and his gaze downcast. Alphonse, like was, was looking incredibly guilty for a suit of armor. “…we’re sorry.”

“We know we shouldn’t have gone,” Alphonse added on. “We really didn’t think it would be that much trouble! But we did anyway. Are you angry at us?”

Riza was quiet for a moment, gathering her thoughts as best she could.

“I’m not angry,” she finally said, and they both looked at her with surprise and a bit of relief. “But I am disappointed in you.” If possible, they looked more stricken then before. “I asked you to trust the colonel. I asked you to stay in your room that night. And you told me you would. And what I’m disappointed in, was that you broke your word.”

“But we didn’t—”

“You didn’t say that in so many words, no.” Riza said. “But I trusted that when you said that the both of you would stay in your room, that you would. You were complaining about being treated like a child, but a man is someone who means what they say, even if they don’t give their explicit word. And I’m disappointed that you didn’t do that.”

Both boys were looking down now, stricken. “Lieutenant,” Edward said, “we’re—we’re sorry. We’re sorry that we broke our word.”

“We’re sorry that we messed up the plan,” Alphonse added.

“We’re sorry that you got hurt.”

“We’re sorry that things got out of control.”

“We’re sorry that we didn’t listen.”

“We’re sorry that we didn’t trust the colonel more.”

“We’re sorry for disappointing you.”

The last one was spoken in unison. Riza was silent during their apologies and, when it seemed that they had finished. She gestured for the both of them to come closer. “Edward. Alphonse. Do you know why I’m so disappointed in you?”

“Because you got hurt?”

“Because we put the team in danger?”

She shook her head. “No. I’m disappointed because I care about the two of you very, very much. When Edward joined, I promised that I would always look after the two of you as best I could. That feeling has just grown deeper over the years.” She reached out with one bandaged hand, putting all of their hands together on the edge of her bed. “I care for everyone on my team—but you boys, I care for you in a special way. I would do anything I could to protect you.”

Both of them were staring at her with a mix of emotions clear in them, and she gave their hands a squeeze.

“…you mean a lot to us too,” Alphonse finally said. “Sometimes… sometimes its hard to tell just how much the adults around us care but…”

“But you’ve always cared,” Edward picked up. “And—and we care about you too. That’s why we’re so sorry. Our actions got you hurt this badly and we’re so sorry.”

She gave their hands a squeeze again. “It’s all forgiven, at least from me. Just promise me that next time you’ll listen when we tell you to stay put.”

There was rapid agreement from the boys, and then Riza asked them to fill her in on what had been going on with the case and in the office. Her boys launched into an explanation, and Riza settled back, content. Perhaps they weren’t her boys in blood. But they were definitely her boys in her heart.

[currytums]

Don't worry about what I do

A fluffy ficlet

Lydia rested beside Vergil, cuddled up with her face buried against his neck. Her breath was just a little too warm against his skin for his comfort, but she was dozing in and out of consciousness - not to be disturbed without urgency.

Her eyelids fluttered open when he spoke her name, a not-so-graceful whistle from her nose as she glanced up at him with a smile. Her cheek that rested on the bed scrunched one eye up oddly as she watched his peaceful expression, but she seemed nearly ready to sleep again.

One of her hands already clasped his own matching one, and she brought the other to rest on his side, near his waist. Her eyes closed, but she had a mischievous smile as her hand trailed across his chest briefly, then down his abdomen. Her fingers tickled at something soft and warm, peeking out of his just barely too tight shirt.

He sucked in air, and the beginning of a gut he had developed only recently, so he thought. Even as the muscles contracted, the tips of her nails still grazed the puffy skin ever so slightly and a warm laugh fell from her lips.

"I wish you wouldn't do that," said Vergil, pulling her tightly against his form to restrict her movements.

It was his own fault. He had started learning to cook, partially to impress her, but somehow he had become a little too fond of his own fare. The often dehydrated and malnourished abs he once sported had melted into a plump little tummy. To his disdain, it made him feel more human, but that was the very reason Lydia loved it so.

"You've been practicing again," she hummed, still sleepy. "Have you always been this comfy?"

He buried his nose in her scalp, enjoying the pleasant scent of silky honey. "You know the answer to that very well."

Lydia's eyes opened again and she cooed just a little. "You're not blaming me, are you?"

His grip relaxed as she curled against him, putting both of her hands on his hips now, where his sides were just a little softer than either of them were used to. "Not blaming, no, but you haven't exactly helped. You're an enabler."

With a delighted twinkle in her eye, she gave him a gentle squeeze. "It's not all bad, is it? You used to be so sharp and bony…"

He didn't care for the way her hands groped at his fleshier sides, and he nudged one hand away. Her freed hand came up to his face to cup his cheek while she looked at him, a loving expression that he felt he was melting under.

"I don't know how Dante does it," he muttered, placing his hand on top of the one on his cheek so that she wouldn't pull it away. "All that pizza and he stays as trim as ever. Don't I stay in practice just as much as he does? Where does it go?"

Lydia giggled, stroking his cheek with her thumb. He had warmed up to the idea of her and only her being allowed to touch him like this. It warmed her from the inside out, knowing how far he had come, from his cold exterior all the way to going so far as to keep her from stopping when she touched him.

"You don't take on as many jobs as he does," she said. Though it wasn't an insult, his competitive nature bristled. "But you have that… teleport thing you do. I won't say it doesn't take a strong core to swing around a sword like the Yamato, but Dante might be a little more mobile than you."

She was pretty sure Dante was just as baffled by that situation, as much of the greasy food as he inhaled, over the years he had bulked up rather than out.

Vergil, on the other hand, who had been eating healthier, probably just didn't account for the extra calories when he started taste testing his own cooking. On the subject of human fare, with which he was barely accustomed, he was starting to form Preferences. Preferences that were making themselves quite known in that ring of chub around his middle.

"Maybe I do need better exercise," he mumbled to himself, tugging his shirt down over his belly. The shirt made it over the lip of that pudge, but it was stuffed in, the line still visible from the underside where it stuck out just a little too far. "Or at least new clothes. Dante will hardly let me live it down if he sees this."

He didn't like to stand out in a way he wasn't comfortable with. Between the two brothers, being "the fat one" wasn't at all appealing.

"Get a bigger shirt," teased Lydia, leaning up to give him a gentle peck on the cheek. "I'm still loving this softer you."

His nose crinkled with repulsion when her hand on his hips moved, swiping her finger along the underside of his bloated middle. "Don't get too used to it. It won't be here for much longer."

-

Vergil found himself lying on his back, biting his lip with effort as he tried to get his pants button to close. It was so close, how had this happened? His face felt warm from frustration and shame, but at last the button was fastened. Wasn't this his biggest pair of pants? Had it shrunk? The care instructions for leather were very particular, but he had gotten caught in the rain only a week ago.

No, he knew the truth; he couldn't delude himself even at the worst of times.

His pants had been tight the day before, but now it had somehow become impossible. He suspected he was still bloated from the previous night's dinner, being an early riser, but that meant that growing out of this pair wasn't too far ahead of his future, if he couldn't curb himself. His diet was out of control.

He was a picky eater, he'd discovered, with particular tastes. He hated anything that settled too heavily by itself in the pit of his belly, but he had developed a tendency to feed and overfeed whenever he cooked. His skills were improving, taking to the craft surprisingly quickly, and there were rarely leftovers. Lydia appreciated his home cooking, but she enjoyed even more watching seconds and then thirds disappear into his ever growing stomach.

He couldn't quite explain what would come over him when he ate like that, perhaps so used to ignoring any hunger he might have felt (since he technically didn't need to eat for survival) that he didn't know when to quit. Or maybe he was enjoying it. The sensation of fullness hadn't been unknown to him, with old, fuzzy memories of his mother's cooking. Perhaps he'd forgotten what it felt like.

It didn't exactly benefit him to gorge himself so eagerly, though. On Lydia's suggestion, he attempted to rely less on his ability to teleport short distances during combat, but that proved difficult for a few reasons. One being that his personal combat style relied on it more than he realized. The other was that all the extra weight was beginning to slow him down, and he wasn't burning his feasts off as quickly as he was putting them away.

He had replaced his meager wardrobe once already, but he was due again soon, it seemed. His shirts would be alright for a little while longer, but his pants felt much like a second skin, leaving a tantalizing muffin top around his positively stuffed waistband.

Though he only truly felt frustrated, rather than self-conscious, his vanity wouldn't allow him to associate the swollen figure in the mirror with himself. His pudgier hand rested on the thick layer of fat above his waistband, and he sighed. He didn't particularly feel like facing this side of him right now.

At least Dante was kind enough, or smart enough, to keep his mouth shut, but Vergil knew his brother wasn't blind. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. "I regain my form after throwing away twenty years of my life, only to ruin my figure immediately. This life has been one bad decision after another."

Tired of seeing himself in this state, he flipped a switch and began to change. Scutes and scales covered his body, as horns protruded from his increasingly less human head, becoming something made of teeth and claws and bitter cold. Wings hid most of his form, and a long tail extended from somewhere down his back, snaking uncomfortably in the suddenly smaller room. This form couldn't blink, or he might have been tempted to squeeze his eyes shut before he could get a good look at the damage he'd done to this form as well.

He would admit, he spent less time in this form than his human form, especially lately. Dante had some rather crass words about both of their devil trigger forms, finding them unsightly at the best of times, but at the very least, Vergil enjoyed the sheer power it rewarded him with when he entered that state. He had never really thought of it as being ugly, or even particularly handsome.

Still, things were different than he remembered.

His room was a bit more cramped than he remembered, in this form. Lifting his wings away from his body, he could see that he remained quite heavy-set in this form as well, but he couldn't recall having to stoop to stand in the room without his horns reaching the tall ceiling before. Had he gotten taller to accommodate the extra weight?

His wings ached for the open air, but as large as this form had become, there was no way he was squeezing his girth through the hatch to the roof, and there was little room to open a portal with the Yamato.

The door creaked open, and Lydia walked in. She had gone home the previous evening, but hadn't hesitated to come by first thing in the morning, apparently.

"Whoa," she murmured.

Her eyes followed from his clawed feet to his face as her eyes trailed up his figure. Her expression confirmed his suspicion, and he released a metallic sounding sigh, sitting down on the floor to relax his shoulders.

She shut the door behind her, blinking up at him. "I thought it felt a little cool up here. What's, uh… all this?"

Vergil shrugged, waving one hand flippantly, a somewhat comical gesture from the overgrown demon. "Taking stock, I suppose."

She loosened her scarf as she entered the room further, walking close enough that she was standing right beside him.

The difference in his size was much more staggering with her as a point of reference. She was a little on the short side already, and his devil trigger form was already by no means petite, but he knew how he measured up to her. Easily. Now, in the high-ceilinged room, she looked even smaller.

He lifted his clawed hand, studying the cracked and scaly palms for a moment, before she put her hands on his large one. She was looking at him with a baffled expression, but he couldn't offer much of an explanation.

"Did you, uh… hit a growth spurt?" she asked.

He snorted, turning his head away, but not moving his hand. "It's because of my human form."

"Yeah, I guessed that," she said, fitting one of her hands around his entire thumb. "But hey, looking good."

He decided to transform back, not thrilled with how little he could move in his own room that way. He would at least be able to stretch in his human form, though not too much, or he risked making a spectacle of himself for Lydia. He returned to the form and height she was most familiar with.

She came in closer, delighted, content to cuddle up to his soft sides. She couldn't help herself, wrapping one arm around his belly from behind, burying her face against him. "You look like you have a lot on your mind."

The idea that he could enjoy any part of this experience revolted him, but the hand on his middle was soothing. He didn't push her away, even when her fingers started to tease the taut buttons of his shirt.

"Careful," he warned, aware of exactly how tight those buttons were.

"Relax, I'm not going to mess anything up," she said, nuzzling him with her cheek.

Peering in the mirror, he turned his head from side to side, blinking. He felt heavier than he knew he actually looked, but he was sure his face had plumped up some as well, by this point. He felt himself warming up from embarrassment. His jaw had definitely not been that soft before.

Her hands were becoming a welcome distraction to keep him from dwelling on it, even though it also proved how big he was getting. She moved her hand in wide, deliberate circles across his belly, and he found himself more focused on that motion than anything else he saw in the mirror.

"You really like this body, don't you?" he asked, looking down at her hand. He placed his hand over her arm, and she brought her other arm to wrap around his waist in a warm hug.

Contact like this… it still made Vergil nervous. To be held close in someone's arms, in a human's, no less, was strange. It was a sensation he'd craved for so long… he wouldn't question it, for fear that she'd let go.

"I really do," she hummed, pressing both hands flat against either side of his belly.

His shoulders relaxed slightly as he gave a well-meaning sigh, accompanied by a soft smile. "Enough to come visit me before your normal waking hours?"

"I thought we could get some breakfast," she admitted, looking up at him. "I know you don't really need to eat and you've only really been eating to taste your own cooking, but… I just thought it would be fun?"

As she spoke, she squeezed gently with her hands, kneading his doughy middle.

He looked in the mirror again, on a whim, assessing the damage again. His biggest problem was that he wasn't burning enough calories, not the fact that he allowed himself to eat at all, though he had been eating more than his share as well. If his habits didn't change, he would find the measurement of his waistline continuing to climb.

He was reminded of his time as the demon king, gorging himself on the blood of thousands of humans. The high had been dizzying, kept his mind foggy with euphoria while he rooted himself in that heinous tree like a fattened tick. Now he actually resembled one.

But he didn't want to say no to her, either. A weakness. He didn't want to admit be had one, but having something to treasure - and keeping it - was the very reason he had lived the way he had, as misguided as he may have been when he was younger.

"Aren't our choices fairly limited, at this hour?" he asked, rolling his eyes.

Lydia trailed her fingertips on him as she pulled away, grinning. "Yeah… but there are a few diners in town. I know this one place, it's a little pricey for the kind of food, but the portions are huge, so it's worth it. If you don't want to risk it…"

She was definitely egging him on, as he suspected. He didn't quite see the appeal of this figure of his, with his less defined features, softer chest, and the red marks that mottled his bare skin because of how portly he had become in such a short time. He didn't see what she saw, he guessed. How could this appeal to her more than when he had been fit? But the way she touched him was more tender than it had ever been before, a surprise to both of them. As long as he could still keep her from harm, he didn't want that to stop.

He turned to face her, stroking the back of his hand down her cheek. "If we leave now, there won't be very much of a crowd."

He didn't want to admit that the reason he didn't want to be observed by any other patrons was because of his struggle to button his pants. If he stuffed himself, he would probably lose the button entirely. If his favorite coat still fit… but he had been unable to button it closed around his corpulent figure for some time, and the sleeves were just a tad too tight to move comfortably in.

"Let us go," he murmured, a fond look in his eyes as he petted her face with his thumb.

If he didn't like the restaurant, he didn't have to finish his food, after all. Perhaps he could take it home…

[swanandapirate]

A Muted Hue of Grey  (1/14)  -- CSBB

Summary: Emma Swan liked being a PI in Boston. It was a fun job, she had an okay income and she was a good one at that, so there was no logical reason to try and leave. Except for the fact that she wanted to, so badly. And, when she received a job offer for what seemed to be the opportunity of a lifetime, she did exactly that. Leave. Run. All the way to London. The job was simple: trailing a man called Killian Jones. Easy enough. 

Well, until things get complicated, that is.

Rating: M (later mentions of violence, alcohol abuse, and sex)

Wordcount: 2934

Links: ao3 // ff.net

A/N: Pheeewww it's finally here! Over a year ago, I came up with yet another prompt that I thought I was never going to write and then had the crazy idea to write it as a part of @captainswanbigbang which was one of the best decisions I’ve made in a long time. I've been working on this story for months and at last, it is done and ready to be posted. This has been a 61K labor of love with a couple of obstacles along the road (I’m looking at you, uni). I owe major gratitude to my betas and superheroes @acourtoftruelove and @ofshipsandswans for sometimes yelling at me, often correcting me, and always squealing along with me. I couldn't have done this without them.

And check out the banner and amazing picset by the lovely @shady-swan-jones who gave this fic the perfect art to go along with it.

So, without further ado: A Muted Hue of Grey.

——————————

God, why were there so many people?

She thought Boston was bad but London was, quite frankly, ten times worse. She had to keep her lips pursed together to keep from grunting and swearing every two seconds. Tourists here, street vendors there. Cyclists who ran a red light, almost plowing her over when she had every right to cross as the green stick figure had given her permission. The city had its charm, of course, but not when she needed to focus and could not be distracted by a girl taking a selfie in the middle of the road while blocking every other person walking there. Emma had a mission and she couldn’t fuck it up.

Avoiding eye contact with the pubescent-looking guy, clipboard in hand and a bright raincoat with a logo of some non-profit organization branded on his back, she continued on. It had to be far from an enjoyable job, standing outside, braving the cold and the rain only to be turned down time after time. Emma did feel sorry for the teenagers. She wasn’t against supporting animals or the environment, far from it actually, but more often than not the “have you heard about this cause” talk generated a nuisance that could only be avoided by lowering her gaze and crossing the road. There was no time to politely listen to them rattle their practiced speech only to politely decline with the answer that she would think about it. Especially now.

Sounds of a busker infiltrated the buzz of the people around her, of all those conversations held between the commuters or across the phone. The chords played on the battered guitar were familiar, ones she’d definitely heard before, and when the words joined the rest of the music, Emma shook her head with a trace of a smile appearing, feeling foolish that she didn’t figure it out earlier. Wonderwall, of course.

While the street musicians lacked originality vis-a-vis their choice of music (John Lennon, Oasis, Goo Goo Dolls, Radiohead; she’d heard it all a thousand times), most of them did possess a lot of talent. Emma halted more often than not—when she wasn’t in a hurry—to listen to their rendition of some cliché song, giving them whatever spare change she had in her purse or pocket and in return being thanked with a smile.

Honestly, London wasn’t all that bad. Her apartment was shit, yes; there was no point in attempting to gloss over that. It was impossible to hide the mold stains and pretend the ice water squirting out of the defect shower was pleasant and warm. Although her landlord was of that opinion somehow; anything to get him out of spending time and effort to fix some bothersome issues he’d rather ignore. The jackass.

She didn’t have any friends after moving here, yes, that was true too. But she could handle being alone, she was quite experienced with loneliness and independence, had learned to be resourceful and creative every time she lacked an extra pair of hands, an additional set of eyes or simply some new company.

The city wasn’t all that great either, but Emma could think of worse places to be. New York, for one, where the large crowds only resulted in chaos; a heavily-polluted, siren-screeching mess. London, however, seemed more structured to Emma. The perfect place to be undercover, to blend into the masses and only reappear when she felt like it all the while still retaining a sense of overview. And for what her job consisted of, that trait was necessary and ideal.

It had taken a while to grow accustomed to the British manners, the overabundance of pet names (she had to keep herself from answering “I’m not your love” everytime she got called some sort of variation), to everything basically. From the way they ordered food to the way their traffic was directed—god, she’s never been so afraid for people riding a bike as she was for the cyclists risking their lives between the swerving and honking cars.

It had been a struggle to not be the American amongst Brits and to not ooze her Americanness in the way she moved and the way she looked. It had taken a combination of observing and adapting, but now, Emma was sure she appeared as any other London goer. One last disclosure was the moment she would open her mouth and began talking in an accent that could not be interpreted as anything but American. Luckily for her, however, she was never the socializing type so she was able to restrict unnecessary communication to a minimum. Yay for being a loner.

She scanned the crowded bridge before her again, adjusting the camera around her neck. Its synthetic band was uncomfortably chafing against the skin of her neck, turning it raw and itchy. In a soothing manner, her hand massaged the dry patch of skin, but to no avail. She had to stop thinking about it, the irritation would only get worse.

A distraction presented itself and Emma let out a relieved sigh when she obtained a visual confirmation that the selfie-taking girl had not ruined everything. It had taken her more than a week to figure the whole situation out, to know where she should be and at what time. The shortcuts she was supposed to take were etched into her mind, a detailed treasure map with a moving X. Left here, two blocks ahead another left, she could almost do it with her eyes closed—if it weren’t for the other people.

If anyone ever asked her what her dream job was, her answer wouldn’t be traipsing around London by foot, but she’d made the choice for this profession a long time ago—after she’d been beaten up as a bail bonds person far too often—and it had stuck. She was good at what she did and after a couple of jobs, her reputation began to precede her. Offers came from left and right, giving her a wide array of choices and letting her be picky, a luxury she could not afford when she was younger. It helped her to be able to fly to another continent and pay way too much for her shit apartment.

The move here was a bit radical, almost crazy, but she’d been asked and she was never one to pass up on a good work opportunity. Her ties back in America weren’t deeply rooted. They could easily be yanked out to start afresh and even though she’d had some mournful and aghast responses to her news, all of her friends knew her enough to have prepared for this situation. They had always kept an eye open for the impending moment, the sudden flash when Emma would get sick of the suburban life and would want a whole one-eighty. The whole picket fence life… well, she wasn’t there yet and doubted she ever would.

She’d come back eventually; this job wasn’t going to take years of her life, but there was no haste either. She would return home with a new experience and some new stories under her belt. No new friends; Emma wasn’t idealistic enough to expect herself to suddenly gain friends. Nor was she social enough; the only things she did were work and return home.

Every day, she took the same route, she visited the same places. The coffee shop across the street that had the surly-looking barista but had the best price-quality ratio. The laundromat two blocks over that didn’t communicate their closing hours clearly enough and had automatically locked Emma inside when she’d noticed at 9.49 pm that she had no clean underwear anymore. The night shop that provided Emma with midnight snacks and drinks and its joyful owner who always gave her a discount. Places with people, but none she spoke more words than hello, bye and thank you to.

It had taken her years to gather and open up to the people she frequently came across back in Boston: the girl with the pixie cut who lived in 2A, her sandy-haired boyfriend, the owner of the diner Emma ate at every Monday morning, the martial arts coach at the gym she used to work out at until she was sweaty and exhausted. Years of coaxing on their part, asking her in the hallway, in the locker room, mid-breakfast to hang out, only to be met by her immediate refusal. Years of learning to trust.

Honestly, she was grateful they never stopped trying, never let being cast off by the solid brick walls surrounding her deter them. They saw something in her—Zeus knows what exactly that was—and wanted to include her, let her enter their little but tight-knit circle of people when they barely knew her. Their only reasoning was that “she looked like she could use some company”, a direct quote from the circle’s mother, Mary Margaret, also known as 2A’s pixie cut.

Emma subtly curled her lips and closed her eyes as she thought back to the people back home, momentarily basking in the warm feeling that settled inside of her. But this wasn’t the time to be sentimental, she could save that for another time, one where she was preferably alone and not working. She continued to maneuver around, opening and lifting her eyes to gain sight of her target anew. The mop of black hair was about 20 yards in front of her, still moving at a steady pace.

She lifted the camera with care to avoid hurting her already damaged skin even more and held it before her face. Closing her left eye to exclude any form of distraction, her right focused on the tiny image before her. The image was still blurry and after a couple of heartbeats, it became clear, the perfect quality for Emma to press the button. The shutter clicked fast, a set of successive images following quickly, flashing along.

After a quick check of her material and a nod, showing her satisfaction with the results, she let the camera drop again, the device bumping against her stomach a couple of times before steadying and adjusting to her fast steps. He was moving fast so she had to as well.

There were white earbuds dangling from his ears, his head softly bobbing along to the beat of the song reverberating in his ears. He was entranced in his own little world, with a personal soundtrack to which he moved and acted and that drowned out the bustle of the city.

She was curious about what he was listening to, what music was worthy of the honor of being added to his playlist and blasted into his ears every morning. Was he a rock listener? Classical music connoisseur? Did he have a penchant for sappy love songs à la Ed Sheeran that he would then emotionally sing along to? Was he as original in creating his playlists as the buskers that were scattered in subway stations and on street corners? Emma supposed it wouldn’t take her too long to figure it out, to figure him out, all the way to the final details of his being and character.

For not being a people person, she prided herself on being able to read people quite well.

The spring sun shone brightly and without encumbrance, hitting her skin directly and causing small beads of sweat to gather at her temples and a thin layer on her upper lip, which Emma rapidly wiped away. The clothes she was wearing—a thick woolen sweater and jeans—were unfit for this weather. It was as though it were the heart of August and not the blossoming beginning of April in a country where winter had only just ceded its powers. Emma wished—fervently—she had known that this morning. She also wished she had thought about layers. Their power could not be underestimated. They were the way of life here.

But the white fabric stuck to her skin, the sweat not helping at all, and slowed her movements down as she attempted to quicken her pace. She was losing track of the nape, the mess of hair she was pursuing. The stress found its way to her head, making Emma’s heart pick up pace as well. Her steps quickened on the concrete, the tap tap occasionally interrupted by a rasp of shoes on the underground when she turned a sharp corner and braked. Her steady breathing was turning into a pant, proving to Emma it was definitely time to renew her gym membership. Being a PI might be less physical and consist of less running, fighting, avoiding danger etc. than a bail bonds person's curriculum but that did not mean she was allowed to slouch. Not if she was doing this.

She squeezed herself between a group of tourists, much to the dismay of said tourists who indignantly addressed her in Spanish. Not that she would understand what words they were using in their complaints, her high school Spanish had withered to a dead plant after not being watered and nourished for years. Emma hastened to reach the leader, using the woman’s Spanish flag as a guide to reach the end of the troop and to be able to pass her. With her camera clutched tightly, held close to not bestow any additional hindrance, she zigzagged, ducking and swerving as she seemed fit. After a minute or so—though it felt like a lifetime—she re-emerged from the group, some more Spanish thrown her way, frantically looking for him.

Shit, where did he go?

While before it was like a ray of light lit him up, pointing out where he walked in the crowd, now there was only darkness. An unlit maze without any sort of red thread, a challenge she had no idea how to tackle. The metaphorical target on his back had vanished. Hundreds of dark-haired people, dozens of earbuds, not the one Emma needed.

She needed him, with his leather bag, the pirate necklace around his neck, the tattoo on his right upper arm, with those elven ears Emma was so fascinated by but would never admit to anyone that she was.

What was he doing?

Right, three streets, right again, left until the lights.

That was what the GPS embedded into her brain told her was his route; that was what he always did on Saturday afternoon.

So why wasn’t he standing before the red glowing traffic light?

He had a routine he followed almost meticulously. A creature of extreme habit, that was what he was. Emma had to buy herself a watch to be able to know what time it was at every second and not have to bother with retrieving her phone from her pocket every time, losing precious seconds. She used the simple watch on her wrist to follow his movements, needed it on every occasion. There were not a lot of people she had met before who were this exact, who left their apartment when the clock stroke precisely eight, who re-entered their apartment at 17:23 time and time again, regardless of the weather, day or season.

This was not like him.

Emma peered over her shoulder as she took a right, the sudden movement making her hair whip, attempting to look through the masses to double check if he surely hadn’t taken the left turn like usual, but there was no trace of him. Or his unique ears.

Right as she turned her head back, in what felt like a blink of an eye, there was something right in front of her. Someone. Emma attempted to decelerate and stop but the distance was too small to do so, her body still in motion. She braced for the shock, the crash of two moving objects together, her body meeting another solid mass and flinched to prepare for the pain to hit her but there were two hands that softened the blow, that settled on both of her upper arms, one warm and one cold.

Emma didn’t dare to open her eyes, eyelids still squeezed shut. Until the someone she almost hit, but didn’t because they were paying attention while she was focused on other things, cleared their throat, an attempt to capture Emma’s attention and most likely to prompt her to open her eyes again instead of standing there like a scared little child.

Biting the inside of her lip, Emma slowly peeled her eyes open, letting them first adjust to the light again and then scan her direct surroundings. She was staring at a chest. A man’s chest. There were earbuds dangling from his grey Henley, a trace of chest hair peeking out the top and a silver chain around his neck. An odd feeling of apprehension plagued her, heartbeat lodged in her throat, as her eyes hesitantly traveled upwards, in search of a face, of some point of recognition who this mysterious stranger-slash-savior was.

Blue eyes stared into hers.

Familiar blue eyes.

“Can I help you, lass?” he asked and while this was the first time she had heard him speak, the cadence, the accent, the voice—his voice—felt familiar. As if she’d spent hours upon hours listening to it, talking to him. She could almost imagine how his voice would sound in a laugh, how it would change when he was tired, the accent thick and present, how it would caress in a whisper.

It felt as if she knew him.

Which she did.

But also didn’t.

Because this was Killian Jones.

The man she was hired to spy on.

The man who was holding her and staring at her with expectant eyes.

Fuck.

——————————

For the next couple of months, you can expect an update every Thursday! I hope you enjoyed!

[emeto-things]

My Emet Story

I’m going to try to make this the least triggering as possible. The reason I’m sharing this is to tell you guys you aren’t alone, and to maybe give you comfort in the fact I think/act just as “weird” as you do (:

I’m currently 15 years old, and to be totally honest, I can’t remember a day without emetophobia. My earliest memory with emetophobia is when I was probably about 6-7.

I was at the mall with my mom, sister and grandma and we all got coffee and a cookie and the cookies are pretty big, especially for a little 6 year old. But I ate it, and then my stomach hurt a little afterwards. I don’t remember being scared I just remember not feeling good. Then, we got in the car to pick up my brother and cousin from school and I think I was maybe drawing in the car? This was before I realized I had an issue with motion s*ness. So then I started to feel even worse - still not scared though. But randomly, I was listening to my mom and cousin’s conversation and my cousin said the word “g*” and I just remember I started breathing heavily and my heart started pounding and I clenched on to my sister saying “oh my gosh!!! I’m scared i’ll get s*!!!” Thankfully I didn’t, but when I got home I remember laying on the couch crying. That was the first memory I had of being scared of s*ness.

Then it kinda disappeared, I didn’t ever think about being s* other than when I didn’t feel good which is probably like most people.

Then I was about 7 years old, and it had snowed for the first time of the year. I was outside with my siblings and I ate a TON of it which wasn’t smart and apparently you aren’t supposed to eat the first snow? I don’t know if that’s a myth or not but either way I didn’t know it back then and my parents weren’t watching me. I may have even possibly eaten around where my dog had peed (Gross, I know). I literally made a meal off of snow that day. That night, I v*ed and it was my earliest memory of v*ing other than when I was much smaller and had another s*ness which I barely remember. But I wasn’t really scared then either, I just felt horrible.

As you can probably already tell, I’ve had emetophobic tendencies in me forever (the crying, rapid breathing, racing heart, and being scared) isn’t typical reactions people that v* have. But my real phobia didn’t start until 2011 when I was 8.

A normal flu (not v* but respiratory flu) was going around and my brother had caught it. I was sleeping peacefully one night in my bedroom that was dreadfully right next to the bathroom - so basically I heard everything that went on in the bathroom, pretty gross, I know. But the sound of my brother v*ing woke me up that night. I didn’t know what was going on but a strange fear took over me again, same as when my cousin said the triggering g* word. Obviously back then I didn’t know such a phobia existed, and I didn’t know my feelings over v* were abnormal.

I ran into my parents room and woke my mom up to ask her what was going on. She told me that my brother was purposely making himself v* because it made him feel better? I still don’t understand but that’s why. I just remember peering over my moms bed to see the light in the bathroom shining out the door as I was uncontrollably shaking. My parents thought I was overreacting a little bit but again, I thought it was normal.

I stayed up the rest of the night in total fear that it was going to happen to me. And the fact that he was making himself do it didn’t register with my 7 year old brain - I still thought it was a contagious thing even though it wasn’t. Then a few hours went by and my throat began to get sore. I had came down with the flu too.

My mom told me it was nothing to worry about because v*ing wasn’t a part of it and again tried to convince me my brother purposely did it and it wasn’t part of his illness. The whole time of having that flu, I was scared. Thinking any minute that I would v* too. Thankfully, my mom was right and it didn’t happen. After the flu went away I was back to my normal self, not thinking about v* ever.

Then in 2013 when I was 10, it started back. I was in the pool that summer and my mom came outside to tell my dad who was supervising me in the pool, that my brother had just v*ed and I remember jumping out of the pool and screaming and crying. I ended up calming down and then I was mostly okay again for a long period of time.

The fall of 2013 got really tough, I remember every time I’d get in the car I would become worried i’d get car s* which is something I never thought about before. I remember sitting in the middle row of the car just crying and whining that I was nervous of getting s*. My mom convinced me over & over that car s*ness doesn’t happen from just sitting there and watching out the windows but I didn’t believe her.

Towards the end of 2013 around Christmas time, I remember isolating myself in my bedroom telling myself over and over “I won’t be s*, I won’t be s*, I won’t be s*” and I was scared to take a shower because just being in a bathroom caused me to freak out.

I would take a shower every 5 days and being 10 almost 11, my hair would get so oily and I wouldn’t smell very good but I couldn’t bring myself to go in the bathroom longer than to pee.

I would take a shower with the door cracked open and my mom outside and I’d rush so fast to get out of the bathroom because I associated bathrooms with v*. Then my phobia kinda disappeared again.

Being 11 was probably my best age, I don’t remember the thought of v* ever even coming to my mind, I was a very happy 11 year old.

I was in an art class, I had some great friends who I hung out with a lot, I made a fan twitter account for my favorite band and I had a lot of online friends I’d chat with, i started editing videos of my favorite band and posting them to YouTube and overall had an amazing year. That all took a turn for the worst in 2015.

The end of 2014 I got my first period. My mom had never taught me about it, I had only heard a little bit from my sister and mom talking occasionally and from googling things when I’d be upset my friends knew about it and I didn’t.

My period made my anxiety way worse which as I said, I didn’t know ANYTHING about the affects periods have on the body.

And I finally got the hang of them around maybe my 3rd period or so, and I had learned a lot about them by then but my anxiety still worsened a lot around that time of the month.

In April of 2015, I went to my art class like I did every week. I was never in love with the class because my teacher was really mean to me but I stuck with it because I wanted something to do. Until one night I woke up feeling horrible. I remember immediately panicking but I somehow fell asleep during my panic attack only to wake up again only a few hours later and feeling even worse. I’m going to spare the details to avoid triggers, but eventually I ended up v*ing. And you’d think, afterwards I’d be like “wow I’m glad that’s over and now I can move on” but no. I knew that very SECOND that this was going to affect me the rest of my life.

I was so dazed. I couldn’t believe it had happened to me. I could literally feel the phobia taking over my body and that everything I would do would be affected.

The next day, I had a small stomach ache which I would usually ignore, but this time I had a strike of anxiety rush through me which was unusual. I ran to my room and hid away from everyone just crying and freaking out until the pain went away.

I then noticed I was overly focussed on bodily sensations. If my stomach had any feeling at all that wasn’t “normal” I’d freak out. If I had a headache, or my throat was tight I’d get scared. If I felt anything even remotely close to how I did when I v*ed I’d be so anxious I would cry and scream.

The summer of 2015 was really good despite my anxiety, it was very minuscule. My emet was with me everywhere I went but not to the point I couldn’t do anything.

In October of 2015, I had my first panic attack. I didn’t know what it was, but I thought I was going to have to go to the hospital. I also didn’t know anything about panic Attacks so I thought it was a once in a lifetime thing, I didn’t know they were a reoccurring thing. I remember sitting on the couch physically too weak to stand up because of how worn out I was from consistent panic attacks.

In 2016 I developed OCD, meaning I would touch doorknobs a certain number of times or else “I’d be s* that night” and I’d refold clothes until they looked “right” or else I would for some reason v* and it was miserable. I couldn’t even clean my room without getting worn out from repeatedly folding things or straightening my sheets and I would plug and unplug my phone which is really bad for it but my OCD told me to or else I’d be s*.

I also became very paranoid of germs and started limiting the places I went to and anytime I’d go anywhere, I’d be on edge for 3 days because that was how long it took to get s* with the sv* I had so I figured if I made it past 3 days id be fine, but those 3 day I wouldn’t do that much of anything because I was so scared. Certain foods also became an issue, eating eggs would scare me and as soon as I got done eating I’d rush to my computer and google symptoms of fp* and freak out and cry until the magical “6 hours” passed and then I knew I was okay. That was my life every day for a YEAR.

2017, my OCD got miraculously better which has to be a God thing because there’s no human way I did that myself, it’s like God took it away for me and I’m so grateful I don’t struggle without OCD debilitating anhmore!!!

But in 2017 my food issue because horrible. I restricted my diet to basically water, chocolate, granola bars, cereal and ice cream. Junk and more junk which in turn made me feel s*, but then if I ate a real meal with meat I’d be scared. I also started having horrrible sleeping hours due to panicking every night.

Currently in 2018, food is still my biggest struggle and I’m just now gaining back the weight I lost last year and it’s definitely still a struggle but I believe we will all get through this together❤️❤️❤️

** I can definitely relate to the fear of bathrooms. If I felt s* at all, I would avoid them as much as possible because it made it more “real”. I had some OCD tendencies as well. You’re so young and you’ll get over it just like I did!! Good luck <3 **

[starrose17]

So I really want a SilverFlint AU to the movie Passengers.

Like, Silver has somehow snuck aboard the ship (The Walrus, of course) in a spare life pod without anyone noticing, but as it wasn’t properly configured to him it opens half way through the 200 year journey. He’s alone on this giant spaceship, no mechanical knowledge on how to get the pod working again, and with only minimal level pass to entertainment and food that he stole from another passenger before he went into suspended animation. 

(this turned into a bit of a fic half way through...)

At first it’s great, he was running away after all, and out here alone there was no one to hurt him. So he enjoys his time, plays the virtual computer games, breaks into the penthouse suite on the top deck and makes home there, gets into the space suit that’s tethered to the ship and goes for a float out in space where only he exists. Sure the same cereal every day for breakfast gets annoying, but at least he’s got the bar man to talk to, the robot behind the bar named Billy, even if he is rather surly.

But after 2 years, it’s not fun anymore. He’s got the endless high scores on all the games, he’d rather eat his socks then that same cereal again, he’s tired of his own voice echoing against the never ending metal hallways, and the space outside is just...cold. Empty. Alone.

He’s lets himself go, he doesn’t care anymore, doesn’t shower, doesn’t shave, soon his beard is as tangled as his unwashed curly hair, and every day he screams at the life pod that brought him to his own silent hell. He’d tried every possible way to get into the restricted life pod section where all the crew were, but nothing would open those heavily enforced doors.

Billy’s a robot, he doesn’t understand, he doesn’t feel, and after drinking what must be half the contents of that bar Silver finds himself standing in the air lock, without the tethered suit, hand hovering over the button that would open those doors and suck him out into oblivion.

But he scares himself, and he drops the bottle held in his other hand and runs, back through the the decks, through the life pod section, and in his haste trips over one of the many bottles surrounding his own pod. He tumbles and ends up splattered on top of another pod. Blinking through his drunken suicidal haze, he looks down at the red head beneath him. All it took was that look for all those dark thoughts to disappear.

He becomes rather obsessed with this passenger, this, ‘Flint, James’ written on the pod. He looks him up, find videos of interviews, the man was an author, ready to leave his life behind to start a new adventure out there in the unknown.  Silver talks about him endlessly with Billy, who just stares at him reminding him he told him this yesterday. And the day before that. And the week before that. In the end, it seemed even robots could get exasperated, as Billy finally suggests, 

“Why don’t you wake him up?”

Silvers immediately refuses, he couldn’t do that, he couldn’t put someone in his position, alone out here for the rest of his life. But the idea was there now, and it ate away at him. He’d spend hours staring at Flint in that pod, hands itching towards the controls, towards the “Emergency Revival” selection on the touch screen. He’d walk away, he’d walk back, he’d tell himself no, he’d dream about yes.

Eventually the loneliness starts to get at him again, and without even thinking of any consequences he can’t stand living like this anymore. He needs someone, anyone, please. He shaves off his beard, he showers for the first time in...when did he last shower? He makes himself look presentable and then suddenly he’s pressing the button.

Gorgeous green eyes open, and suddenly Silver is faced with the inevitably of what he’d just done. Lies pour from his mouth, that there were malfunctions with the pods, that it seemed it was just the two of them, that he has no idea what had happened.

This Flint was a determined man, and before barely saying hello he was up out of the pod and down yanking out wires from the console. He’s not a mechanic but he knew a bit and was going to try and get it working again. Silver tucked the few wires he’d cut out as he waited for Flint to fully revive into the back pocket of his trousers. 

After some time, and with the help of Silver being nice and chatty and knowing more about the ship having been awake for longer, Flint starts to relax, the initial fear and anger of knowing he was going to spend the rest of his life with just this curly haired man for company finally being accepted and put to one side.

Silver was so excited he couldn’t put it into words, he dragged Flint everywhere, showed him the ship, got him playing as Player Two on all the games he’d grown so bored of, games that were now fun with him there. They drank at the bar together, making fun of Billy wouldn’t didn’t understand he was being mocked, and talked about each others lives before, Flints books and Silver...well, Silver chose a set of lies and stuck to them. Flint was flabbergasted to find Silver had been eating the same breakfast and the same choice of 3 evening meals for 2 years, and got out his platinum access card and piled their table high with so much food Silver’s eyes practically bulged at the sight of it. They floated around in space together, laughing at first, Silver having forgotten what his own laugh sounded like, and very much loving the sound of Flints. They’d sit together in the observation deck, side by side, watching with heavy filters as the ship passed by a nearby sun, and Silver would sit closer, one knee touching Flints, and Flint wouldn’t move away.

Silver knew he’d fallen hard for Flint, probably the moment he saw him really, the man had saved his life in a way Flint would never know, so when Flint knocked on the broken door of Silvers penthouse suite, dressed in a dark navy suit and holding a bottle of champagne, asking Silver to join him for dinner, Silver could do nothing but grin.

It wasn’t long before they both ended up back at the penthouse, and that dark navy suit was discarded on the floor.

For a long time, everything was perfect. The food was perfect, the entertainment was perfect, the sex was perfect. Silver could not remember any point in his life where he’d been happier than stuck on this space ship now 97 years before landing, with a man so embedded into his heart he wasn’t sure if he could go just one day without being by his side.

Billy would serve them drinks with his ever present disapproving frown (”I’m sure he has to be broken, they wouldn’t have deliberately made him like that would they? And what robotic bartender needs arms like that?”), they’d swim naked in the pool with nothing but starlight coming in from the large windows to their space outside, and every night Silver would end up warm and sated and perfectly comfortable, wrapped up in those freckled arms without a care in the world.

Silver could have spent the rest of his life without telling the man he truly loved how he really came to be awake on this ship. He’d pushed that knowledge far away deep inside him with all the other unpleasant secrets in his life. But then a meteor storm hits, and one little shitty meteor gets through the shields and knocks into something that starts making everything electrical, which is everything, go haywire. It doesn’t last long, the computer system was smart and had a way of fixing itself, but the disruptions went on for long enough that it caused Billy to start spurting out random conversations he’d had with Silver years ago, including suggesting that Silver wake up Flint.

The held back fury in Flints eyes as Silver approached for their evening drink stops Silver in his tracks, wiping the grin from his face as he held onto the homemade ring in his pocket that he’d made from bits of scrap. He was going to ask tonight. He never got a chance.

He couldn’t lie now, and when Flint asked him through that suppressed rage if Silver had deliberately awoken him, deliberately stranded him here for the rest of his life, with no chance of getting home or to the colony of having any if his aspirations for his future come to light...Silver was silent for a moment, before the word “Yes” quietly passed his lips.

Flint doesn’t hit him, at least not yet, but his rage comes out in full force and he yells, screams, throws a bar stool barely missing Silvers head. He swears if he sees Silver again he’ll throw him out the airlock, to murder him just like Silver had done to him, before he smashes a glass at Silvers feet and leaves, still screaming in fury.

Silver is terrified, not just for the revelation of the truth, but what this would mean for him, for them, to be trapped on a ship not knowing if he’d wake up in the morning dead. One night that very thought almost came true, and Silver was awoken in the night by Flints fists punching him in the face, in the stomach, Silvers arms reaching up above him to try and shield the blows. Only when Flint reached for the knife he had on him ready to take the life of this man he now fucking despised...only then did he stop. Silver was still shielding himself, but he hadn’t said a word.

“Why are you just lying there? Why aren’t you telling me stop?!” he demanded through panting breaths where he straddled him, but Silver just continued to stare up at him through a bloody face, eyes so terribly, terribly sad, and didn’t say a word.

He deserved it. After what he’d done, he deserved to be killed by the love of his life.

Flint growls out a yell and throws the knife to the floor, getting up and disappearing as quickly as he came. Silver doesn’t see him for a long time, except for meals, where they’re forced into the same room. Flint no longer gives him any of his constantly changing food, and is stuck with the same sloppy cereal, looking utterly dejected. Flint always takes his food somewhere else, and Silver could see how much Flint still wanted to hurt him, so never said a word.

Eventually Silver figures out how to get on the speaker system for the ship, and knowing Flint is out jogging around somewhere he starts to tell the truth. The real truth. About how he was a thief back on earth, trying to escape some serious trouble he’d gotten into by sneaking on board this ship that would take him billions of miles away from those troubles. That he woke up not through a mechanical fault but because he wasn’t supposed to be there.   He told him how he’d tried to kill himself, how seeing Flint saved his life, about how long he’d spent wondering if he could wake him up. He admitted he knew what he did was wrong, but he was so desperate, so desperately desperate, he wasn’t thinking right. All he could think of was that a choice between eternal loneliness, or Flint, he picked Flint. He knew it was wrong, knew it was selfish, and he was so so sorry, but as he was being honest, he’d do it again. He said he knew Flint hated him now, and he had every right to, but Silver still loved him, forever would love him, and if there was any chance at all of reconciling this, to please, say something the next time they ran into each other. Please. Please. 

“Eternal loneliness is not a good prospect, believe me...I know.” he sobs.

The only words Flint says to him the next time they see eachother are:

“You’re a fucking murderer.”

And all hope is lost for Silver.

Months go by, and strange things keep happening on the ship, flickering lights, the little cleaning robots going haywire, the gravity going in the swimming pool area, nearly drowning Silver as he floated upwards in ball of water he couldn’t get out of. He wished he had drowned. Flint still hadn’t said anything else. Hadn’t said anything and yet, when they did run into each other, Flint would at least look back at him as they past, not that Silver had noticed. More and more times Flints eyes would linger on him, and more and more times it was less anger, more...something else, something calm.

Flint had tried to imagine, after Silvers speech over the speaker system, what it would have been like to be alone for so long. He couldn’t image it really. He’d spoken to the repaired Billy about it, about exactly the kind of hardship Silver had gone through, and Billy would tell him how tragically terrible Silver had looked for a long time, and how morally conflicted he was over waking Flint up. When he asked Billy if he knew Silver had tried to kill himself, Billy had just shrugged,

“Selfish if you ask me. Who was I going to make drinks for if he killed himself just because he was lonely.”

Something had been tugging inside Flint for almost a year now, every time he saw Silver, and saw just how dejected he looked.  It was difficult to remain angry with the only other human being on the ship, and despite knowing what Silver had done, despite knowing that Flints life was now permanently confined to these metal walls, he found himself...missing him. He missed their conversations, he missed the flirting, hell he missed that obnoxious little snorting laugh he did when he’d regain his high score from Flint on one of the VR games. He missed the company. He missed his warmth in bed. Jesus Christ he missed the little shit, and despite everything he still felt something for him. He’d loved him once, and it was still there, buried under alot of anger, but it was there.

He’d walked past Silver with his tray of bacon, eggs, sausages and toast with jam one morning, placing the tray next to Silvers pointless little cereal bowl and walking away without saying a word.

If he had turned around and seen that glimmer of hope in Silvers eyes, he probably would have run back to him.

The electronic failures were getting worse, something truly wasn’t right, and it came to it that they were going to have to work together to find out what was wrong. For the first time they held a tentative conversation, and after a long search of the ship found the meteor from over a year ago and gone straight through the fusion engine, and not being repaired the damn thing was close to exploding. The release valve to vent the engine was smashed to bits, and knowing about ships from his book research Flint knew there had to be a manual release from the outside.  Without even asking Silver puts on the one space suit in tact, Flint asking what the hell he was doing.

“Well I can’t let you risk your life...I’ve done enough to you already.”

He pauses in putting on the helmet, quickly deciding to lean up to steal a kiss from Flint before putting it on and picking up part of the heat shield off the engine that had broken. Silver then heads outside the ship and down into the vent, releases the valve and uses the shield that barely covers his body as protection from the radiation that goes shooting past him. Flint is yelling into his comm, telling Silver to get out of there, that he won’t survive this, that Silver was the one who woke him up he can’t leave him alone now don’t fucking leave me alone!

The vent is too strong, too much, and eventually it blasts Silver away from the ship, heading off into space with a cracked visor, oxygen escaping fast. Flint runs faster than ever before to the airlock, space suit on, Silver still slowly talking in his ear, saying he’s sorry for everything, that he wishes Flint to be happy, to write his books so when everyone else wakes up they can read about the best author this ship will ever have. To know about the best man there ever was.

“Fucking shut up! I’m coming to get you! You think I’m gonna forgive you if you die I fucking love you stay the fuck alive!!”

But the space suit is the one with the tether, and as he pushes himself off from the ship, floating quickly towards Silver who’s now quite far away, the tether pulls him short just inches from Silvers outstretched hand, and he can do nothing but watch that small, sad smile, obscured by the oxygen leaking from his helmet, as he floats away  “I love you... and I’m sorry...for everything.”

“Fuck that.”

Flint unhooks himself from the tether and cuts his own oxygen line, pushing himself towards Silver, grabbing him, turning the line behind them and pushing them back towards the ship. By the time they get back inside and remove their helmets both are gasping for air, collapsing to the ground in a heaving heap. Silver then pushes the rest of the suit off him while Flint is still on the ground, pounces on him, and kisses him hard. He pulls back quickly though, eyes asking if this is ok, and Flint just cups the back of his head and brings him down for another kiss.

“We’re alive. And we’re staying that way. You shit.” Flint grins.

They do the remaining repairs to the shield as best that can, and find themselves standing, hand in hand, in the main communal area that leads off to restaurants and clubs, Billy’s bar, and what would have been the night life of the ship.

“This place needs a little green, don’t you think?” Flint asks.

In 95 years, the rest of the passengers and the crew would awake to a communal area filled with trees and flowers and small forest animals and birds, once all in suspended animation in the hold in a lot less complicated life pods, now all wild and free. And there, in a makeshift hut amongst the greenery, would lie a pile of books, now covered in dust, the series entitled;

‘Never Alone’ - by James Flint and John Silver.

[flowers-that-i-sent]

Tw: domestic abuse/stalking/hallucinating/drinking/ednos/ drugs/ptsd

*going to continue at some point*

*tldr: my abuser has been dead for years but I see his face everyday on strangers. I just saw him walking a dog down the street and its triggering me to isolate and be mute right now.

_________________________________________

When I was in my late teens I started to date this guy. He didn't really like me and idky he even played me out the way he did. I persuade the relationship and asked him if we could make it official. He said no but literally a minute later agreed. I barely remember how long we were together before he tried to call it off.

My dumbass begged him to give me another chance. It was obvious he didn't want to but again agreed.

[This was my fault. If I didn't beg for another chance things wouldn't of gone so far]

The next few months we started drinking more. His spit fire tongue turned towards me weekly. Daily. Hourly.

Coming from a home of verbal abuse i ignored it. It was normal.

I started to believe the horrible things he would say to me.

"Stupid."

"What were you thinking?!"

"Goddd!!" Followed by rolled eyes

Pokes my fat. "Eewwww!" Followed by a disgusted face.

I didn't realize it at the time but he was trying to push me away. Im assuming at least. Who would say those words to someone they wanted in their life.

When summer came things became more intense. He started obsessing over me now. I've gained about 30lbs from drinking and a poor diet. I was about 18 when I dated him and had little care about my appearance. I had less knowledge of health, fitness, and diet then I did of basic aesthetics.

Even though he belittled my appearance he didn't want me to leave him. After each public fight in front of his friends he pull me to the side and beg me not to leave.

Now, I can't remember if this part is in my head or really happened. I remember feeling like he said no one would want me because of my weight. This was around the same time I found out he was cheating on me. The girl was small. Blonde. Firery. Pretty in a whorish way.

He admitted to it the night it happen and apologized. We decided to work it out. And by working it out I mean I ignored him as he wildly cheated on me.

He continued with the Blonde. She knew of me. Who I was. That I was dating him. She projected flout on the outside and raging jealously on the inside.

She spat on me. She spat in my hair.

She walked away while pointing and laughing. The coward ran into her friends house before I could even get out of my seat.

He did nothing but sigh.

And we drove off.

_________________________________________

We ended up at a good friend's house. I told her what happen. My friend wanted, and would of, kicked her ass but I said I would take care of it. She expressed how I would let it go. How I was too nice of a person to do anything.

She was right. I let it go. This lead to a new depth to the abusive wedge I allowed into my life.

I am now a doormat.

The guy continued to cheat: tall, cute, super thin brunette; average height, pretty, super thin black hair. Besides their pretty faces they all had one thing in common. They were underweight.

I was still overweight and I thought he would stop if I lost the weight. So, I started doing something I haven't done since I was a child.

I stopped eating.

The weight slowly started coming off but I still ate like a pig (in my mind at least). I remember the day I decided to puke for the first time.

After I dropped everyone off for the night I bought a large sub, diet soda, and some breakfast sandwiches. I parked my car near a lake i did homework at and inhaled the breakfast. Grabbed my plastic bag and put my fingers down my throat. It hurt so bad. I teared up. I choked on food. I continued to eat. And I continued to force it back out.

It was working. I was losing weight. The restricting. The puking when I ate bad foods. The weight was coming off and people we noticing.

The Blonde who spat on me didn't even recognize me at a party. I remember her looking me up and down with a wtf expression. He still cheated on me with he though. He still cheated on me the the Black Haired girl.

As I lost weight he became more insecure. His abuse turned from verbal and emotional to physical. He always had a hint of control hovering over our relationship but that wasn't enough.

I can't remember when in the relationship it started but I remember what he did.

Pushing against the wall.

Head bunting.

Knife to throat

Attempt to crash my car while I was driving.

Guilting me to have sex.

Grabbing onto me until I said I wouldnt leave.

Blackmail.

One day I finally got the courage to leave him. I noticed other guys started looking at me. I was done. I knew I was finally pretty enough for someone else to love.

________________________________________

I decided to end it in a public place. Bluntly. No words just action.

We met up for lunch at a deli with some friends. I knew he wouldn't get physical in front of them. Just verbal. I ate my protein bar and drank my coffee. His hands were wrapped around my waist. Causal conversations filled the air.

It felt safe.

This was it. This was the time to move. He allowed me to unhook his arms. I started walking towards my car. He knew. I walked faster. Open the door. Got in. Locked it with in less then a second to spare. As soon as the door shut and locked i heard the handle being pulled. I heard the THUD! of the outside door handle drop. Unopened.

I made it.

I turn my engine on and drove off. He tried to stand in my way but I didn't care I would of driven off with him on my hood if it came down to it. Thankfully it didn't. On my drive to a safe location I was crying uncontrollable. The feeling was unreal. He called me on my cell phone minute after minute after minute. He continued for 30-60 minutes.

Now here's where there were more problems.

All of our friends were OUR friends.

I tried to stay friends with them. I even dealt with the fact that he would be at some parties months after i left him.. I just had to avoid him. He ended up stalking me. He broke into my car and stole my credit card and license. Said he would steal my identity if I didn't get back with him.

This happened at a real friends house and the cops were called. He was arrested. I didn't see him around for 2 years (he was at a party i was invited to). I cut almost all those mutuals out of my life. They didn't believe me anyway.

See, he was very charming. Very funny. Very manipulative. I was painted as the bad guy. The crazy one that yelled at him at parties. The one that started everything.

_______________________________________

Days turned into weeks. Months turned into years.

I weeded out the people who still hung out with him while I was present. He ended up heavily addicted to drugs and alcohol. As well as myself.

He got arrested.

I got a college degree.

He went to jail for selling guns

I got married.

He took a plead deal and joined the army.

I bought a house and started a family.

He got kicked out of the army.

He contacted me 10 years after I broke it off.

I didn't know about the guns. If I knew I wouldn't of replied to him. I was very court with him.

"I'm happily married. Own a home. College educated. Pregnant with my first child." He respond back but I never answered. I just wanted to hurt him. I wanted him to know that I made it.

A few months later he OverDosed on Heroin.

Before he died I would hallucinate seeing him in cars next to me or in stores. It was never bad. Just once in a blue moon. Now its weekly. Multiple times a week to be frank. And I dont know how to make it stop.

Its also so sad. Even years later no one who remained friends with both of us believes me when I tell them how bad it was. They still mourn him every year while I fear his ghost everyday.

* need to edit later

[mattpajak]

Nutrition: Exploring Food Sensitivity

Overview

I’ll just start by saying that I’m not a nutritionist, however, the experience that I will share will have takeaways that you can hopefully use to keep your body feeling good.

Back in May, I visited a doctor who ran a quick food sensitivity (food-allergy) check on me. A friend of mine had recently retooled his fridge by removing certain foods from his diet that he had sensitivities to, per the check, and noticed a drop in weight (as a result of reduced inflammation), stable digestion, and an increase in general well-being and energy. I didn’t seek this check, however, I was curious based on his feedback and was presented with the opportunity, so despite not having any glaring issues, I went down the rabbit hole.

Initial Evaluation

After about 5 minutes, the doctor had given me a laundry list of foods to avoid because I may have sensitivities. Now, again, my body didn’t present any glaring issues and at the time I subjectively reported feeling good. So, when the doctor told me that I should try and avoid dairy (which I had largely cut out anyway), chocolate, peanuts, cashews, seeds, gluten, chicken, oranges, corn, and eggs, I was heavily skeptical.

I had replaced dairy chocolate milk with chocolate-almond-cashew milk about two years ago and I drank that regularly. Both cashew and chocolate came up as potential sensitivities. Was it not enough to cut back on the dairy? I ate a lot of eggs and eggs are an ingredient in a lot of things I eat. So, no more eggs? Come on, chicken? I don’t eat it all the time, but I love fried chicken, and what about grilled chicken thighs? I’ve always been told chicken breast is one of the best lean proteins for you. Well, apparently not for me?

I made the decision that I would do my best to avoid the foods that came back with potential sensitivities for a 2-week period. I would say that I was at least 90% compliant and any of the 10% that wasn’t compliant was a result of a small-trace of a food item that was used as an ingredient in something I ate.

What did I eat for 2 weeks?

The first trip to the grocery store was a long and frustrating one. Finding an attractive gluten-free bread isn’t easy. Finding an attractive gluten-free bread that wasn’t made with egg is near-impossible. I arrived at a gluten-free cinnamon-raisin swirl bread (it actually wasn’t half bad). I also found that many of the foods I was targeting for healthy snacking were made with sunflower seed oil (seeds came up as a sensitivity).

Ultimately, your best bet for snacking with heavy-restrictions is food that doesn’t have a ton of ingredients. For me that was a homemade trail-mix with lightly-salted almonds, raw walnuts, dried cherries and honey-roasted pistachios. Lara bars were a necessary discovery (most are made with 4-7 ingredients only). Peaches and cherries are in season. Green pea snack crisps are inexpensive, made with only 6 ingredients (and you can pronounce them all), and the cracked and spicy black pepper ones play well with an almond butter, pecan, and honey sandwich on the aforementioned gluten-free cinnamon-raisin swirl bread.

A steak prepared with onions and cilantro, a side of tomatoes w/ balsamic vinegar, and a sweet potato w/ pecans and honey. 10 total ingredients on this plate.

When it came to meals, I could still work with steak, pork, fish, rice, sweet potatoes, and avocados. In tandem, there were plenty of onions and peppers chopped, tomato, brussels sprouts (I did not know there was a third ‘s’ in brussels before spellcheck), and of course, cauliflower.

Unfortunately, no non-dairy ice cream made the okay list, so I pivoted to frozen fruit bars (also very few ingredients) for dessert.

Results

The first result was weight-related and as it was explained to me, foods that you have sensitivities to create inflammation in your body (add weight). It shocked me none to see the volatility in both directions during and after the two-week period.

The green lines represent the start and finish of the 2 week ‘food evasion’ period.

After two weeks of the great food evasion of 2020, I was down 2.6 lbs. (without modifying my physical fitness or sleep patterns). Mind you, I had monitored my weight on daily basis for 2 months prior to this and had weighed in consistently between 188 and 192 for at least a month. I broke the two-week evasion with a pizza, because I love pizza, and weighed in 2 lbs. heavier the next day. Over the course of the next week, I became less rigid with what was going in the fridge and in my body and one week after breaking the two-week evasion, I was up 4 lbs. from the two-week low (also, without modifying my physical fitness or sleep patterns).

The second result was digestion-related and is what made me a believer. Regular digestion came within a few days and at no point over the two-week period was my stomach upset in any way. There’s a difference between the “my body is feeling good,” I subjectively expressed prior to avoiding the laundry list of foods and the “my body is actually feeling good,” that I can say with confidence was a result of avoiding the said foods.

Pulse Test

The doctor provided me with an at-home, easy to execute food sensitivity test (if you’re ever curious). 

The crux of it is that you take your resting pulse (how many beats in 1 minute) with nothing in your system (I opted to do all food sensitivity testing prior to my first meal of the day). Once you are confident in your resting pulse. Put the food item that you want to test in your mouth for 30 seconds and make sure it covers all tastes buds – do not swallow the food item – this is your body’s opportunity to gather all the information it needs on the food item (a significant increase in pulse is your body’s way of preparing to defend the fort). After 30 seconds, keep the food item in your mouth without swallowing and take your pulse for another minute – record your pulse now and note any difference. If you intend to test another food item, do not swallow the food item, if you do not intend to test another food item, it doesn’t matter. Per the above linked article, an increase of 3-4 bpm confirms a food sensitivity. The higher the increase, the more severe the sensitivity. Results from 7 food sensitivity pulse tests below:

Elimination and Moderation

Keep in mind that the following notes and explanations behind them are my own interpretations and not those of a licensed professional.

The combination of the Chocolate Almond-Cashew Milk test and the Milk Chocolate test results revealed to me that the cashew was likely the cause for the pulse spike. As such, I have decided to avoid cashews moving forward. Chocolate did not seem to have much of an effect at all on my pulse, so I will continue to enjoy in moderation.

Parmesan Cheese came back with a +4, so there was a sensitivity to dairy. I had largely removed dairy from my diet anyway, but because the sensitivity is on the milder side, I won’t feel bad about enjoying a pizza from time to time.

My primary bread of choice for quite some time has been sourdough, and that’s mostly because I enjoy the taste – also turns out, it is lower in gluten and easier to digest – who knew? I was pleased to find that my Sourdough Bread test came back with no change in pulse rate. Since that test, I have reintroduced sourdough bread into my weekly rotation.

The Blue Bell Cookie Cake Ice Cream test is the one that is most interesting and unfortunate. Looking at the ingredients list, it shocks me none that I saw a +8 spike in pulse after testing this food. This was one of my favorite ice creams, and after the two-week food evasion, I decided to follow the test with a full bowl. Keep in mind that this half-gallon was half-empty prior to the two-week period, so I had already consumed part of the container. After I ate the bowl, I experienced an upset stomach – a reaction that I had never had previously (both with this particular container and with multiple past half-gallons). After essentially cleansing my body for two weeks, I think that was its way of telling me that it would prefer if I didn’t go back to eating Blue Bell Cookie Cake Ice Cream. Dairy ice cream as a whole will be an infrequent treat for me moving forward, fortunately, there are plenty of non-dairy ice creams out there (that are starting to taste just as good).

Milk, cream, wheat flour, milkfat, butter, eggs, skim milk, high fructose corn syrup, and corn syrup were all identified food-sensitivities for me + the things I can’t pronounce can’t be good for me + what is a natural flavor anyway? Do those grow on trees somewhere?

The last two food tests that I recorded both involved peanut butter as the primary identified-food sensitivity. Both an almond milk-based, peanut butter-flavored Ben and Jerry’s ice cream and a Clif Chocolate Peanut Butter Builder Bar yielded a +4 jump in pulse. From this, I have decided to moderate any use of peanuts or peanut butter and substitute where possible (almond butter has become a new mainstay for me).

I haven’t tested corn, oranges, egg or chicken yet in isolation, though, it hasn’t been entirely difficult to avoid these foods. I do plan to test them, but I have already mentally decided to move forward in moderation with these food items.

It is worth noting that concentration of a food item likely impacts the effect it may have on your body. Eating an egg and eating something made with egg are likely two different things – I would guess that it’s akin to taking a straight shot of alcohol vs. having a mixed drink.

An Aside on Salt

I, like many of you (I’m guessing), have been under the belief that salt is no good for you. As an aside, a conversation I had with the doctor yielded a new lease on salt. It turns out that table salt is the salt that spikes sodium levels and has been attributed to heart-issues (think salt-shakers/salt-packets at restaurants and the stuff fast food restaurants use). My understanding now is that table salt is boiled at a high temperature and stripped of a TON of minerals that are good for you in the process. The good news is that the salt that isn’t bad for your heart and still has all of the minerals is available at your grocery store. Grey Celtic Sea Salt is my new salt of choice, but here is an article on other salts you should look into / use at-will and without fear.

Closing Thoughts

Fortunately, I’ve never needed or explored a popular diet – I know Paleo and Keto have emerged as popular diets in the past few years and obviously, vegetarians and vegans have been preaching largely plant-based diets for a long time. Those diets are one-size fits all, and that’s not how we’re wired – there’s no magic bullet for everyone. The human body is complex and individual to you and that is probably what the past month or so has opened my eyes to the most.

I must make clear that none of the identified food sensitivities were affecting my quality of life. With the knowledge gained, application and observation, I have decided to make some adjustments moving forward.

Objectively, I just want to feel good with regularity. If that means I have to stop eating certain foods and moderate other foods, I’m willing to do that. I would urge anyone at any age to explore what they are putting in their body and how it may be impacting their sleep, energy, and general well-being.

Food is joy and health is wealth – so find a way to enjoy food that keeps you healthy. Your health is your long-term freedom.

[iammorethanmyed]

November 28, 2017 - 4

Depressions have kind of taken over in the last days. Maybe because my bf left to go back home which is 1.600 km from where I live and in another country, maybe because my social life is non existent right now as everyone else is busy, maybe because I think too much about my appearance and numbers ... 

I go from happy moments to sad ones within seconds. One second I am totally comfortable in my own body and the next second I feel too big. I occasionally take photos before heading to the gym to remind myself that my body is OK and that I should be proud of what it allows me to do. I found a picture of the 21 year old me posing at the gym. I had almost reached my ultimate goal weight back then but only now I realise how much my body had to suffer. I was restricting heavily only eating around 1000-1200 calories a day and eating really shitty food too. A short while after my first real binges started ... I am thankful for having learnt so much about healthy nutrition and balance yet my mind has still a long way to go and accept that food is not the enemy.

I’ve been trying to find reasons why I can’t let go of my eating disorder and today it kind of hit me. It’s been the only stable thing in my life for a long time ...I almost lost touch with my family a few years ago, I ended a relationship of 4 years, I lost a bunch of friends, I moved to my own place etc. and all I could control was what I ate. Well I wasn’t in control but it was the only thing that was always by my side. Letting go of it feels like losing control and losing another big part of my life and I can barely handle any more losses even though this one would be a reason to celebrate. I truly want to recover and make peace with myself but it really scares me ... Who am I going to be without my disordered eating? ... Of course a happier and healthier person which is who I finally want to become.  

[thebibliosphere]

Patreon recipe questions: kosher cookies?

I had an interesting ask which I now can’t find my answer to, so it looks like tumblr ate it somewhere along the queue to posting stage so I’ll just quickly answer it again sans pictures and come back and redo it properly later on—sorry I can’t remember your tumblr name to tag you! :( 

The question was: “I want to make my mom’s cookies for my friend’s birthday, but I think they keep kosher, do I need to change anything? and if so do you have a kosher cookie recipe? also how do you cook for someone with allergies?”

I’ll start this by saying—I’m not Jewish. I merely grew up in a house that was heavily influenced by my Jewish family background so keeping kosher in our house was more out of familial habit than an actual need to adhere to Jewish law apart from my father who worked as a Jewish butcher for some 20 odd years. As a result I may or may not have a few crossed wires somewhere, so if any of my Jewish friends spot something I say which is incorrect, I would love for you to correct me so I can edit it and post the correct info.

And also wow this got long so I am going to throw this under a cut.

If you’ve got a baking question you’d like to throw my way, PM me over on [Patreon] or drop me a line on [Tumblr]. Even if you think it’s really really silly and don’t want it to be a public post, please feel free to ask! We all start learning somewhere :)

-tumblr mom xoxox

When baking for anyone, it’s always a good idea to find out a few vital things about them, such as allergies and food restrictions—and to absolutely respect those restrictions whether they are are a medical necessity or by choice. I can’t tell you how many times someone has thought in the past that I am just being a “picky” eater and accidentally-on-purpose poisoned me because they didn’t believe me when I said eating certain vegan ingredients will make me projectile vomit 30 minutes after the first bite and risk putting me into shock. Don’t be that person. You wouldn’t go up to someone with a peanut allergy and lie about putting peanut butter in your cookies...at least I hope you wouldn’t, because I’m pretty certain on top of making you an asshole it might also constitute towards a deliberate murder charge at worst. It’s the exact same for other allergies, though they are often afforded little consideration compared to the peanut one. Ask them, and do everything you can to avoid cross contamination in your home wherever possible. 

If you think your friend might keep kosher, it’d be a good idea to find out for sure, and how strict the are with it—along with any other possible food issues. 

(There’s also a difference between regular kosher and keeping kosher on Passover which means having to also exclude extra things like wheat, spelt, barley, oats and rye—so that means no cookies until the end of Passover.)

If they are very strict with their keeping of kosher, they might politely decline your kind offer on the basis that even if you manage to get all kosher ingredients, your kitchen itself and your utensils, are not, and they run the risk of contamination. There’s a reason for why the kosher certification is so important on food products. It’s not just about the food itself, but how it is handled and processed, things like meat and dairy never being kept on the same counter/shelf and there’s a whole process involving your rabbi coming to your house and submerging your things in boiling water and a few other things I am likely not remembering from my childhood growing up with a kosher butcher for a father.

Don’t take it too harshly if they do, and respect that wish. You made a nice gesture and the thought will be appreciated. It’s always bullshit when other people feel guilted into eating foods which may or may not be good for them, either physically or spiritually.

If your friend is okay with your kitchen not being officially kosher, then you can jump right ahead to buying your kosher ingredients and baking them cookies. If you want to be extra considerate invest in a new mixing bowl, spatula and bake tray. I have sets of utensils which while not officially koshered by a rabbi, are kept separate from my other utensils which might be used to mix/cut mixed ingredients. I do the same for gluten free and nut allergies with designated mixing bowls and baking mats and spoons (ours was the house of deathly allergies growing up, it just took some 30 years for my allergies to emerge in the form of an auto-immune meltdown) which are kept in separate cupboards. This is in general good practice if you bake regularly for friends with severe food allergies, though those of us with said allergies understand it’s a hassle and don’t expect you to do it by default. We’ll just keep politely declining offers of food, and wishing people didn’t react to those rejections like we’ve just murdered their firstborn over a flapjack.

Assuming your friend is okay with your kitchen not being officially kosher there are still some things you need to take into consideration when picking your ingredients and prepping. I have one friend who greases her cookie sheets with leftover bacon fat—for the added flavor. Needles to say this is not kosher and should be avoided. Use a vegetable based oil instead to line any bake tins or trays.

Butter is technically kosher as it comes from cows which are considered kosher animals, but unless it’s certified kosher on the label, there’s a chance it’s been produced alongside other meat based products (gelatin or rennet) and could be contaminated and is therefore not kosher and should be avoided when trying to bake kosher. If it says kosher certified on the label? Go for it. If not? Well, we’ll be sticking with margarine, which is non dairy. 

Also it’s an important distinction to make, if you do use dairy product in your cookie rather than margarine? You need to tell the person as it might affect the rest of their diet for that day. Part of keeping kosher means not eating meat and dairy at the same time, and some people depending on their beliefs, might need to wait an hour to six hours before consuming a dairy product before or after eating red meat. So depending on how strict your friend is, it would be a good idea to tell them it’s a dairy based cookie, even if it is kosher based dairy. 

Same with your chocolate chips, go for non dairy milk ones like dark chocolate (although it sounds like it, cocoa butter is not dairy, it’s the fat from the cacao bean). If they need to be absolutely certified kosher, then kosher chocolate brands off the top of my head include Equal Exchange and Schmerling’s, both of which bake fairly well when you chop the chocolate bars up into chunks/melt down to make a drizzle. I think Theo Chocolates are considered parveve (neutral) too, if not actually certified kosher. Google around and see what else you can find or ask at your grocery store.

Eggs are considered to be pareve, meaning they do not fall under the meat and dairy rules of kosher, but you will however need to check them for blood spots in the membrane, as those make them non kosher. When prepping eggs for a kosher recipe, crack them one at a time into a separate small bowl, then add them into your mix one at a time in order to avoid the risk of contaminating a whole batch with a blood spot. (I speak from experience, also this is just generally a good way of cracking eggs to avoid getting shell in your mixes for people who struggle with cracking eggs neatly into a mixture) 

The recipe I am familiar with for kosher cookies was the one my Jewish great grandma taught my dad (who didn’t care, so then she taught my mother after they were married), and after googling around for some other kosher cookie recipes, it looks like the same one found in Second Helpings, Please! by Norene Gilletz and Harriet Nussbaum, so this recipe is at least 50ish years old, and I can attest to it tasting good as it was the only version of an “American cookie” we ever ate as kids in Scotland :)

I’ve kept this in cups cause my asker was American, but if anyone wants grams or oz I can find my scales and work it out <3

Things you will need:

2 bowls, a sifter or whisk, a mixing spatula/spoon, and a baking sheet (2 is better cause then you can bake the whole mix at once).

Dry ingredients.

1 cup all purpose flour. 1/2 cup whole wheat flour (if you have it, if not do 1+ 1/2 cups all purpose or substitute in oatmeal flour or even rice flour for added texture/flavor, oat meal gives it a bit of a nutty flavor, rice flour will make it sweeter) 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda.  1/4 teaspoon of kosher salt 

Wet ingredients

2/3 cup of margarine softened at room temperature (do not melt, you need the fat structure intact to carry the sugar, alternatively 1/3 vegetable oil works too. If this is too dry, try adding a little more. I tend to add oil slowly in by feel these days). 1/2 cup finely granulated sugar. 1/2 cup of light muscovado (brown sugar) tightly packed. 1 egg. 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract.

Extras: throw in one cup of your choice of chocolate chips (or extra of your choice eg. raisins, chopped nuts)

Method:

Preheat your oven to 350′f and either line or lightly grease your cookie sheets.

In one bowl beat together your wet ingredients until light and creamy. And because I get asked this every now and then, yes when it comes to baking, sugar is considered a wet ingredient. This is because it is a liquifier, not a stabilizer like flour. And just to really fuck with your head, eggs thought not dry, are considered a stabilizer because they give food structural stability. Which is why the more sugar you add into something, the gooier/softer it will be (like the famous American cookie texture) and also why successful gluten free baking (usually high in sugars) that doesn’t have the textural experience of eating mushy sweet drywall, requires more eggs than your usual cookie mix in order to retain shape/moisture. themoreyouknow.jpg

Anyway, set your wet mixture to one side, then in another bowl sift together your dry ingredients. If you don’t have a sifter throw your dry ingredients together and give them a whisk round to make sure they are thoroughly blended. Add about half your dry mix to the wet until you get a gooey mix, add in your 1 cup of chocolate chips, then add in the rest of your dry mix until well combined. It should be sticky but not runny.

Next take your prepped baking sheets, and drop 10ish tablespoons of the batter onto each one and bake for 10-12 minutes or until cookies are lightly browned and firm at the center. Then remove from oven, allow to sit on the hot tray for another 2 mins, then allow them to cool on a wire wrack. Allow to cool mostly the whole way before serving. 

These will keep well for up to about 3-4 days in an airtight concealer, and can be frozen for up to a month. (longer if you don’t use whole wheat flour, which goes rancid quicker than all purpose white flour). You can also freeze the raw mix ready for throwing in the oven, for up to about a month, then add on 1-2 mins for bake time to make sure they are cooked the whole way through 

And that’s how to make a kosher cookies for friends who keep kosher. Good luck with your baking friend, and please tag me and let me know how it goes! :)