#all focused on BURNING THIS TREND UNTIL IT NEVER RECOVERS

[mariniacipher]

if i have to hear the term “girl math” one more time i wilL TEAR SOMEONE’S HEAD OFF

[youngdreamer3214]

Could you do 18 from the prompt list with Speedy and Raven

Assume Standard Disclaimer

Tumblr Prompt #18. “You weren’t there for me when I needed you the most.” Warning- Angst, Hurt with little comfort Pairing- Speedy and Raven

(A/N- This is written in Raven’s point of view. Please be gentle it is my first time writing a piece of this sort.)

I hope you enjoy reading this.

0O0O

My vision started to blur, heartbeats slowed down and in that moment I was lost, confused, sad and hurt. So deeply hurt that I felt as though all life was seeping out of my veins and at an excruciatingly slow pace, reminding me of everything I had gone through, what I had lost, something which I never had. A tear slips down my cheek as my breathing becomes uneven and blood gushes out of my wounds.

As I laid in the middle of the ruins, sirens blaring in the background, my friends screaming in the background trying to get to me, all I could think about were his parting words to me.

Call me a masochist but all I could think about was his painfully beautiful smile, his breathtakingly enchanting emerald eyes which would never look at me the way that I wanted, like how I looked at him.

Maybe it was because I was not pretty enough, not funny enough, not interesting enough or just not enough for him. Or maybe it was because I was not her.

She, who is his priority, the one for whom his smiles are directed to, the one who he always looks at, the one for whom he leave everything behind, even me.

My breath hitches in my throat as a ray of light falls on my face and fresh air embraces every inch of the room and hope takes birth in my heart seeing a domino masked face. Maybe he came for me? Maybe I am his priority? Maybe he hadn’t forgotten about me?

But as people rush in the room, everything becomes stuffy, cramped. The light is blocked and all hope dies as I see black hair instead of his beautiful fiery hair. I realize with defeat, cursing myself to be an idiot for having hope that he would come for me. All hope leaves my body as my leader and friend picks me up in his arms cautiously saying something that I cannot hear, all I can see is his lips moving before everything starts to blur and my world goes dark.

0O0O0

I hear voices as I slowly drift into consciousness, my eyes slowly adapting to the brightness of the... med bay? I groan as my head starts to throb and my throat feels dry.

“W-water.” I manage to croak out and everything around me falls silent except for the constant beeping of the heart monitor. I see my best friend Richard rush to get water as Cyborg with great care help me sit up while Beastboy keeps pillows behind my back. Starfire hovers around me with a worried expression on her face. I see my team filling the room as my eyes slowly open fully and without hurting.

And my heart starts to ache when I don’t see the archer in the room, confirming what I already know, that he doesn’t care enough for me to be here.

I try to shift my focus from him to my friends, who I am so grateful to have in my life and offer them a smile full of gratefulness as I see the relief on their faces.

“You scared us there, Rae…” Richard says with relief evident on his face as he pulls a chair to sit next to my bed after helping me drink water.

“Yeah, don’t do that to us again please…or who would save us from greenie’s jokes?” Cyborg, my dear big brother said trying to lighten the serious mood but I could feel the high levels of relief emitting from him. Beastboy agreed till he realized the remark made at him and gave an offended, making me laugh inwardly “Hey! Raven loves my jokes…don’t you, Raven?”

I just gave an unimpressed look to him, trying to hide my smile as my mind shifted to my friends and how thankful I was that I had them in my life.

It was not until later that Cyborg told me that I had suffered from several wounds, some of them being burns and a fractured leg but the most worrisome was the wound on my head which was the reason I had difficulty healing myself and the reason why I was in critical condition until and unless I woke up.

He advised me to not move out of the med bay for at least till tomorrow and that for at least three weeks (depending on my healing) I was to not take part in fighting crime. The latter to which I protested relentlessly but my friends were firm on this decision and I ultimately gave up when Starfire gave me her watery eyes.

I sighed and my eyes started to become droopy, the medicine showing its effect so I leaned back in the pillows and Cyborg ushered everyone out of the room seeing my state, Starfire gave me a huge but gentle hug. Well the gentlest she could be and left. Cyborg and Beastboy followed suit with the former making promises of waffles for breakfast and the latter with of a protein filled vegan breakfast at which Cyborg hit his head as they both walked out playfully fighting.

Now only Richard was left. With him only in the room my mask had no meaning; he was my best friend, my leader and the one who I trusted most in the world. He knew about my feelings for the archer and he knew all the pain I suffered because of it.

The pain of loving someone who could never see me that way, who could never think of me in that way, who could never return my feelings.

We sat in silence for a while, the beeping of the heart monitor being the only sound in the room when I asked in a low voice “Did he call?”

A small, quiet ‘no’ was my answer and I chuckled painfully, a couple of tears welling up in my eyes as I heard what my best friend had to add “Maybe he didn’t get the message…or maybe-”

“He doesn’t care.” My dejected admission stole all the words out of his mouth and he stared at me with pity, which I hated. I don’t need anybody’s pity or sympathy. So before he could say anything I looked at him and whispered, my voice coming out shakier than I would have liked “I am t-tired.”

He saw the turmoil underneath my facade like he always did, and left after wishing me a good night. I closed my eyes, hoping for sleep to take me away from the nightmares of reality.

0O0

Days passed as my body was recovering from its injuries unlike my heart which still remained broken, breaking more with each day passing when he didn’t call.

My friends noticed this as they constantly tried to divert my mind to other matters. Richard would ask me to help him in battle strategies, Starfire would make me watch some show that was trending and Cyborg would just talk with me, carefully avoiding any topic which may hurt me.

But the most puzzling of all was Beastboy, who would transform into a kitten and just lay next to me, napping or lightly purring as I gave him scratches, just offering me his support and comfort. And that was just what I needed; as much as I appreciated the efforts of all my friends, I looked forward to Beastboy’s company the most.

The shapeshifter was the only one of my friends who could understand my pain, the pain of loving someone who could never love you back again. And ever since Terra refused to recognize him, he has carried that pain in his heart; which I can often feel and now relate to.

And it was on one of the days when Beastboy was lying next to me in his cat form while I read when he entered the room, and my breathe hitched in my throat and my heart beats slowed down.

His somehow always impeccable red hair were messy, as though he had run his hand through it a lot; his gorgeous emerald eyes were hidden by his domino mask but even that mask couldn’t hide his anger as his face was flushed and his chest was heaving.

“I need to speak to you Raven” he said, his lips tight and sporting a frown which only deepened as he looked at the changeling next to me and said “Alone.”

Beastboy didn’t say anything; he lightly curled his tail around my hand while staring at the archer, showing his support. He slowly turned and looked at me in question and I lightly nodded my head so he untangled his tail from me, making me suddenly feel so empty and alone, and jumped on the ground and walked out of the room to give us privacy but not before glaring at the archer.

“What is it Speedy?” I asked not looking at him, which seemed to anger him even more as he stomped in my direction till he stood in front of me, his stance intimidating and furious. But I couldn’t bear to look at him. Just being in the same room with him was suffocating me. It was reminding me of what I couldn’t have, what I was not good enough for.

“Do you mind explaining to me, why I found out from Aqualad that you are injured instead of you telling me this yourself?” he seethed. I didn’t say anything and focused my attention on the wall behind him.

He clouded my senses, everything about him was overwhelming me. His extreme and very loud emotions were impacting my empathy, making me unable to think about anything but him.

I stayed silent, unable to say anything with his anger clouding his senses and now fueling my own. “Tell me Raven!” He screamed at the top of his lungs.

“Why did you not tell me? Am I NOTHING to you? Don’t I have the right to know, if my best friend is injured? You are an empath right? Then why do you not care about anyone’s emotions but your own! Why-”

This was the breaking point for me.

I could feel my magic waiting to erupt from my being, my second pair of eyes waiting to open and my demonic heritage wanting to overpower my human self.

“Shut up!” I hissed, my voice laced with my demon’s “You don’t get to speak to me this way, especially after everything that has happened between us.”

My heart ached again, thinking about the day when our relationship changed forever. My demon retreating in the deepest depths of my being as my pain overshadowed everything else.

“You are asking me that why didn’t I tell you about my condition but why weren’t you there for me when all this happened, when I needed you?�� his eyes widened at my question.I could feel his anger drain out of his body as everything he said that day and his reason for not being there for me dawned on him.

He shamefully hung his head, the anger seemingly forgotten as he said in a voice just above a whisper “S-she…”

I laughed, cutting him off; of course it was because of her. I cursed myself for thinking that he had another reason for not being there for me. “So don’t accuse me of not caring about anybody else’s emotions, when it was you who had never cared about mine...You weren’t there for me when I needed you the most.”

A tear slipped down my eye as I looked at him saying what I promised to myself would be my last words to him, the man who was my friend, my first love, Roy. “And now I will make sure that I never need you again.” And now he will always be Speedy to me, a fellow titan.

Fin.

Please Read and Review.

Thank you.

[prettywordsyouleft]

The Devil Contained

Prompt: #162 for anon – “Come into the light.”

Anonymous said:

Hello hello! For the drabble game could I ask for #162 with jaebum if you don't mind?

Pairing: Im Jaebum x reader

Genre: demon au / fluff

Warnings: none

Word count: 1359

Whilst this is part of the KOD world, you can read this away from the series, although it would make more sense to read the previous stories to understand the world this takes place in.

King of Demons series: Havoc // King of Demons // Unfathomable // Sacrifice // King of Demons: The Return // In The Night // Identity // Prophecy // Someone // The Devil Contained // The Monsters Witch

“Why are you hiding? Come into the light properly!” you called out and Jaebum sighed heavily, looking down at his new clothes right when you walked into the room.

Your light snort wasn’t lost on the demon and Jaebum lifted his hand, fingers on the ready to click together. You gasped. “Oh no, don’t you dare!”

“Y/N, this isn’t me,” Jaebum implored, snapping his fingers. His appearance changed before you, his cloak and dark clothing returning to him.

“This is you in Sheol,” you reminded sternly, placing your hands on your hips. “Change back.”

“Why should I?” he asked bitterly, shaking his head to refute your instructions.

It was ironic to Jaebum that he commanded an entire world down in Hell. Everyone listened to what he had to say and never questioned him, knowing the grave consequences if they even tried.

Still, even after all these years of being together with you, he wasn’t used to having someone he answered to.

Your eyes grew hard and the devil softened, dropping his gaze to the ground. “Must I?”

“We’re trying to find your earthside fashion, Jaebum. We still haven’t found something you won’t protest about endlessly after one night wearing them. Last time you even burned the outfit from existence! That cost me a lot of money!”

He smirked. “Human clothes are too restricting.”

“Says the man who gets around in leather pants most days,” you retorted, uncaring of his troubles.

Sighing, Jaebum clicked his fingers together again and you immediately beamed, fussing over his polo shirt and chinos. Jaebum shook his head. “Y/N, who even wears these clothes?”

“Lots of people,” you mumbled, still admiring him fondly. Jaebum scrunched his nose up at you.

“Really?”

“Sure, this is a popular look for a lot of men in power.”

“To go to work in?” he echoed and you laughed, shaking your head.

“No, for leisure.”

“The Devil himself never gets a day off so why would I need an outfit for leisure?”

You rolled your eyes. “You have one night with me every two years on Earth. The first time around, I don’t think you ever complained this much about your clothes.”

“I was rather preoccupied, don’t you think?”

Laughing, you nodded. “Stealing all the mint chocolate chip ice-cream sure took your attention off your outfit, huh?”

“This isn’t me, my love. What other outfits can I wear instead?” he asked, looking at the pile of clothing you had bought in preparation this year. Jaebum had to admit, anything would be better than the weird layered thing Jackson had insisted was the hottest trend on Earth two years previous.

However, the stripes on the tee and the waistband of these pants did nothing to appeal to him whatsoever.

“Okay, how about this?”

“A shirt? How is that much different from my normal look?”

You laughed. “For one, it’s not made from silk.”

“I thought you liked the feeling of it under your hands,” he questioned, stepping in closer to you. Reaching to cup your face within his hands, he smiled wickedly at you. “Or is it the way you can easily rip it from upon me?”

“Simmer it down, Devil,” you remarked, blinking away the lust forming within your eyes. “No one in their right mind wears a silk shirt here unless they’re in a historical play or the mafia.”

“You humans have lost your sense of fashion. Silk has been a staple for centuries.”

“Yes, much like you have, we know.”

Shoving Jaebum back into your bathroom, he changed, looking up at himself in the mirror as he did so. This wasn’t as bad, he could wear a shirt, though he did miss the lightness of his silk. The pants weren’t a bad fit either.

This would do.

“Okay, I’m coming out,” he announced, stepping out to find you rubbing at your stomach. He frowned. “Are you unwell? Must we cancel our human date?”

“Hm? Oh no, I’m fine!” you excused with a smile, now eying him up.

Jaebum cleared his throat. “What do you call this look?”

“The Devil contained,” you mused, coming over to wrap your hand around his lower arm and tugged him along. “Come on, we have a reservation waiting for us.”

Dinner was delicious, though paled entirely once he was equipped with the largest scoop of mint chocolate ice-cream that he could get. Swinging your linked hands lightly as you strolled around the streets together, you shared smiles as you ate your ice-cream, and Jaebum knew it didn’t matter what he wore to enjoy this special time with you. Although he would always feel his best in the land he belonged in, it didn’t matter wherever he was, as long as you were at his side.

It was a love that was unlike any other.

He longed for you whenever you were earthbound without him and he wanted time to stop when you were spending your half of the year with him in Sheol. Knowing that after tonight, he wouldn’t see you for another two months was bittersweet.

Perhaps that was why he liked eating mint chocolate whenever he was up here.

You stopped suddenly and Jaebum examined your expression, his brows knitting together. “What is it?”

“It’s nothing,” you whispered, your eyes attached to the store you had halted outside of. Jaebum looked inside, noting it was a baby store. He frowned; did you know anyone who was going to have a little human soon?

As soon as the thought came, his eyes travelled to your middle once more, blinking slowly. He had been so worked up and focused on himself that he hadn’t once picked up on the changes happening within you.

Jaebum didn’t know if the idea frightened or excited him immensely.

You caught his knowing gaze and laughed awkwardly. “Maybe it won’t be something we have together.”

“How can you say that when you know of our child growing within you?”

“It’s not just any child, Jaebum. It has a demon for a father.”

“Does that bother you?” he murmured and you shook your head adamantly.

“I worry I might not be strong enough to nurture it. Not to mention, all that I have read up on says that the gestation rate should be different. I could be having our child faster than I’m physically prepared for.”

“You read up about having a child with my kind?” he mused, touched by your efforts. Reaching down to rest his hand upon your stomach, Jaebum grinned. “She is as strong as her mother is.”

“She?!” Gasping, you shook your head rapidly. “Jaebum, I didn’t know the gender! How did you… why am I even asking, you’re the Devil himself.”

“It appears I have wreck havoc after all on a human, just not in the way the Gods anticipate,” he announced as you groaned loudly. Looking at you, he noticed the smile you were trying to hide and laughed in satisfaction. “Who knew I would become a father?”

“I did,” you told him, recovering enough to look up at the man you loved. “And a fantastic one at that.”

“With you as my queen, what can I not do?” he told you, kissing you passionately before looking up at the store again, a smile curling up his lips.

“No ice-cream this time, that’s a first,” Jinyoung exclaimed when Jaebum arrived back from his trip to Earth, though the insightful demon soon grew perplexed. “Brother, what did you do?”

“The unthinkable,” he mentioned proudly, raising a hand to his chest as he passed Jinyoung and went into his chambers. Jinyoung had followed, scratching at his head.

“Did you cause actual calamity?”

“I brought around new life.”

“New… you did what?!”

Jaebum grinned, opening a set of doors, watching as everything he had travelled back with soon settled upon the floor. Jinyoung approached the first box and then sent a startled look in the direction of the Devil.

“Will you help me prepare everything? It won’t be long until we have a true demon princess among us.”

Jaebum was excited for his next trip to Earth already, knowing it would be a family outing instead.

_________________

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[thisselflovecamebacktome]

My personal connection with Taylor’s discography, part two: Right Where You Left Me

Basically this is just a series I’m doing where I write down my feelings on what each of the Taylor songs means to me personally. Part one was my relationship with It’s Time To Go, which you can find here.

Before we get started with this one though, I just want to mention how much I love this song, even outside of relatability. While I do prefer Taylor’s ‘mature’ voice nowadays, the fact she tapped into her ‘fetus Taylor’/RED era voice in an album filled with her ‘mature’ voice to show that she’s stuck at an age that no longer suitable/where she’s meant to be adds a lot to the song. Likewise, the urgency she uses when saying ‘Help!’ because it feels like an emergency to her makes me want to scream every time I hear it.

Anyway, with that being said, this is how I personally relate to this song.

Right Where You Left Me

As a whole, this song is one of the most relatable songs of Taylor’s for me right now. It is somehow comforting, yet also reads me like a book. It is also one of the many songs Taylor has written that I relate back to the trauma of losing my family. Specifically, Right Where You Left Me feels like a vocalisation of what I feel on the worst of days where I do not feel strong enough to go on alone and just want them to come back. Because of this, Taylor’s ‘immature’ voice adds even more to the song as the situation it relates to in my own life makes me feel like a child crying out for their parents to help them.

Friends break up, friends get married

Basically I’m at this part of my life where it feels like all my friends are hitting these milestones that not only do I not feel close to hitting, I just have no interest in hitting them because I’m too focused on what happened with my family.

Strangers get born, strangers get buried

In the last year or so, I found out through facebook that I am an aunt and via the phone that my grandfather, someone who called me their favourite grandchild, had died. These are people who should in theory mean the world to me, but instead, they were born/died strangers to me, as will any other members of my family. And as a result, I felt nothing hearing the news.

Trends change, rumors fly through new skies. But I'm right where you left me. Matches burn after the other

Time has passed, but I still stuck in that moment, so much so that things that used to catch my interest no longer phase me.

Pages turn and stick to each other

A lot of people have spoken about how this song is about trauma, but I feel like this line is often left out of the conversation when it’s perhaps the most obvious show of it. When you’re traumatised, time all blurs together and as a result, you often find yourself in a position where you’re questioning how you even got there or feeling like you’ve missed part of the story. And part of this goes with my friends’ lives too. Like it feels like I am so stuck in the moment my family fell apart that I wake up some days noticing my friends have made these achievements that I didn’t even know they were working up for despite them telling me things I just do not remember. In non-traumatised terms, it’s almost like being invited to a wedding where you thought the bride was still single.

Wages earned and lessons learned. But I'm right where you left me

Obviously life has still gone on for both myself and my family. None of us have just stayed in bed for almost six years doing literal nothing, at least from what I know. I’ve started and finished my degrees, assumingly my family has gone to work etc and I’ve been able to reflect on what went wrong and why not to trust them again. But despite that, it still feels like just yesterday that this all went down. The damage losing my family has done is and may always be a fresh wound.

Help, I'm still at the restaurant, still sitting in a corner I haunt cross-legged in the dim light. They say, "What a sad sight"

Continuing from the above, I am still traumatised and don’t really know how to move past this. And while most of my friends have tried to help, there’s nothing they can realistically do but say that they’re sorry that it happened.

I swear you could hear a hair pin drop right when I felt the moment stop. Glass shattered on the white cloth

Christmas Day 2015. Before then my sister had been in a two year cycle of running away but coming back for special events to get gifts. So when she didn’t show on Christmas, I knew she wasn’t coming back. Also the moment I read the facebook messages from my extended family stating that they’d rather I starve and be homeless than speak to my father about helping put the family back together.

Everybody moved on. I stayed there. Dust collected on my pinned up hair

Again the continuation of the idea that it feels like everyone around me has moved on and done amazing things and I’ve just sat here, achieving nothing.

They expected me to find somewhere, Some perspective. But I sat and stared right where you left me

My family falling apart was one of those ‘everyone knew before me’ moments. Like friends of mine have flat out pointed out that the signs were there from when I was like ten. And yet, part of me held on thinking that anyone in my family would come back and fix things someday.

Did you ever hear about the girl who got frozen? Time went on for everybody else, she won't know it

Again, so much time has passed since then and everyone else (barring my mother) seems to have moved on, leaving this trauma behind as just a memory and yet it feels incomprehensible that this happened and that I was meant to do anything afterwards until this got sorted.

She's still twenty-three inside her fantasy, how it was supposed to be

I still spend so so much time wishing things were different and imagining all these different events in our lives that the other should be at and how it should have been even though I know at the end of the day that just breaks my heart worse when I am forced to reconcile that that’s never going to happen.

Did you hear about the girl who lives in delusion?

I spent two years truly believing my father would eventually realise how messed up the situation was and reuniting my sister and extended family with me, my brother and/or mother even though he had the means to do so the whole time but didn’t. Or that my sister would come home on her own at 18 knowing mum couldn’t set boundaries anymore. Or at very least, one of the extended family would call and ask how they could help. Like I had zero reason to have faith in these people anymore, and yet I sat around like a delusional idiot truly thinking that 2015 wasn’t the end for my family.

Breakups happen every day, you don't have to lose it

In an attempt to either make me feel better or just move past the subject, I’ve had people in my life constantly compare it to their siblings who came back or their parents divorce where they still speak to both parents or just generally telling me that I’ve gotta forget them and just move on to be okay. And while well meaning, it has just felt more isolating and like they want me to just shut up for their sakes, even if they don’t mean it to. As a result, I’ve been left to fester more about it, because outside therapy, I have nowhere to put that energy. And as someone who feels like they can “infodump”/rant and then move on, at least for a while, it’s the most frustrating thing.

She's still twenty-three inside her fantasy and you're sitting in front of me at the restaurant when I was still the one you want, cross-legged in the dim light. Everything was just right

While it was not the last day I had with her, the last positive memory I have of my sister was when the three of us went to Merimbula, my then favourite place in the world, to visit my grandmother in January 2015. It was the time in my life where I was the happiest, both with myself and how the rest of my life was going, and felt that everything was going to work out. We had just moved my sister to a different school away from the people who were pushing her to act out (they later transferred to the same school :/), I was about to start my degree, I felt the most recovered from my PTSD, Bipolar and Eating Disorder than I ever had and I felt the most loved I ever had, both by my family and others. Looking back at the photos from that trip, I also noticed that it’s the only photos I’ve smiled in and the most huggy I’ve ever been towards my sister and father.

I could feel the mascara run. You told me that you met someone

This line specifically feels aimed at my father and the moment in 2017 he told me that he’d rather stick with my sister and allow her to do whatever she likes than stand by my side and try to reconnect the family and I realised that that was never going to change.

I'm sure that you got a wife out there, kids and Christmas. But I'm unaware ‘cause I'm right where

Like I said, I know I have a nephew that I’ll never meet now. I know my younger cousins are probably getting married and having these other events, but I’m never going to be part of that and I can’t even comprehend having those events for myself after what happened. The specific mention of Christmas also feels like a kick in the guts not only as the day that I realised my sister wasn’t coming back, but that was the main time we saw everyone from the extended family and would literally spend like 12 hours at my uncle’s place for the day.

I cause no harm, mind my business

Again, I just cannot find it in myself to do anything anymore. I don’t get involved in things I used to, I don’t make new connections and I can’t bring myself to explain what happened. I just go through the motions of living the same day, over and over.

If our love died young I can't bear witness

Quite frankly, I’ve pushed this shit so far to the back of my head because I just cannot face the pain, even after all this time. Like taking a ‘out of sight, out of mind’ approach and trying to rationalise it to myself that everyone else was right and this was inevitable is the only way I’ve been getting through each day because the alternative is that none of this had to happen but still did.

And it's been so long. But if you ever think you got it wrong I'm right where you left me

This is the child in me screaming out and begging me to reach out to them on the bad days that I want them all back and can’t do this alone.

You left me no, you left me no

The disbelief. Like none of this can be real. Like my father and extended family couldn’t have decided a broken family was better than the work it takes to fix one, right? My mother can’t be so torn up in her own grief that by her own accord, has admitted she will never love me, right? It just all cannot be real. But it is.

You left me no choice but to stay here forever

And to finish off, we have a triple meaning line.

The father version: By manipulating events and turning my mother, brother and I into the villains, he has forced us into a future where we do not have family. He has brought on grief to my mother that I am expecting her to die at her own hand soon. And he has left me living in my fantasies of what could have been.

The mother version: Within her own grief, my mother is living in a mindset where anyone wanting to move on from this and have a life is selfish and is herself constantly talking about it and giving ultimatums to listen to and agree with her or refuse to pay bills, which I need her to do as someone who is financially dependent on her. Ironically, she also shuts down any inkling that my brother and I have been affected by this to the level she has and refuses to entertain us talking about that in the household. Both of which mean I am forced to relive this over and over without the recovering aspects that I need.

The me version: Basically the combination of the two above. Because I have not been given the chance to recover in the way I need and do not have an outlet outside of therapy to properly work through this, I am forced to relive the events with myself each night just to try and make sense of it all. Further, the trauma has hit so deep that again, even the idea of starting new relationships whether they be familiar, romantic or platonic seems both unworthy of my attention and horrifically terrifying because it still feels like I am unloveable because if my own family, the people who are meant to love you forever, have abandoned me, why would anyone else stay?

[dreamerfae]

Androphobia

Summary: Touka met with an unfortunate incident when she was young, which lead to her having an uncured androphobia till today. When her boss told her to get it fixed or get fired, she knew she had to face her phobia head-on. It resulted in her going to the hospital, where she met a handsome doctor named Kaneki who was in-charge of curing her.

Word Count: 9005

Rating: Teens and Up

Genre: Alternate Universe

Notes: Androphobia - a fear of males. She is currently a working adult in a company. The doctor is black-haired Kaneki but in adult form (not reaper Ken).

—

"Isn't that bad!?" Yoriko exclaimed, and Touka had to close her hand over her friend's mouth to keep the news from spreading.

The female sighed. "Yeah. I'll get fired if I don't get my androphobia settled down within 6 months. Boss says it's affecting my work performance and everyone else's as well..."

"What are you going to do?"

"I don't know... I don't want to go to a doctor... they cost lots of money and what if it's a guy? It'll be even harder to recover."

Yoriko squeezed her friend's hands. "You have to do it! Even if the doctor is a guy! You never know—he might be your future boyfriend and husband!!! Are you going to let your phobia affect your work and your relationship status?!"

Touka rolled her eyes. "If I didn't know you better, I would think you're insulting me. Seeing as we've been friends since high school, I will take it as you're not."

She remained silent to think about what Yoriko had said. As a young girl, she always wanted to meet a handsome prince and have a family with him someday. But after that incident, she changed and never got close to men ever again.

If she were to overcome her phobia, she would be able to fulfill her childhood dream. As it stands, her phobia was affecting everything and everyone in her life. Her family, her friends, her work performance etc. At this rate, she was going to be fired from the only company that allowed her to work here despite her phobia and she couldn't let that happen.

"Alright. I'll go see a doctor."

A wide grin appeared on Yoriko's face. "Great! I'll introduce you to a good hospital!!"

Standing in front of a therapist's hospital room, Touka took a deep breath and hoped for the best. She knocked and entered, only to freeze in her tracks when she saw that the doctor was a male, even though she had specifically requested for a female. Her heart stopped, palms sweat and stomach churned.

The black-haired male doctor looked up from his documents and smiled at her. "Good afternoon, Ms Kirishima. I am Doctor Kaneki and I will be in charge of you on your path in treating your phobia. Do take a seat."  He gestured to the chair in front of him.

Kaneki stared at her documents then had realization dawn upon him the reason why she never moved from her spot. "Right, you have androphobia. Sorry, I wasn't aware that it was this serious." He stood up, startling her and attempted to push the chair over to her. She caught it, pulled it to the furthest area of the room—the corner, furthest from him—and sat. Then, she turned her head to face the wall, not wanting to even look at him.

"If it'll help you relax, let's talk like this--"

"I thought I requested a female doctor." She cut in.

Clasping his hands together, he was unfazed by her interruption and rudeness and remained friendly. "Despite your request, I took on your case, thinking that it might be more effective for your phobia to be treated by me, seeing as I'm a male. Don't worry, your case is not uncommon. It can be treated, with time and patience."

"I don't think it's possible for me to get treated if I have a doctor who is male--an object of my fear in the same room as me and talking to me."

"We can do this and I assure you that I'm one of the best doctors in therapy."

With no further objections from her, Kaneki stood up. Her jaw clenched when she heard him do so from the scratching sound of the chair against the floor.

"I'm going to confirm the seriousness of your condition now so I can come up with your treatment. If you are uncomfortable about anything, let me know."

He took a step towards her. She didn't move from her spot. Another step. She shot up from her chair and had her hand on the doorknob immediately, wanting to leave the room. He stepped backward, she didn't open the door.

Noting down how the minimum distance he needs to keep from her was about 6 steps, he then asked, "Do you look guys in the eyes when you speak to them?"

"I do not."

"How do you feel if you talk to men?"

"Like I rather die than talk to them. "

He decided that the first thing he had to fix was to make her look at him when they talked. It would definitely kick start things.

"Right. Let's work on your eye contact first. What do you like? Animals? Food? Color? Tell me anything."

"..rabbits."

Kaneki hummed in response as he began typing on his computer. Soon, many different pictures of rabbits came out of the printer and he grabbed them. Sliding one to her feet, he watched her gaze at the wall switch to the picture of the cute rabbit and she smiled.

He then slid another picture to her, this one further from her, but nearer to him. As he hoped, she looked at it.

He continued doing so with other pictures until he finally held one picture above his head, where she did look at the picture though avoiding his eye contact. Slowly pulling the photo down, their eyes finally locked when the photo was positioned just below his eyes.

She held her gaze into his eyes for only a few seconds before looking away.

That's an improvement, he thought and he used blue tack to stick one photo on the cabinet behind him, just above him. She followed it and then, he had her looking directly at him. Though her eyes were only on the picture, it was better than having her speak to him whilst her gaze was on the wall or the floor each time.

A reward would be next.

"If you look into my eyes at another 2 times today, I will give you a rabbit item. I will increase the number of times I need you to look at me by every session and your prize will be better than the last."

"You're trying to bribe me."

Kaneki chuckled. "Don't put it in that way. It's called a reward system."

Touka walked out of that 2-hour session with a rabbit pencil that day.

The next session focused on allowing her to look at photos of men. So Kaneki printed out different pictures of men; from young to old and showed it to her. The young went first.

"Tell me which you don't like the most."

A picture of a young boy around age 5. She managed to look at it without being afraid.

A picture of a boy around 17 years old. Her lips trembled and body shivered. But she could still look at the photo without turning away.

A picture of a 30-year-old guy. One look at it and she stood up, turning to leave the room.

"Wait, don't leave. I'll put the picture down."

She sat back down onto her chair and watched as he put the paper into the shredder machine before heaving a sigh of relief. More photos were shown after that but the biggest reaction she had was for men around the age of 30-40 years old.

"Kirishima-San, look at me."

Touka does as she's told.

"Similar to the photo of the 30-year-old guy you hate, I'm also 30 years old."

Hearing that alarmed her but she clenched her hands into fists and forced herself to continue looking at him.

He smiled, making her relax a little.

"Good job on not looking away from me. Why don't you tell me what happened? Most people with phobias have had something bad happen to them to cause the phobia they have now. I would like to know yours so I can better treat you."

To explain the horrible experience she had in words felt like she was going to relive the whole thing again and she didn't want to. She squeezed her eyes shut with regret and bit her lower lip. "I'm sorry, I'm not ready to tell you."

"No problem. I will wait until you're ready."

It's been 2 months since Touka started therapy with this doctor and after meeting once for 2 hours every week, they've built up some kind of friendship between them.

In times when she's uncomfortable or unable to continue with the treatment, Doctor Kaneki wouldn't force her and instead talked to her. The topics of conversation range from hobbies, work, news, trends, favorite food, and drinks, etc.

She found that it wasn't because he didn't bother to continue the treatment but it's a way to allow her to relax and not feel threatened by him as a male—the object of her fear.

Which, she admits, is a clever plan. Getting her to let her guard down through conversations is working and she doesn't feel as apprehensive towards him as compared to day 1.

Now, she's able to at least look him in the eye when they talk and sit a little closer to him. As he mentioned, the first time they met, they were 6 steps apart. Now she was 3 steps away from him—halfway there and she felt so proud of herself for doing that.

She had left this sickness of hers untreated for the past 10 years and it only took this doctor 2 months to partially heal her. He was capable, she'd give him that.

And friendly,

And handsome—

She choked. How had thoughts of her sickness become thoughts of him being handsome?!

Cheeks burning, she cupped them to cool them down and buried her face into her hands. She shook her head. The reason why she found him handsome and nice and friendly was due to her talking to him—who's the first male she has talked to, met eye contact and seen in a decade.

It's probably because she's been having her head down and gaze to the floor whenever she was around males. Yeah, that's just probably the case. She was not in love with him.

—

Writing down notes in his book, Kaneki stared at Touka's notes and smiled at the remembrance of the previous day where she looked so happy to receive a rabbit plush toy. Out of all the patients, she's the one that he enjoyed treating and being with the most.

As a doctor, to see her fast progress in treatment was great because that's what he's here for: to treat people. But there's one other thing that made him happy was the determination and perseverance she showed in her treatment.

Sure, she was a tough patient to treat for her type of phobia but it was the progress that made everything worthwhile—as well as the smile that he put on her face at the end of the day when she received a reward from him.

She glowed—shined—he couldn't find a word for it—but he found her beautiful when she smiled. It's been a long time since he's met a female who made his heart beat fast. The last time he had seen that kind of smile that made his heart race was from his ex-girlfriend, 3 years ago.

A frown replaced the smile on his face and he had to remind himself once again to not fall in love. He has maintained it that way for 3 years and he will continue to do so in the future.

—

Staring down at his notes, Kaneki didn't notice Touka enter the room and already sat on the chair waiting for him.

"Doctor Kaneki!"

He snapped out of his thoughts and directed his attention to her. "I'm sorry. I was lost in thoughts."

"Are you okay?" Touka looked worriedly at him and he smiled.

He felt his hand brush his chin and smiled nervously. "I'm fine. Let's start our session for today."

Touka hesitated, then put a hand over his. "Y-you can tell me anything. I'm here to listen."

The male felt touched by her gesture. Despite her phobia, she forced herself to touch him and offered her help. "Thank you." He looked down. "Today's actually my girlfriend's 3rd year death anniversary. I was planning to visit her grave after our session."

She remained silent at his confession. What was she supposed to say in this situation? She had wanted to help him when he seemed so sad in his thoughts. But now that he really told her, she didn't know what to do and she wasn't responsible for whatever came out of her mouth next.

"What was she like? Your ex-girlfriend."

One end of his lips quirked at the memory.

"She was always laughing. She was outgoing. She was gentle. She was my everything and I wanted to eventually marry her and have a family with her." He seemed so happy as he remembered about her, then his mood suddenly dropped.

"She suffered depression from being bullied at her workplace and despite being a doctor—" he exhaled a shaky breath. "I couldn't save her and she committed suicide by throwing herself from a building."

He tried to control his voice from wavering and his tears from coming out.

Touka's lips trembled and her heart ached for him. It must have been so painful to have a loved one die without being able to save them. Every time they talked, he would have light in his eyes but now, his eyes looked sorrowful and dead. She did not like that. Not one bit.

Without thinking, she was out of her chair and had his head in her chest, arms wrapping around him. She froze when his arms encircled her torso and he shed tears into her chest.

They separated, with her plopping down onto her chair, staring into space and asking herself what had possessed her to hug him—her object of fear. Was it the waver in his voice? Was it the tears brimming in his eyes, threatening to fall? Was it the forced smile he put as if to pretended everything was fine?

Or was it because it upset her to see him upset?

Before she could answer her own question, he wiped his tears away and smiled. "Thank you for listening to me. I appreciate it. That's embarrassing. I'm supposed to be listening to your problems and you ended up listening to mine." He chuckled.

She shook her head. "It's okay. It's the least I can do when you're helping me so much."

"It's my job. Don't worry about it."

And somehow Touka wished he cared about her not because it was his job, but because it was her.

—

One of Kaneki's legs shook and his fingers drummed on the table as he awaited Touka's arrival for their appointment. These days, he has been looking forward to their appointments earnestly, and it always made his day better when he saw her progress with his own eyes.

But after that day where she comforted him by hugging him to her chest, it gave him mixed feelings. He had since then begun to notice some things about her. How her perfume smelt of roses, how her bag hung the rabbit keychain he gave her, how her smile reached her mesmerizing ocean-blue eyes and many more.

..Was he starting to see her not as just a patient, but as a woman?

He shook his head. It was probably his own imagination. It was just his excitement in her improvement of phobia treatment.

Despite believing so, his heart leaped when he heard the familiar ring of her bell keychain as she entered his room and settled down on the chair in front of him. "Good afternoon, Doctor Kaneki."

The scent of coffee lingered in the air as he watched her put a cup of Coffee Bean's coffee on his table. He eyed it, then looked to her with a puzzled expression, confused.

"I bought this for you. I noticed you always drink this in the afternoon. I-if you already drank one, it's okay. I'll just drink it myself."

Maybe it was his imagination but her cheeks turned pink at one point.

Kaneki took a sip and smiled. "Thank you. I forgot to buy it today so I'm really thankful you got for me."

She bowed her head and he caught her smiling before she quickly hid it. She's cute, he thought.

"Well then, let's start with our session for today. Up until now, you've achieved many things. You are able to make eye contact with me, talk to me, sit near to me and look at me without shrinking away. You've done a really good job of persevering. Now, I need you to work even harder because the next thing I need you to fix is physical touch."

He paused because she froze.

"I understand this might be hard for you as it is the final step of your treatment so do let me know your thoughts of an arrangement I'm about to propose to you. I will respect your wishes if you don't wish to go through with it."

"W-what is it?" Touka asked, voice wavering.

"The first way is for you to have a male of your choice and proceed to have a relationship with him where you can experience the physical touches done in a relationship. I can then instruct him on how to treat you. The second way is for you to have a relationship with me. The third way is we do not fix this 'physical touch' aspect of your phobia at all."

The thought of another man touching her made him feel sick to the core. "I would rather you not choose the third way because as a doctor, I want to see you treated. As for the second way--" his throat suddenly felt dry and he swallowed.

"It would probably be deemed as sexual harassment if I were to touch you as a doctor but if I were in a relationship with you, it wouldn't cause many problems since couples often, ahem, touch one another."

Silence filled the room and Kaneki coughed to fill in the awkwardness. He can't help but be distracted by the way she bit her lower lip when she was focused on the choices he gave her. In his mind, he wondered how her lips would taste like. Soft as they looked? Wet from her lip balm? Or sweet like the sweet drinks she often drank?

He shook his head, mind reeling from the perverse thoughts he had. He was a man and remaining without a girlfriend for 3 years now made him all weird in the head.

"I choose option 2."

Despite being happy deep down that she chose him, he had to make sure she was comfortable with it. "Are you sure? I don't want to force you into anything. If you wish to not cure that part, I understand."

Touka shrugged. "I don't know any other guys and I feel most comfortable with you, so why not? Besides, I can't fulfill my dream of marrying and having a family if I can't even touch a guy right?"

He did not want to imagine her with another guy right now.

"Alright. Let's get started soon then. Are you free this Sunday? Let's go on a date."

--

Kaneki looked at his overall outfit and dusted off some dirt from his shirt whilst waiting outside Touka's apartment. He exhaled to calm his nerves since this was his first date in 3 years, and found that exhaling did not help his feeling jittery at all.

He reminded himself of his duties as a doctor which was the reason why he proposed for them to be in a relationship, to begin with. No flirting, no touching her without her consent and protect her.

From what he heard from her, she has problems walking in crowds because it often meant she had to squeeze and walk in the near distance with men. This often caused her inconvenience and she would always wait for early morning or late night when there was no one before she walked on the streets.

As for transport to any place, she always took a taxi and made sure the driver was a woman.

So for today's session, he would try to let her get used to walking on a crowded street and taking the bus and train.

"H-hi, Doctor Kaneki. You're here early."

Snapping out of his thoughts, Kaneki looked down at Touka who had a nervous smile on her face and took a moment to appreciate the effort she put into her outfit--which consisted of a blue skater dress and a brown pair of sandals. She had a crossbody sling bag where he spotted the rabbit keychain he gave her hanging from the zip.

"Is my outfit too much? When I told my friend that I was going on a date, she insisted on choosing an outfit for me.." She asked, avoiding his eyes and twirling a lock of her hair nervously.

In her heart, she was hoping that he would like her outfit. After all, she went through a 4-hour hair session at the hair salon, had her manicure and pedicure done, and went shopping for new clothes.

Her current outfit was a big difference from her usual t-shirt and shorts she wore whenever they met at the hospital and Kaneki thought he should at least compliment her on it despite knowing that it could be taken as a form of flirting.

"You look pretty."

Only 3 words and he was slightly amused at how her cheeks flushed pink.

Cute.

"Thank you."

--

They started off from an alleyway where only a few people would pass through. As it was quite a wide area, she seemed okay whenever men walked because there was a certain distance between her and them. But as the alleyway turned narrower, the distance also shrunk.

He could tell from her shaking body that she was afraid but was glad at her effort in not running away.

The next stop was taking the bus. He could tell her struggle of shying away whenever a male came to stand near her and forced herself to remain rooted in her place. However, when the bus goes or stops and the people around her accidentally touches her, she would shift away if it were a male.

The next one was taking the train. Unlike the bus, she couldn't move away as the train is always packed with no space to move around.

Touka was now squashed between the train door and a male on the train. The heat from his body and the smell of sweat disgusted her. Her immense discomfort showed on her face and Kaneki moved to put himself between the man and her, his arms pressing on the train door above her head.

"You alright?" He asked, worried that this might be too much for her.

Her cheeks flushed when the train turned and his body pressed up against hers, too close for comfort but she didn't hate it to her surprise. Her face was against his chest and he smelt of mint and sandalwood.

"S-sorry." He apologized and she shook her head.

The train treatment did not work out as they ended up in that position all the way until their destination with Touka blushing and Kaneki looking elsewhere embarrassingly with a blush on his face.

Their next stop was a shopping street. As it got later in the day, more people poured in and Touka found it hard to avoid men as well as before when the street was empty. Despite that, she found herself enjoying the outing with Kaneki very much because he'd offer to buy her things, food and anything she wanted.

Even though this relationship was only temporary, it felt real. It felt like they were really a couple who had romantic feelings with one another. For once in her life, she experienced how it was like to be someone's girlfriend and to be on a date with them.

She was too busy looking at a stall that she didn't notice a man trying to barge through the number of people and almost hit her. But Kaneki noticed and quickly had his hand on her shoulder to pull her away from being run over and into an empty alleyway.

The action caused her body to press against his, her breasts, hands, and face on his chest and her heartbeat roared in her ears as his arm wrapped around her waist to pull her close. As her ear was on his chest, she could hear the racing heartbeat beneath his shirt and started to think that her own heart might also be racing like his, and it was definitely because she was in his arms.

"Are you okay?" He asked but she didn't reply. Instead, she looked up at him dazedly.

Instead of releasing her, which he should, his arm remained wrapped around her waist as he gazed down at her before his hand came to cup her cheek.

"Touka.."

Her heart skipped a beat when he called her by her first name—which has never happened before. It has always been Kirishima and the fact that he's calling her by that name now on a date made the moment more intimate.

Just as quickly her heart raced, he dropped his hand and looked away. "Sorry. If you're alright, let's continue walking."

Touka felt a pang of disappointment when he separated himself from her and proceeded to pretend as if nothing between them happened. It felt so right to be in his embrace. If it were any other man, she wouldn't have wished for him to continue holding her.

--

Upon reaching home after the date, Kaneki buried his face into his hands.

When he saw that she was about to get run over, his body had reacted on instinct and pulled her out of the way. In the process, it couldn't be helped that he touched her. It couldn't be helped that she landed in his arms. It couldn't be helped that he cupped her cheek—who was he kidding?

From the way she had looked at him, it made him want to kiss her. Her eyes were wide and her pink lips parted slightly. The way her body felt so right in his arms did not help either.

He cursed. Hadn't he promised himself not to touch her without permission? Hadn't he promised himself not to get his feelings mixed up with his work?

Over the course of 4 months, he had gotten to know her personally and her hardworking attitude was what caught him. With her, he felt a level of a bond between them whenever she shared bits and pieces of her personal life, work, hobbies, and many other things.

Along the way, he had fallen half in love with her.

She made him feel like no other girl had done so before, aside from Fumika, his ex-girlfriend. She made him feel alive again, ever since Fumika died.

He wondered when he started having these feelings towards her and thought that maybe it started when she comforted him with a hug when he talked about his ex-girlfriend. The way she had empathized with him and provided comfort had touched his heart despite her being androphobic.

Shaking his head, he tucked his feelings for her away deep and swore to himself that he wouldn't allow himself to fall deeper in love. If he did, his already fragile heart would break when it came to a time they had to separate.

—

Today was their second date as Touka waited nervously for Kaneki to arrive. She was early today, too excited to sleep and ended up being super early to meet at their meeting point. For her to get used to men, they had agreed to meet outside a train station instead of him picking her up at her house.

She looked at the couples who lingered around the train station and felt envy build within her. They were all talking happily, holding hands and some were even kissing when no one was looking. She wanted it to be that way between her and Kaneki as well. But it seemed that he only saw their dates as part of his work and job.

Even so, with the way he had held her face the previous day, it seemed that he held some feelings for her and she felt slightly comforted by that.

For afar, she saw Kaneki running towards her whilst waving and smiling. They soon departed for their destination for the movie theatre. His explanation for choosing this as their next treatment was if she were able to take being close to him—a male—for several hours, she would then be able to date a guy like a normal person.

As they walked and talked, Touka couldn't help but stare at his hand and had the urge to grab it. When she talked about what happened on her first date to Yoriko, her friend had patted her hard on the shoulder and told her to go for it. He obviously had some feelings for her and if she didn't do anything about it, she would regret it.

She gathered up her courage and grabbed hold of his hand. His head swung to look at her, his eyes wide and then directed his attention down to their intertwined hands. Her cheeks warmed. "T-this is okay, right? I want to hold your hand."

He remained silent as to ponder over her question and she wanted to prevent him from coming up with any excuses. "I-it's for me to practice holding hands so I can do so with my boyfriend in the future!"

She swore she saw a frown hanging from his lips for a split second before he changed it into a smile. "Sure."

--

As they sat side by side in the movie theatre, Touka realized that she didn't want to learn how to have physical touch with a male. She didn't care about other men, she wanted it to be him. Only him.

So, as subtly as she could, she slowly shifted closer to him and rested her head on his shoulder during the movie. Kaneki noticed and turned his head to look at her, which resulted in them gazing into each other's eyes, in close proximity in a dark room.

To her dismay, he turned his attention back to the movie. Her hand moved to rest on his chest, over his beating heart.

"Touka, don't. We're not at that stage yet."

"..what if I'm ready to enter that stage?" She murmured.

She had no idea where she got the courage to act so boldly in front of him but she did and hoped that he would get the hint.

"We promised that we would take it slowly, didn't we? Besides, we're in public." He whispered.

"Okay.." she replied in disappointment.

They ended up going on another few dates after that, slowly exploring more of the physical touch aspect of their treatment.

As the touch increased to hugging, so did Kaneki's struggles with his feelings. He had wanted to keep it professional but he can't help but wish that this was all real—that they were truly a couple. It seemed that with each passing date, the more his barrier in dating her weakened. And he knew it was because he hadn't dated in a long time and Touka was a one of a kind woman.

Having been with her for the past 5 months, he has since seen many parts of her. How she'd start talking a lot once she was familiar with him, sometimes talking very excitedly about certain things, how her eyes would shine at the sight of anything rabbit-like, how she dislikes tomatoes just because they're red, how her cheeks turn pink whenever she was embarrassed and every one of this traits made him want her for himself.

While his duty as a doctor had been to cure her androphobia, he didn't want her to interact with other men but him. He was jealous of the men who would come into contact with her in the future. Jealousy was one factor present in love, he realized and shook off his thoughts.

Their date today was the summer festival. Donning their yukatas, Kaneki and Touka headed to the main area—the food and game stalls—and had a lot of fun. They were seated on a picnic mat when the fireworks show started. As the fireworks went high up in the sky, the noises by the crowd and the heat of the summer air didn't matter.

What mattered was how they were mere inches apart from one another, looking at a beautiful sight in front of them and it felt as if they were the only two people in the world, with all the sounds but the fireworks, drowned out.

"It's beautiful..." Touka murmured, eyes focusing on the fireworks, mesmerized by it.

"It is..."

While his words may have been meant for the fireworks, they were actually directed at her, as his eyes never once left her face as he said the words.

Once the fireworks were over, everyone started heading home, hence the huge crowds with people squeezing with one another trying to leave the area.

Kaneki turned back to Touka who was just behind him and took her hand with a smile. "It's so we don't get separated."

She nodded, one of her hands going to touch her hair. Her heart dropped when she couldn't find the rabbit hairpin that he gave her. It's gone.

"I have to go back! I lost something!"

She let go of his hand and returned the way they came, leaving him alone to be carried away further from her by the crowd. Running back to the grassy area where they sat to watch the fireworks, she got on her knees and started to feel around the grass for her hairpin.

She didn't care that her yukata got dirty, she had to find the hairpin. It was a gift from him and it was important to her.

At the corner of her eye, she spotted something shiny and went over, to find her hairpin.

"Here it is!" She exclaimed, picking it up happily and dusting the grass away that was on it. Securing it tightly in her hair, she smiled and was about to return to him when she was approached by 2 middle-aged men.

"Hey pretty girllllll, what are you doing all alone out hereeeee? Where's your friends???"

"Wanna come with us to have some funnnn?"

From the red blush on their cheeks and their slurred words, she could gather that they were drunk and walked to the side to avoid getting involved with them.

One male grabbed her by the arm and pulled her flush up against his body. The male's breath stunk of alcohol and she bleched at the smell, adding on to her initial disgust of being against a sweaty, drunken man.

When the man's hands started creeping up her thighs, and the other guy yanked her yukata to reveal her shoulders and cleavage, Touka's eyes brimmed with tears. She recalled that day as a young child, where the exact same thing happened.

She knew she should do something to save herself but her body just froze at the spot. She cursed herself for being weak and questioned herself the reason why she even learned judo and aikido for self-protection if she can't even use it when she needed it now. Her heart thumped in her ears and she couldn't move her limbs.

At that moment of crisis, her knight in shining armor came—Kaneki.

From her disheveled clothes and tears running down her cheeks, it doesn't take a genius to realize what was going on here. Anger boiled within Kaneki and he clenched his hands into fists. He charged at them and punched the 1st male who had his arms around Touka.

The man stumbled and fell to the floor, roaring in pain and held his cheek which was starting to turn swollen. The other male ran towards Kaneki and she shouted his name to alert him. He took down the other male with a punch to the face and the stomach, leaving both males rolling in the floor in pain.

Police soon came and after giving the details to the policemen, the males were handed over and Kaneki held the trembling Touka in his arms. "I'll take you home," he said, and he didn't allow any room for discussion.

Throughout the whole car ride, he refused to look at her and she could tell that he was angry from the fury in his eyes. But she was too scared to say anything and so the entire car ride was just silent.

Only after depositing her in her room, that Kaneki decided to release all of his anger and shout at her.

"What were you thinking?! If I hadn't made it in time, you could have been raped by those men! What was the thing you lost that was so important you had to go back to get it?!" He roared.

This was her first time seeing the gentle-natured him angry and yelling at her that it scared her and she backed away.

"I-I'm sorry... I just—wanted to find it myself and I didn't want to bother you for it...

Kaneki sighed angrily and ran his hand through his hair in frustration. "You know you would never bother me. I said from the start that I will be with you."

"I know, I just—" tears welled up in her eyes again. "I lost the rabbit hair clip you gave me and I wanted to get it back. It's precious to me..."

Her hand rested on the small hair clip that was pinned on her bangs. Stunned silent that she actually risked herself to get the hair clip back, Kaneki let out another sigh in resignation and cupped her cheeks. "I get that it is important to you, but ask for my help next time, you know I'll never refuse you. Promise me, Touka."

She nodded. "I'm sorry."

"You're forgiven." He smiled before a worried expression came on. "Are you okay? Did they hurt you? Do you need me to do anything for you?"

Her lips trembled. "I was so scared... it reminded me of that day when the same thing happened to me when I was young."

"..do you want to tell me about it? You don't have to force yourself."

She shook her head. "I will. It's about time I did."

"I was only 13 years old then. I was with my dad and little brother at a shopping street when we got separated. I wandered along the alleyway where nobody was around and I had hoped to find my family, if not the way home. And then, 2 men came along."

Releasing a shaky breath, Kaneki's hands ran up and down her arm to soothe her and gave her the courage to continue on.

"When I asked them for help, they laughed and asked me to give them something in return for their help. Being a young girl at the time with no money, I brought out some sweets from my pockets and offered it to them. But their idea of a reward was different from mine. They cornered me to the wall, and one man held my arms and legs while the other tore the clothes from my body."

Anger rose within Kaneki at the men that did that to her and he forced it down, not wanting to interrupt her story.

"They touched me. They felt up my legs, my arms, everywhere and I was crying but I couldn't run because they were holding me and—by the time I was found, it was too late—" she sobbed and he hugged her tightly. Without her continuing, he already knew the rest of the story. She was raped.

"What happened to those men?"

"..They went to jail."

"They deserve more than jail for taking advantage of a young girl like you. They deserve death."

Touka withdrew and smiled weakly. "You're so nice, Kaneki."

"I'm sorry I couldn't be there to help you. If only I knew you back then..."

"It's not your fault, or anyone's. I just happened to be there at the wrong timing. That's all."

Gazing into her blue eyes, Kaneki was overcome with sorrow for the young innocent girl she was who had to suffer this kind of thing. He wanted nothing more but to do anything to comfort her and hold her in his arms until she was alright. Cupping her cheek, he ran his thumb across her pink lips and leaned down to kiss her.

Her eyes widened and before she could react, he pulled away and caressed her cheeks. "Do you trust me, Touka?"

"I do."

Aside from her best friend Yoriko, he was the only other person she trusted the most. It seemed that her answer made him happy as he smiled.

"Then...let's take the next step in our relationship. Give me a chance to hold you, let me make you forget what happened with those men today and when you were young."

She could see the truth in his words from his eyes and couldn't refuse.

"Okay."

Then, he kissed her again.

—

As they basked in the afterglow of their making love, Kaneki held her tightly in his arms and inhaled her scent before kissing her head. He knew he had to leave now and yet, he didn't stop her when she leaned up to kiss him. Instead, he returned the kiss, hands splayed across the soft skin of her back to pull her closer.

The expression that she gazed at him with and a contented smile told him everything. She loved him. It was a sad thing, for he couldn't love her back.

He cupped her cheek, pushing her violet strands to the back of her ear and remained silent, taking the time to craft his next words.

"As of today, your treatment is complete. As a doctor, I'm really happy for you that you have overcome your fear of men. We won't be meeting every week anymore but I will give you an open appointment, should your phobia relapses. You will be able to go on with life normally and it is my greatest pride as a doctor to see you functioning healthily as a member of society."

At that moment, he got up and started to get dressed. Holding the blanket to her chest, Touka watched as he put on the last of his clothing—his shirt—and chewed on her lower lip. "Will we see each other again?"

After getting dressed, he made sure for his back to face her so that his face wouldn't give away any of his feelings. He could not. Previously, he was only half in love with her. But now, after they've done it, he's fallen completely in love with her and it was too late. "Unless your condition relapses, we will not. As a doctor, I hope it won't come to that."

"..but if I want to see you again?" She asked, hoping that he would at least allow it.

Kaneki's hands turned into fists and he struggled with the answer. The thought of never seeing her again made his heartache, because even if he tried to control it, he had feelings for her and he wanted to see her every day. Alas, he couldn't, because he would just be stringing her along, knowing her romantic feelings for him, when he couldn't love her the way he should.

"No."

Her heart dropped at his answer. "Why?"

"There's no reason for us to meet one another. As of today, our couple status is broken and we agreed to become a couple in the first place to treat your phobia."

"But..what about all the time we shared together? The dates, the laughter, the hugs? Are you telling me that it was all for my treatment, and they didn't mean anything to you? We had fun, and I thought...that we were getting closer.." She looked down, tears brimming in her eyes as she recalled the dates they had, the times where he held her hand and smiled at her. The way he had kissed her so lovingly and passionately during their making love... everything made her believe that they were in love.

Seeing her cry, he almost wanted to go to her and hug her and tell her he was sorry. But he hardened, it was for her own good. Even if he ended up hurting her, it would be much better than her realizing late in their relationship that he couldn't love her 100%, because part of his heart would always belong to Fumika.

He forced his tone to be cold. "It was only for your treatment. I felt nothing. I don't love you, and I never will. Your feelings are only temporary and it will fade if we were to part."

"W-we can try again to be in a real relationship and not for my phobia! We can be a real couple and I'm sure that with time, our feelings towards one another will be the same—"

He turned towards her and shook his head with a frown. "That wouldn't work. Goodbye, Touka."

As he stepped out of her house and her life that day, he couldn't help but feel regret over his actions and that she didn't come after him.

—

Two weeks after that incident...

Hugging her knees to her chest, Touka had a movie marathon consisting of sappy romantic movies and binge ate ice cream and waffles alone. There were no messages nor calls from Kaneki and it felt as if they were never a thing at all.

Tears welled up in her eyes once again as she recalled the way Kaneki had rejected her and left her life as quickly as the way he entered her heart. Her first love and it ended with heartbreak.

Ah, so this was the heartbreak that Yoriko was talking about... She felt like crying all the time and often didn't want to go to work. Her heart ached wherever she went and would remember Kaneki in everything she did.

Deciding that she needed to stop moping, she got up and looked around her messy room. It's time for a spring cleaning. The first thing she did was look under her bed, she always liked to shove her things under there to avoid putting them back to its places.

It was a mess down there, as expected, but she spotted a notebook mixed in there. Puzzled since she's never had a blue notebook, she picked it up and opened it.

—

Closing his eyes, Kaneki rested his head on his desk and allowed himself a short 15 minutes nap. Ever since he broke up with Touka, he missed her so damned much that he hasn't been able to sleep well at night.

With his exhausted self, he soon entered his nap. He woke up in his own bed, turning to the side to find Touka sleeping beside him. The silver band on her left fourth finger shined in the morning light.

The scene cut to the living room, where he found himself fully dressed and Touka stood with her back towards him in the kitchen. She was cooking. Then, she walked towards him with a plate of food in her hand and a smile on her lips.

The scene cut again, to the park where he observed Touka and a young girl with black and white hair playing with each other. They spotted him and the young girl ran towards him, with the words that shocked him.

"Papa!"

With that, his body jerked and he ended up falling off his chair and to the floor.

Touching his eyes, they came away wet and he squeezed them shut. Even in sleep, he thought about her. He saw a future with her. They were married and they had a child.

Even if it couldn't happen in real life, he was happy to have seen that. At least in his dreams, they were happy together.

Groggily, he got up and went to shower. He hasn't slept well for the past week and needed to wash the fatigue away before he started hallucinating of Touka.

—

Rubbing his eyes, Kaneki thought he was hallucinating when he found his ex-girlfriend in his own bedroom. Hallucination or not, she looked livid.

Touka stepped toward him threateningly and raised a book in her hand. "I found this in my room."

That book..! No wonder he couldn't find it anywhere! She must have read it already if she was this angry.

He seemed shocked and she continued by flipping through the pages. "And at one glance, it looks to be a report of my progress in curing androphobia but at the back of the book, you were writing about your feelings for me. You said 'I love Touka.' That night, why did you say you didn't have feelings for me but you actually do?" Tears threatened to escape her eyes.

"Touka, I—it's complicated.."

Lowering the book onto his bed, Touka moved to cup his cheeks and gazed into his sorrowful eyes. "I told you, the least I could do is listen to your worries. Am I that unreliable to you?"

His eyes turned glassy. "I'm scared. I saw how Fumika succumbed to her depression and left me. She was originally my patient and we started dating soon after. I thought she was getting better, she even looked better, but...she suddenly jumped to her death one day. I was afraid that if I ever dated another patient again, I would experience the same painful feeling of losing that person. Even now, 3 years later, I haven't been able to date someone and am still suffering as the person who's left behind. I'm the best doctor in the department and yet what's the use if I can't even save one patient?"

Touka remained silent to consider her words. "I'm not pretty. I'm not patient. I'm not everything Fumika was. But I can tell you that I love you, and my love for you won't lose to hers. I'll be with you no matter what happens, and I promise I'll tell you everything. I won't hold all my worries to myself, I won't be like her."

He shook his head. "Even since she died, I became a broken man. I won't allow you to be stuck with someone like me. You deserve someone else, someone better than me. Someone who can give you the happiness you deserve and that person is not me."

"The point of having a lover is for them to stand by their sides no matter what, isn't it? If I have a problem, you would stand by me, wouldn't you? Then what's wrong if I do the same for you?"

"I—" Kaneki smiled weakly. "When you put it that way, you make it hard for me to reject you."

She grinned. "Then don't reject me. Say yes."

He hesitated. "Apart from being broken and scared, my other reason for not dating you is because part of my heart still belongs to Fumika. Are you really okay with that?"

"Yeah. I'll allow her to have that part of your heart and secretly hope that the remaining of whatever's left will go to me. If it doesn't, I'll make you love me." She grinned, throwing her arms around his neck.

He laughed for real for the first time in ages and leaned his forehead against hers, gazing into her eyes. "You don't have to do that. That part of my heart already belongs to you. I had thought loving another was impossible ever since Fumika's death, but then you came along and changed everything. Within a few months, I fell in love with you, despite your rudeness, brashness—" he winced as he earned a jab in his ribs and a scowl from her. "I love you, Touka. I really do. Will you be my girlfriend? For real, this time."

"You know my answer."

He grinned. "Then will you give me a chance to show you how much I love you?"

Touka cocked her head to the side, puzzled. She shrieked in surprise when he suddenly bent down to carry her in his arms before dropping her onto his bed. His lips molded with hers and the tears that she shed were tears of happiness.

In the aftermath of their making love, she laid on his chest with his arm around her waist, listening as his heartbeat returned to the normal stable one and closed her eyes in contentment.

"You know, in my dreams, I saw you," Kaneki spoke.

"Hm?? What did you see about me?" She asked, eyes still closed.

"You were in my bed, sleeping. We were married, from the silver ring on your finger. Then suddenly you were cooking, then we were at the park with our child."

"Child?" She opened her eyes to look at him, echoing after him.

He nodded. "It'd be nice if it were real."

True to his words, they married a year later and had a child with a mix of black and white hair named Ichika. It took a while but Kaneki decided that letting Touka into his heart was the best thing he ever did. They then lived happily ever after.

[sciencespies]

The Great Koala Rescue Operation

https://sciencespies.com/nature/the-great-koala-rescue-operation/

The Great Koala Rescue Operation

I ​arrived on Kangaroo Island bracing myself for the sight of acres of blackened trees and white ash, but I had not expected the parasitic bright green vines wrapped around almost every charred trunk, glowing phosphorescent in the sunlight. This was no parasite, I learned. It was epicormic growth, bursting directly from the burnt trunks themselves, a desperate bid for photosynthesis in the absence of a leaf canopy.

The growth looks nothing like a eucalyptus tree’s normal adult leaves. It’s soft and waxy, with rounded edges instead of long pointy tips, and it blooms from cracks in the trunks or right from the tree’s base, rather than along the branches where leaves typically grow. It is beautiful, and also very strange, in keeping with the surreal phenomena that became almost commonplace over this past apocalyptic Australian summer, even before the coronavirus pandemic further upended life as we know it. A few weeks earlier, in Sydney, I’d watched red-brown rain fall to the ground after rain clouds collided with ash in a smoke-filled sky. During a recent downpour here on Kangaroo Island, burnt blue gum trees foamed mysteriously, as if soap suds had been sprayed over them.

Even in less strange times, Kangaroo Island can feel like the edge of the earth. Although it sits fewer than ten miles off the southern coast of Australia, about 75 miles from Adelaide, it is a geographical Noah’s Ark; its isolation from the mainland 10,000 years ago because of rising seas transformed it into an ecological haven. It is vast and rugged, with dramatic views of bush or sea- or cliff-scapes in every direction. National parks or protected wilderness areas make up a third of the island’s 1,700 square miles. Much of the rest of the island is farmland or privately owned backcountry. In recent years, the island has rebranded itself as a high-end tourist paradise, with unspoiled wilderness, farm-to-table produce, fresh oysters, and wine from local vineyards. But while there are luxury accommodations here and there, the island’s few small settlements feel decidedly unglamorous, befitting laid-back country and coastal towns.

Left, Kangaroo Island sits a few miles off the coast of South Australia. Right, at the height of the fires, in January, most of the island’s western half was ablaze, as seen in these images based on data from a NASA satellite.

(Guilbert Gates; NASA Worldview (2))

The fires started here in December, after dry lightning strikes on the island’s north coast and remote western bushland areas, and then escalated and jumped containment lines, ripping through the island in early January, with high winds and hot temperatures fueling the front. Two people died, and hundreds of properties were affected, many of them farms. Tens of thousands of stock animals were lost in the blaze. While the bushfires all over Australia were horrific, burning more than 16 million acres—nearly eight times the area lost to fire in Brazil’s Amazon basin in 2019—people around the world focused on Kangaroo Island because of the relative scale of the fires, which consumed close to half the island, as well as the concentrated death and suffering of the island’s abundant wildlife, including wallabies, kangaroos, possums and koalas. Wildlife experts worried that certain vulnerable species endemic to the island, such as the glossy black-cockatoo and a mouse-like marsupial known as the Kangaroo Island dunnart, might be lost forever.

Flinders Chase National Park, the vast nature preserve encompassing the island’s western edge, is closed indefinitely. There were rumors that parts of this natural bushland, which depends on fire to propagate, might never fully regenerate, because the heat from the fires was so intense that the soil seed bank may have been destroyed. Climate change researchers are warning that while fires in Australia are “natural,” they’re now so hot and frequent that even fire-adapted plants don’t have the chance to recover. A major fire burned 85 percent of Flinders Chase just 13 years ago. Matt White, an ecologist at the Arthur Rylah Institute for Environmental Research, in Victoria, told me the fires are almost certainly decreasing biodiversity, despite “the oft-repeated rhetoric about the resilience of Australian flora.” Now the fires are out, and the immediate danger has passed, but life on the island is very far from normal. On certain parts of the northern coast, coves are silted with ash, black tide marks on the sand. Outside several towns are signs directing people to a Bushfire Last Resort Refuge, a chilling reminder of how bad things can get.

A lone koala clings to a charred trunk in a severely burned plantation of eucalyptus trees.

(David Maurice Smith)

Kangaroo Island’s east coast, where I disembarked from the ferry, seemed relatively unscathed, but as I drove west through the central agricultural area, known as the Heartlands, I crossed a line into devastation. The color palette shifted from the beige and olive green of roadside scrub to charcoal trunks and scorched leaves in shades of orange, an uncanny simulacrum of autumn. The deeper into the fire grounds I went, the more the shock of that green epicormic growth scrambled my perceptions, as did the long green shoots of grass trees, emerging from their blackened, pineapple-shaped trunks. These trees are pyrophytic—they thrive after fires.

In Parndana, a small agricultural town, I saw a handwritten sign outside a makeshift store offering free groceries to families affected by the fires. A newsletter posted in a gas station reported on wineries going under, tourism businesses destroyed, and burned buildings requiring asbestos cleanup. In a roadside café near Vivonne Bay, on the south coast, I found mental health pamphlets and notices of counseling services and depression hot lines for a community reeling from losses. An Australian Psychological Society handout was stacked on the counter: “Now, a few months after the fires, many people are feeling tired and stressed, and they know that their daily struggle isn’t going to be over any time soon.”

The news media’s fixation on the island as the fires raged has created a complicated legacy for any reporter who turns up a month or two later. I was aware of being viewed with distrust by locals who’ve felt justifiably used in the media storm’s sudden descent and then abrupt disappearance. The press attention, combined with social media’s refraction of certain stories into trend roller coasters, has had the undeniable upside of an outpouring of genuine sympathy and generosity. An effort to recruit 120 volunteers to set up food and water stations for wildlife throughout devastated areas, organized by Australia’s Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, was inundated by more than 13,000 applications in a matter of days. Online crowdfunding has raised close to $2.5 million for Kangaroo Island bushfire recovery. But there’s a downside, too: a trading in the suffering of others. In the midst of the fires, one foreign journalist demanded of a shellshocked local resident, “I want to see burnt animals, and where those two people died.”

The immediate compassionate response of people pulling together in a crisis is now wearing thin. Tendrils of suspicion are snaking their way through the community, as locals assess the distribution of government and crowdfunded resources. Almost everybody has their heart in the right place, but the reality is that these decisions are political and contested. Old divides are widening—between, say, stock farmers in the Heartlands and those motivated to protect the island’s unique wildlife, to say nothing of the divide between locals and outsiders.

Tens of thousands of koalas were killed in the island blaze, and an additional number perished from starvation or dehydration after the blue gum plantations where they lived were destroyed.

(David Maurice Smith)

The remains of a Tammar wallaby. Where the fires raged, populations of kangaroo and wallabies were devastated; up to 40 percent of the island’s unique kangaroo subspecies may have been killed.

(David Maurice Smith)

In every conversation, whether with a lodge manager, the owner of a feed business, or at the corner-store café, people wanted me to know that they’re upset about the way resources were being distributed. Special anger was reserved for rogue operators who have raised huge amounts of cash for wildlife work on the island, but with no real right to be there. Many singled out a Japanese outfit, reportedly run by a guy who turned up on the island with good intentions but zero clue. He had set himself up in a house in Kingscote, the island’s largest town (pop. around 1,800), and without coordinating with any recognized wildfire rescue operations was bringing in koalas from the wild that were healthy and didn’t need rescuing. Yet he had raised a small fortune through his organization’s website, from good people donating to the wrong cause. One islander told me, “I never realized disaster would be like this. At first, everyone helped. Then it got scary. It became about money, fame, randoms making an absolute killing.”

* * *

Kangaroo Island was given its modern name by the British navigator Matthew Flinders, who sailed the HMS Investigator to its shores in March 1802. The island was then uninhabited, but archaeologists later found stone tools and other evidence that ancestors of modern Aboriginal Tasmanians lived there thousands of years ago, at least until the island was cut off from the mainland, and possibly afterward. Rebe Taylor, a historian, writes that the Ngarrindjeri people of the coast opposite Kangaroo Island call it the “land of the dead,” and have a creation story about rising seas flooding a land bridge to the island.

Flinders and his men were amazed to find kangaroos—a subspecies of the mainland’s western greys—that were so unused to humans that they “suffered themselves to be shot in the eyes,” Flinders recalled in his expedition notes, “and in some cases to be knocked on the head with sticks.” In gratitude for this meat after four months without fresh provisions, he named it Kanguroo Island (misspelling his own). The French explorer Nicolas Baudin, sailing the Géographe, was disappointed not to have arrived before his English rival—their ships crossed paths as Flinders was leaving the island—but Baudin took 18 kangaroos with him, in the name of science. He made two of his men surrender their cabins to the animals in a bid to keep them alive. Baudin himself died from tuberculosis on the return journey, but some of the kangaroos survived, and they reportedly became part of the menagerie outside Paris owned by Napoleon’s wife, the Empress Josephine.

The recent fires killed as many as 40 percent of the island’s 60,000 or so kangaroos, yet worldwide attention has focused mostly on the fate of the koalas. At least 45,000 koalas, or some 75 percent or more of the island population, are thought to have died, and the crisis has revived an old controversy, with battle lines drawn anew between those who believe the koalas don’t deserve all the attention they’re getting and those who do.

Koalas have always had the species advantage of being considered cute, cuddly Australian icons, but they are not native to Kangaroo Island. They were introduced by wildlife officials only in the 1920s, from a breeding program on French Island, off mainland Victoria, with a founding population of fewer than 30 animals. The effort was an early attempt at conservation; habitat loss and hunters trading in their fur had driven koalas on the mainland to near extinction. Since then, the island had become overpopulated with koalas, which some people think are in danger of eating themselves out of house and home. In fact, since the late 1990s a government-run koala sterilization program has tried to stem population growth, not only for the koala population’s sake but also because the animals wreak destruction on native vegetation, including rough-bark manna gums, a type of eucalyptus that is key to preventing soil erosion, and paddock trees.

Charred eucalyptus trees sport green epicormic growth— shoots emerging from cracks in the bark to give the trees another chance at life.

(David Maurice Smith)

New growth springs from the trunk of a charred blue gum tree after the bushfires on Kangaroo Island.

(David Maurice Smith)

In addition, tens of thousands of koalas lived in eucalyptus plantations owned by a timber company with plans to harvest and export those trees; those animals would have to be moved eventually. Finally, the Kangaroo Island koalas are so highly inbred that some experts argue they may be of little use in bolstering northern Australia koala populations, which are classified as vulnerable.

Some wildlife advocates believe that preventing species extinction, or saving species that are endemic or unique to the island, should be the priority. They argue that funding would be better channeled toward specialists working to save the few remaining Kangaroo Island dunnarts, or Tammar wallabies (which are almost extinct in mainland South Australia), or pygmy possums, or endangered glossy black-cockatoos, which mainly feed on the seeds of casuarina trees (many of the trees burnt), or Ligurian bees, introduced in 1885 and believed to be the species’ last genetically pure population in the world.

Island farmers, meanwhile, feel that wildlife has unfairly consumed all the attention when so many stock animals burned during the fires. Many local farming families are descended from soldier-settlers who were given parcels of land after each of the world wars, which they worked hard to make productive in difficult circumstances. (The island’s natural soil quality is so poor, and the lack of surface water so severe, that most British colonists backed by the South Australian Company who settled the island in 1836 left after just five months.)

One islander confided to me that, while he felt bad for the farmers, stock animals are “replaceable,” and often covered by insurance, but wildlife is not; and while it may seem from news media coverage that Australia cares about its wildlife, the government in fact has an appalling track record when it comes to protecting wildlife and biodiversity. “Australia is a global deforestation hotspot,” Suzanne Milthorpe, from the Wilderness Society Australia, told me. “We are ranked second in the world for biodiversity loss, and three unique animals have gone extinct in the last decade alone. In comparison, the United States’ Endangered Species Act, which contains real protections against harm and habitat destruction, has been 99 percent successful at preventing extinction.” (Critics of American species conservation efforts point out that less than 3 percent of listed species have recovered sufficiently to be removed from protection.)

The koalas on Kangaroo Island were also fortunate in being able to be rescued at all; many were found sheltering high enough in the treetops to have escaped the flames. Hundreds were saved, treated and survived, and many were set free. Even young, orphaned koalas that must be bottle-fed and tended by hand would survive in captivity. By contrast, kangaroos and wallabies often couldn’t outrun the fires, and most of the rescued animals were badly burned and had little chance of recovery.

All of this helped me understand why legitimate, professional koala rescues on the island really do matter, and why the stakes feel so high for those who are skilled at and committed to this grueling work. For people desperate to help in the aftermath of the fires, rescuing and treating injured koalas and relocating koalas stranded in devastated forest areas has become a kind of humane religion, something to cling to and thus avoid descending into despair. Each and every rescue becomes a small but holy and tangible act to stem the wider suffering.

* * *

As soon as the story began to circulate, during the fires, that the Kangaroo Island Wildlife Park, outside Parndana, had become the impromptu center for the emergency treatment of burned wildlife, the place was inundated with journalists. The largely open-air park, which was already home to 600 or so animals, including snakes, wombats, cassowaries and an alligator, is owned by Dana and Sam Mitchell, a couple in their late 20s who moved to the island in 2013, after meeting while working at a wildlife park in Victoria. Journalists turned up even as the fires were burning, sleeping uninvited on the floor of the park’s café, barging into the Mitchells’ house at all hours.

This, to be fair, had some positive outcomes. An Australian TV channel, for instance, arranged for a popular home renovation show to build a wildlife hospital in the park, and the Mitchells have raised more than $1.6 million through crowdfunding to pay for professional veterinary costs, new buildings for wildlife care, and an islandwide koala rescue and rehabilitation program.

Yet it was overwhelming, too. Dana had to evacuate twice with their toddler, Connor, during the peak of the fires, while Sam stayed with staff and other family members to defend the property; the park and its animals were spared only after the wind changed direction as the fires were bearing down.

Meanwhile, hundreds of injured wild animals were brought to the park by Army personnel, the State Emergency Service and firefighters. As the roads reopened, many locals also began to arrive with injured wildlife, unsure where else to take them. Since the start of January, more than 600 koalas have been brought to the park, though not all have survived. Kangaroos with melted feet and koalas with melted paws had to be put out of their suffering. Orphaned baby koalas, called joeys, arrived with ears or noses burnt off. There were severely dehydrated older koalas with kidney disorders, and possums and wallabies blinded by the heat. “We were having to make it up on the spot,” Sam told me. “We were just a small wildlife park. These animals weren’t my responsibility, but nobody else was doing anything. The government wasn’t giving any direction.” In the first weeks, they operated a triage center out of a tin shed, with no power.

Sam and Dana soldiered on, and by now they have an impressive setup for koala rescue, treatment, rehabilitation and release. Behind their house is a series of brand-new buildings and dozens of koala enclosures, tended to by vets and veterinary nurses from Australia Zoo, Zoos South Australia, and Savem, a veterinary equivalent of Doctors Without Borders, as well as trusted local volunteers.

Oliver Funnell, a veterinarian at Zoos South Australia, and veterinary nurse Donna Hearn attend to an injured koala at the Wildlife Park.

(David Maurice Smith)

A hospitalized koala has pink spots on its paw that are healed burn areas.

(David Maurice Smith)

Sam has a grim sense of humor to help deal with the trauma of the past months, but he and Dana are physically and emotionally exhausted, as is everybody I met on the island. I felt bad asking them to retell their experiences during the fires, the ins and outs of how they survived, aware of the symbolic violence of being forced to perform your own private trauma for outsiders over and over again. Yet they did so, graciously, describing the unusual warning of white ash hitting the park even before the smoke. Desperate for sleep after staying awake several nights, Sam eventually brought a blanket outside and laid it on the grass, setting his phone alarm to go off every 15 minutes. He was worried that if he slept inside he wouldn’t see the fire coming.

In spite of their fatigue, they welcomed me into the joey clinic one morning. Dana was in the middle of individually bottle-feeding some 15 baby koalas while also caring for Connor. He was toddling around holding a branch of acacia and following the family dog, Rikku, who is remarkably tolerant of human babies and a tiny kangaroo named Kylo that likes to practice its boxing on the dog’s face. Staff and volunteers swirled in and out of the clinic, eating breakfast, getting medical supplies, asking about treatment plans. Dozens of rescued, slightly older joeys under 18 months old live in enclosures outside, since they no longer depend on milk, along with 30 older koalas with names like Ralph, Bonecrusher and Pearl; the number changes constantly as they recover enough to be released. Dana sat on a sofa cradling a baby koala they’d named Maddie, feeding it a morning bottle of Wombaroo, a low-lactose formula. When Maddie was rescued, she weighed just two pounds. “She had no burns when we found her,” Dana said, “but also no mum.”

Dana Mitchell feeds an injured baby koala at the Kangaroo Island Wildlife Park, which Mitchell owns with her husband, Sam. The park has treated more than 600 koalas since January.

(David Maurice Smith)

Nearby sat Kirsten Latham, head keeper of Australia Zoo’s koala program, holding 10-month-old Duke, who was swaddled in a towel. He was rescued in January with second-degree burns and was missing several claws—which are crucial for tree-climbing—and had to be fed with a syringe before he started taking the bottle. “You have to really concentrate when you’re feeding them, as they can aspirate the milk when they’re young,” Kirsten said. “It helps to wrap them in a towel and keep a hand over their eyes, because when they’re drinking from their mums they keep their heads tucked right into the pouch, where it’s dark and quiet.” These feedings are done three times a day, and it can take each person three hours to feed all the baby koalas during a mealtime.

* * *

In the clinic’s kitchen, I found Kailas Wild and Freya Harvey, both fit and sunburned, wearing black T-shirts and cargo pants. They were studying a map of the island’s plantations and natural bushland, planning their next koala rescues. They are old friends and skilled climbers, and have been on the island for weeks, doing the dangerous work of climbing the tall, burnt blue gum trees to reach koalas perched at the very top, sometimes as high as 80 feet.

Kailas is an arborist and volunteer for the State Emergency Service in New South Wales, and Freya is currently based in New Zealand, but they both dropped everything to go to Kangaroo Island as soon as they realized their tree-climbing skills could help save wildlife. Kailas drove the 900-odd miles from Sydney to the ferry terminal in Cape Jervis in his pickup truck, sleeping in the back along the way, and bringing it across to the island on the ferry. It took them a little while to earn Sam’s trust; his classic Australian suspicion of “blow-ins” has been compounded by having been let down by others who turned up offering help but haven’t followed through. But now that they have it, I can see the three of them have formed a close-knit team, daily coordinating koala rescues and treatment.

Kailas Wild, an arborist from Sydney who aided rescue efforts on the island, with a young kangaroo. He saved more than 100 koalas.

(David Maurice Smith)

The ground rescue crew that Kailas and Freya have been working with is a local family of four: Lisa and Jared Karran and their children, Saskia and Utah. They live near Kingscote, where Jared is a police officer. They’ve spent almost every day since the fires out in the bush rescuing animals. At first, the ground was so hot it was smoking, and they had to wear special boots so the soles didn’t melt. Now the risk is falling trees. They work up to 12 hours a day, the kids uncomplaining and involved, outfitted with gloves and hard hats, handling the koalas like pros, and accompanying Jared for long drives at the end of each day to release rehabilitated survivors into a distant unburned plantation. As of last count, they’ve helped rescue 143 koalas.

Outside the clinic, in a nearby field, a Robinson R44 helicopter had just landed after an aerial survey using a thermal-imaging camera to locate koalas by detecting their body heat; this is one of several ways that Sam and the rescue team are now experimenting with technology to find where koalas are clustered and whether those habitats are burned or still viable. Sam was paying a lot to rent the helicopter, and the results have been promising, but Sam is still learning how to operate the infrared camera from the air—it’s no easy feat to adjust the focus and pan-and-tilt speed while fine-tuning koala heat signatures from inside a moving helicopter—and the data is complicated to interpret.

At this phase of the recovery effort, the goal is no longer strictly to rescue injured koalas and get them to the hospital for treatment. The team is also trying to figure out if koalas remaining in the wild have enough food to survive. The fear is there will be a second wave of koala deaths, from starvation. The team is also experimenting with drones, and Thomas Gooch, founder of a Melbourne environmental analytics firm called the Office of Planetary Observations, has donated recent satellite-observation maps that display vegetation cover to identify areas that have burned.

California wildlife rescuer Douglas Thron and environmentalist Freya Harvey launch a drone outfitted with an infrared camera to spot stranded koalas.

(David Maurice Smith)

A newer member of the koala rescue team is Douglas Thron, an aerial cinematographer and wildlife rescuer from Oakland, California, who was brought to the island by Humane Society International. In the 1990s, Thron used to take politicians and celebrities up in a little Cessna to show them the impact of clear-cutting old-growth redwood forests in California. Last year, he spent months after California’s devastating fires, and in the Bahamas after Hurricane Dorian, using a custom-made drone to spot dogs and cats trapped in the debris.

Douglas had been on the island since late February, using his drone—configured to carry an infrared camera and a 180x zoom lens and spotlight—to help the team identify where in the vast acreage of burnt blue gum plantations there were koalas needing rescue or resettlement. So far, he had spotted 110, of which 60 had been rescued.

Douglas, Kailas and Freya had spent most of the previous night in the bush, using the drone to do thermal imaging and closer spotlighting of the treetops in the darkness, when it’s easier to see the koalas’ heat signatures. From the ground, Douglas used a video screen attached to the drone controls to identify ten koalas in one section of a burnt eucalyptus plantation. Today, it would be up to the ground rescue team to head out and see what they could find by daylight.

* * *

“We were calling it Pompeii,” said Lisa Karran as we drove past a tragic tableau of carbonized Tammar wallabies huddled in a clearing beside rows of burnt blue gums. The hardest part, she said, was seeing the incinerated family groups together—baby koalas holding onto branches beside their moms, dead possums and kangaroos with their young beside them.

Standing amid rows of charred trunks, Utah, who is 13, was readying the koala pole—an extendable metal pole with a shredded feed bag attached to the end, which the climbers shake above the koala’s head to scare it down the tree. Saskia, who is 15, held the crate at the base of the tree. Jared had spotted this particular koala—“because I’m koalified!” he joked—curled right at the top of a black trunk with no leaves.

Upper left, a climber wielding a “koala pole” persuades an animal to leave its towering hideout and descend to the ground, where rescuers could examine it and crate it for later treatment. Upper right, Rescuers placed vegetables in devastated areas to feed animals. Some 13,000 people applied for 120 openings for volunteers to distribute food and water. Below, Utah Karran, 13, releases a recovered koala into an intact blue gum plantation. Karran and his sister and parents spent two months rescuing animals at risk.

(David Maurice Smith)

The luminous epicormic growth was sprouting from many of the trunks around us. The rescue team had begun to wonder if this growth, which is known to be more toxic than mature leaves, as the tree’s natural defense against insects and animal browsing while the tree itself struggles to survive, might be making the koalas sick. Some of the koalas they’d seen eating it, and had subsequently brought in for treatment, had diarrhea or gut bloat. They’d also observed koalas eating dead leaves rather than epicormic growth, suggesting the animals may not find it an ideal food source. Koalas are naturally adapted to the toxins in eucalyptus leaves, with gut flora that help digest the leaves and flush out the toxins. But the higher toxicity levels of the new growth may be beyond their tolerance. Ben Moore, a koala ecologist at Western Sydney University, said that there are no detailed studies that directly compare the chemical makeup of epicormic growth with adult leaves, but he hypothesized that any dramatic change in a koala’s diet would change that individual’s microbiome, and in turn affect its gut function.

In recent weeks, the group has rented a mechanized crane, which makes it easier to get to the tops of the trees, but there are still many rescues where the koala is so high up that Freya or Kailas need to clip in and use the arborist’s technique of throwing a weight and line to climb the burnt and brittle trees, and then shake the koala pole above the animal’s head. Typically, a koala grunts or squeals and climbs down a trunk amazingly fast. After Lisa or Utah plucks it off the trunk at the bottom and places it in a crate, it becomes surprisingly docile, gazing up at its human saviors.

The first koala rescued that day was underweight, and others had pink patches on their feet signaling healing burns, but some were healthy enough, the group decided, to be released elsewhere without needing to be checked by vets at the Wildlife Park.

Out of the hundreds of koalas that volunteers and staff have rescued, many are being raised in captivity. Older koalas are released into intact eucalyptus plantations.

(David Maurice Smith)

Hours and hours passed like this in the hot plantations. It was gripping to watch. Each rescue had a unique emotional texture—a dramatic arc of growing tension as those on the ground waited for the climbers to encourage the koalas down, the adrenaline spike of grabbing the animals behind their strong necks and getting them into the crate, and the communal relief if they were found to be healthy. Each of the ten koalas rescued that day was found almost exactly where Douglas’s drone had spotted them the night before.

During one rescue, a koala kept up a plaintive high-pitched wail but would not budge from its perch. Freya and Kailas both had to clip in and climb up in order to coax it down. Once on the ground the team knew this koala was seriously unwell: its paws were covered in fresh blood, from the loss of several claws—a sign of previous burns or infections. Kailas, in particular, was devastated, and sobbed openly. They knew from experience what fate awaited this koala. Later that night, after its condition was checked at the Wildlife Park, it was euthanized.

The next day, Kailas made his 100th rescue. It also happened to be Jared’s last day doing rescues with his family. The next Monday, he’d be back at work as a police officer. “There’ll be criminals robbing the bank, and I’ll be gazing up into the trees, looking for koalas,” he said wistfully. He’d been scrolling back through his photos, and had been struck by a picture of Saskia and Utah swimming in the sea the day before the fires started, two months before. “Every day since, it’s just been so different,” he said. “I was thinking this morning that I want to get back to that.”

At dusk, the Karrans drove out to one of the only plantations that didn’t burn, called Kellendale. They had six healthy koalas in the back seat and the trunk of their SUV, rescued from plantations with no leaf cover for food. After the eerie silence of another long day spent in burnt plantations—not a single insect hum or bird song—it was a joy to see a flash of pink from the belly of a rose-breasted cockatoo, and to hear the soft, wavelike rustling of living eucalyptus leaves in the breeze. It felt like paradise.

Utah and Saskia released the koalas from their crates one by one, and the family laughed together as one of their feistiest rescues, a female koala with lovely fluffy ears, sprinted for a tree, climbed about 15 feet up, then stopped and stared back down at the humans for a good long while. Then she climbed higher, cozily wedged herself in the fork of a branch, and held on tight as the narrow trunk rocked in the wind.

#Nature

[creativenostalgiastuff]

A Virgil Affliction Chapter 14: Okay

Word Count: 2570

Rating: T

Warnings: Accidents, car accident, hospitals, injury, anxiety, medication

Author’s Note: A very special thank you to @today-only-happens-once for all of her help on this project. No matter if it was editing, sound board, etc. she was always down to help even though she didn’t have to. I don’t know what I would do without her. And a very special thank you to all of the followers and readers of this story. You all are amazing in every way. I love you all more than you know. Thanks for the support, understanding and encouragement.

Need to Catch Up?: First Chapter Previous Chapter

Virgil didn’t know how long he was asleep on the floor of Emergency Command before being woken up by Logan, squatting across from him with a small, tired smile on his face. Virgil blinked a few times and picked his head up off of Patton’s shoulder. He felt this specific type of exhaustion in the past, generally after rough anxiety attacks. His neck was tense as he rolled his head around and tried to straighten his back into alignment.

“What up, Teach?” asked Virgil as he stretched.

“Is Thomas okay?” Patton asked as he stood up quickly, eager for answers.

Logan nodded, “Yes, the surgery appears to have been a success. His vitals are returning to acceptable levels. I suspect that he will recover sufficiently given enough time and adherence to the doctor’s medical plans.” He reached out a hand to help Virgil stand up. “And no small part of that is due to your quick thinking.”

Virgil rubbed the back of his neck, looking at the ground, “It was nothing.”

“That wasn’t nothing,” Logan corrected sternly. “We have never seen anything like this situation occur before.”

“Thank goodness,” Patton interjected.

“You pushed past your worries, you focused on doing what needed to be done to help save Thomas- to save all of us,” continued Logan. “And that effort should not be minimized or ignored.”

Virgil could feel his face burn up at the compliment, “But I didn’t know what I was doing. Lexi helped.”

“Lexi?” the other two asked in unison.

“Uh, the device,” amended Virgil. “It does this weird thing with the EC and talked to me. She said her name was Lexi.”

“Fascinating,” mused Logan as he folded his arms in thought. “I was going to inquire what the voice earlier was. I wonder if we took the devi- I mean Lexi, and-“

Virgil put up a finger to stop Logan, “Oh no. You are not going to start running tests on me and Lexi.”

“I am merely speculating that-“

“Nope, don’t care.”

“Guys,” Patton interrupted, his voice quiet as he wrapped his arms around himself in a hug, “Is Roman up yet?”

They all shared a worried look before staring at the floor. “I’m sure he’s okay,” Logan stated, clearly not wanting to answer the question that was actually asked.

Virgil felt his chest tighten. What if Roman never woke up? The need to move suddenly built, almost pulling him towards the door.

“Level 1, go check on him,” Lexi chimed, causing Virgil to wince slightly as he watched the other two’s eyes turn towards him in concern. Great. The nice thing about when the Lexi had just been a wrist watch was that the others were less likely to notice his concern. At least it was just temporary and Lexi would turn into his silent companion again once he left the EC and lost the link.

“I’m going to go check on him,” Virgil muttered as he pulled the hood of his sweatshirt up, trying to block out the looks from his friends.

Logan pushed his glasses up, “Very well. I shall stay here to monitor Thomas’ vitals to ensure that we remain on a healing trend.”

Patton hesitated, his eyes shifting between the two friends, biting his lip. “Is it okay if I stay here? I just want to make sure Thomas is okay…”

Virgil nodded, shooting finger guns at his friends in a feeble attempt to make Patton smile again, “You got it.”

He turned on his heel and ran out of the room, towards Roman’s. He reached the large stately doors and paused. What if he still couldn’t get in? They had never been in this kind of situation before. What should he expect?

His wrist vibrated lightly, LEVEL 1: OPEN THE DOOR

Virgil took a deep breath and opened the door. Roman still was laying on the poster bed exactly as he had been when Virgil had last checked. Papers and debris still littered the floor, but the ceiling was back to it’s basic white; the storm having passed.

Anxiety raised a hand and cautiously pushed it to the door way, wincing slightly as the fear of the barrier from earlier reappearing. His hand swiped through the air before falling limply to his side, a sigh of relief escaping as Virgil realized he could get in the room.

His eyes went back to his friend across the room, “Roman?”

No response. Not that was surprising. If Roman was asleep, good luck trying to get him up just by talking to him. Out of all of them, the Prince was the hardest to wake up. Logan would wake up once the window in his room was opened and light was let in, Patton would wake if you talked to him, and Virgil was up if you so much as touched his door. But to get Sleeping Beauty up, you had to actually talk to him and nudge him to get any response in the slightest.

Virgil walked across the floor on his toes, trying to be mindful of the mess on the floor. He got to the bed and a smiled softly at how peaceful his friend looked before he nudged Roman’s side, “Alright, time to get up.”

Roman didn’t move.

“Roman? Seriously dude, you’re the last one not up yet,” Virgil explained. “Well, Deceit might not be up yet, but I’m not worried about him right now.”

Still nothing.

Virgil’s mouth went dry as his hands started to shake, “Come on, please?” his voice cracked.

It vibrated again, LEVEL 1: HE’S OKAY. GIVE IT TIME. GO HELP THE OTHERS

Virgil sighed and brushed Roman’s hair out of his face with a shaking hand, “Okay. Just don’t take too long, Roman. We miss you.”

Virgil went back to the others and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

They were there in the EC for a couple of days. Thomas’ status continued to improve, showing that the surgery was successful. Logan was able to restore audio connection for a little while, allowing them to listen to the hospital room that Thomas was recovering in. His family had been there and Tayln was almost a permanent fixture too, often upset and blaming themselves for the whole situation. Thankfully Thomas’ family was great at reassuring the friend that they were in no way at fault. Sometimes things happen.

Roman still hadn’t woken up. Logan’s  theory was that they had all been woken up in order of use that Thomas had needed them. Virgil hadn’t been affected due to being the fight of flight instinct that was needed to remain alive. Patton seemed to have been woken by the visual of Tayln at the crash sight; the fear and sadness at his friend being distressed alerting Thomas in some way to the direness of the situation. He needed Patton to help remind him why it was important to fight. Logan was woken thanks to the surgery prompting Thomas’ body into getting the help it needed to jump start him to work. Clearly the reason Roman was still asleep was simply because Thomas hadn’t needed him yet. His body was too busy on healing to call upon romance, fancifulness, creativity. Clearly, Logan explained, that once Thomas was aware enough to need creative dreams that Roman would join them.

And Virgil was happy to find that Logan was correct.

On day 4 in the hospital, Roman came into the Emergency Command. Virgil had been curled up on the floor with Patton while Logan had been standing, watching the console intently.

“Roman?” Patton called, his eyes widening as he tried to untangle himself from the pile of blankets that had been his nest on the floor.

Logan turned, his eyes lighting up, “Look who decided to join us.”

Roman rubbed his eye, sleep still foggy around him, “What happened?”

“Car accident,” Logan answered as he looked back up at the monitor. “Pretty involved, but Thomas is doing better now, evidenced by your awakening.”

Roman looked at the floor as he took it in, “How’d we manage that?”

“Virgil managed Thomas at the scene until help arrived,” Logan explained. “Thanks to his quick thinking we were able to make it to the operating room where they could stop some of the internal bleeding.”

Virgil blushed, “It wasn’t me. Lexi helped.”

“Lexi?”

“The Device,” Logan explained. “And she just provided assistance. You did the work.”

Roman smiled, “Good going, Twilight Zone.”

A steady beeping filled the room, causing the Sides to look up at the monitor. On the side of screen, audio had switched to “good”. Thomas was aware enough to hear the room. Virgil’s heart fluttered. This was the first time that Thomas had done anything without Logan messing with the controls.

No one said anything. Suddenly the screen lit up in a fuzzy gray and white. The view opened up to a textured, white ceiling. A large fluorescent light was in the edge of the screen a curtain track snaked it’s way around the edges of the view.

“Is that…” Patton asked.

“Hospital ceiling,” Logan answered, his voice sighing in relief.

Virgil felt his chest constrict, “Don’t get to excited yet. This could just be a fluke.”

“Try getting him to move,” Lexi’s voice chimed.

Anxiety moved to the controls and pressed a button. They watched as Thomas jumped, trying to sit up. A nurse came into view, trying to stop Thomas from moving, “Woah there.”

Virgil felt tears start to fall from his eyes, relief swelling inside of him. They were okay. Thomas was okay.

It took a week to get things back to normal in the Mindscape. A day or two after Thomas woke up, the door to the EC disappeared from the Sides’ rooms. Which was just as well since they had to clean up the mess that the Mindscape had been tossed into during the accident.

The Sides themselves were doing well. Roman occasionally complained of a headache from being out of it as long as he was. It took him a while to get his bearings again and to get back to his Princely state.

Lexi stayed with Virgil throughout the readjustment period. The first day home from the hospital was a bit hard on Virgil, due to his worries that something would go wrong or that Thomas wasn’t ready. But everything had gone smoothly. Thomas’ mom had stayed with him for a while to ensure that his recovery continued to go well. Tayln had posted on the social media platforms that Thomas was going to take a small hiatus for health reasons and would be back in another week. Thankfully the fan were super supportive of everything, sending well wishes by the thousands across every platform they could. Joan had video called in to check on their friend and had discussed some ideas of covering don’t-text-and-drive themes.

Virgil felt the familiar tug at his core for the first time since the accident. Thomas was finally calling them to him. Probably to start getting ready for the next video. Either way, Virgil couldn’t help but smile as he let himself get pulled back to the real world.

He popped into his usual space on the stairs, the others in their places. All of them were smiling at one another.

“So… how’s it going, guys?” Thomas asked.

“Perhaps it would be more fitting for us to ask you that,” Logan answered. “But it is going… Snatch?”

“Close enough,” Roman squealed in excitement at his friend’s attempt.

“That’s good,” Thomas smiled. “I’m glad you guys are okay.”

“Aw, we’re glad you’re okay too,” said Patton. “You gave us quite a scare there.”

“Yeah,” commented Thomas, rubbing the back of his neck. “I still don’t really know what happened. I mean, I know, but…”

“It seems a bit surreal,” Virgil supplied. His mind flashed back to his own experience of the event. It had seemed more like a bad horror movie than reality now in his mind. Hopefully it didn’t come back to fuel his nightmares.

“Right.” Thomas agreed. “But you guys are okay?”

“Thanks to Virgil,” Patton added.

Virgil looked at the floor. He was glad that they were okay, but he was tired of the attention it got him. He had just done his job, why was it such a big deal. “Patton, please stop. I didn’t do anything.”

“He’s just modest,” Roman told Thomas. “He truly saved all of us.”

Virgil clenched his fists at his side, “No I didn’t. I just did what I was designed for: fight or flight.”

“But you chose to fight, valiantly from what we hear,” Roman continued. “Nothing to help you.”

“I just listened to Lexi,” Virgil corrected. “She helped.”

“Who’s Lexi?” Thomas whispered loudly to Patton.

“The device,” Patton whispered back, using the back of his hand to block it from Roman’s view. “It goes by Lexi.”

Thomas snickered, “Makes sense.”

“You still did have to do the work itself,” said Logan, ignoring the other conversation. “And Lexi didn’t know specifics about any of the controls. You had to solely work with your instinct to guide you, which is stressful to anyone given any circumstances. Do not sell your accomplishments short.”

“Yeah,” Patton chimed in. “You’re the GOAT.”

“Don’t be silly,” Logan said as adjusted his glasses. “Virgil is not capra aegagrus hircus.”

“No, not a goat. The GOAT,” corrected Roman, shaking his head. “Greatest of all time. GOAT. Just… I’ll make you a notecard.”

“That would be helpful,” Logan said.

Thomas chuckled at the exchange as he turned towards Virgil, “Well Virgil, I’m proud of you.”

“Don’t mention it,” Virgil muttered. “I just got lucky.”

“I don’t just mean about the accident,” Thomas corrected. “You have fought for me in ways you don’t even understand these last few months. I know everything has been so hard for you, but I haven’t heard you give up even once. You have risen to every occasion, taken on difficult challenges, and been open to getting the help you need when you need it.”

Virgil smiled shyly, his eyes coming up to meet Thomas’ and finding them full of nothing but truth.

“We wouldn’t have made it this far without you,” continued Thomas. “I am so proud of you, buddy.”

“We all are,” Patton added warmly.

Lexi lit up on his wrist, catching his attention. A smiling emoticon was on the screen. Virgil really did feel better with Lexi around, even if he hoped that he wouldn’t always need her. But for now, she helped him feel more balanced and kept him from fighting so much with the others. She helped him remember when to fight and when to let things play out. But the others were right; at the end of the day, Virgil was still in control of himself and what he did. This victory was his.

Virgil looked at the others and felt his heart fill with warmth. His famILY was great and full of love. He had no idea how he had gotten so lucky to be with such an amazing group. “Thanks guys.”

There was a beat of silence before Roman came in, “So about our next video, I was thinking…”

Virgil couldn’t help but smile. Sure it had been rough, but that was okay. The important thing was that everything was okay and he knew that.

Everything was okay.

Author’s Note: OMG y’all, we’re done. This is so bitter-sweet. I have adored working with this story the last couple of months. So much has happened and changed and it was fantastic to have this story to work on and distract me when I needed it. Obviously I won’t be adding anymore chapters to this particular story, but that doesn’t mean I won’t be bringing Lexi back for future ideas I might get. If you have any questions, comments, thoughts, HC, you name it from this story, please don’t hesitate to drop me an ask! I love mail. Who doesn’t love mail that isn’t bills?

If you are interested in any of my ficlets or for future work, please follow me! I don’t have a general tag list, but if you think I should change that and you would like to be on it, please let me know. I might start one if there’s enough interest. I have a number of prompts that people have sent me that I am currently working on, so look for those coming at you in the coming weeks. I also have a fic that I have been working on during my free time at work that I will be typing up here shortly as the school year ends and I become unemployed.

Tag List (AND THANK YOU):

@niatsu-fullbuster  @rileyfirstname @pineapplebutterscotch  @thepoolofthedead  @larkiaquail  @jade-dragon226-fan  @modcarbz  @kiwisandsprinkles  @anime-geek-girl32  @marion-fnaf-fan  @dennithekit  @icantbeme71097  @lemonofweirdness  @fuck-spock  @thebaagelboy  @sanders-trash-4ever  @patton-loves-coloring  @i-will-physically-fight-you @hissesssss

@jayzwonderland @ab-artist @thats-so-crash @heir-of-the-founders @dinorawrs1 @cadefailure @sakurahayasaki @itsdemonsjim @axahi-bitxh @julia6181 @voices-and-stardust @hghrules @ryuriel @chocopirate @generalfandomfabulousness @4-s-shadowlink @maizeandbirds @virgil-sandersss @raygelkitty @midnightalex12 @snow-cherri @notveryglittery @random-name-here @virgilient @cyberpunkjinx @jackthesmolboi @random-pianist @peanut0303 @sleepyssnail @grandpasweatersrock @nervousarts @sesame-icecream @teegan95 @arandomkoalainaustralia @olris55 @djpurple3

[drlaurynlax]

14 Best Ways to Gain Weight (Without Harmful Effects)


Gain Weight Without Making Yourself Sick

Move over “GOMAD” (Gallon of Milk A Day) and searching Dr. Google for the answers “how to gain weight fast”…Let these 14 essentials light the way. 

So you want to gain weight, but you “can’t.”

Some people call it a “hard gainer,” others call it “genetics,” others call it “not eating enough” or “working out too much,” and others wish they had your problem.

No matter what your theory is behind why you CAN’T seem to gain weight…it sucks.

While the majority of America is seemingly hyper focused on weight loss with 1 in 3 Americans overweight (1) (and more than 85% of all people overweight by 2030 if trends continue, 2), for those who struggle with putting weight on (or keeping it on), it can feel equally disheartening. Being underweight can affect your body image, strength and often times even health.

I get it.

“I’m a Hard Gainer” (Story of my LIFE)

For most of my life I’ve struggled with my weight.

Early Bloomer

My pre-teens were characterized by being a healthy “early bloomer”—one of the tallest in my class, the first to shave my legs and wear a sports bra by age 9, and ranking in the top percentile on the BMI charts for my height and weight.

Chronic Dieting

By age 10, I forcefully put a dramatic halt to this—wanting nothing to do with womanhood, and more than anything, wanting to be considered thin, pretty and popular. My adolescence, teens and early 20’s were spent battling my weight and destroying my metabolism through malnourishment, subsisting on fat free yogurt, baby carrots, apples and deli turkey. I counted calories and fat grams as if it were my job, and there was a time I even feared water.

Force Feeding Weight Gain: Hypermetabolic

Doctors sent me in and out of treatment centers and hosptials, like I was on vacation, and my weight forcefully yo-yoed, as protocols forced me to sit on a couch for 3-9 months at a time, eating Egg McMuffins, Ensure shakes and Pop-tarts to put weight on and keep me alive.

My nutritionists were always “shocked” at how my body would respond to the “absurd” amount of calories and large meal plans they’d put me on, telling me I was “hypermetabolic” due to the years of starvation and metabolic disruption to my system.

Eating a Michael Phelps’ Olympic Diet

Come age 24, when I chose to recover from my 15 years of anorexia and orthorexia, this once more meant fluctuations in my weight—rebounding up from death’s doorstep at 79 pounds and feeling like the walking dead, to a “healthier place” where my body could do things a normal 24-year-old body should do (like menstruate, think clearly,and sweat in yoga class).

Nevertheless, as I once more began the classic re-feeding “weight gain” diet, my body still struggled. At the time, I was in eating disorder treatment, and being fed the equivalent of what Michael Phelps ate to win his dozens of Olympic Medals—from takeout pizza, to milkshakes, ice cream, Snickers bars, peanut butter crackers, bagels and waffles—without burning a calorie or swimming a stroke my metabolism was super fast, and yet the my gain weight process was SUPER SLOW.

For almost a year, constipation and bloating were my daily nemesis, I rarely saw a green vegetable of any sort, and no one cared that I was both lactose intolerant and gluten intolerant, with underlying autoimmune diseases that wreak havoc on the body when fed inflammatory foods. However, as forceful and painful as it felt, I did gain weight, and everyone else (but myself) were happy with the number on the scale.

Confused: Health vs. Unhealthy Weight Gain

Despite wanting to be healthy and also restore healthy weight myself, inside I felt awful. Why did “getting healthy” and having a “healthy body” have to be such a painful, forced process? Why did my body have such a hard time to gain weight? Not once did anyone talk to me about the real reasons why my body struggled so much to put healthy weight on—and be in a healthy place for my body.

Redefining a Healthy Body & Weight for ME

After I got out of treatment and back to the real world, in my new 40+ pound heavier body, I felt like I was Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz— not in Kansas anymore. In my new skin, and world of new opportunity before me (instead of standing face to face with death), I knew I had one of two choices—move forward or go back to my old ways.

I had no idea what “maintaining” my weight looked like—since for the past 15 years, my world had seemingly revolved around others wanting me to gain weight, and me fearing it so much…but I knew I did NOT want to go back down the road I had traveled.

In my new skin, I did my best to accept myself just as I was, with a few more rolls and much fuller face, without letting the old diet mentality slip back in—making me fear every morsel I put into my mouth.

Thankfully, at this time, I found an amazing CrossFit community that showed me the beauty of being strong, self-confident, and eating real whole foods. I decided to finish my Doctorate in Occupational Therapy and later furthered my education in Nutrition—both of which gave me realistic insight and truth about what holistic health is all about. And my faith and belief in the fact that I am truly fearfully and wonderfully made and here for a greater purpose than my body helped me stand firm.

Weight was seemingly no longer my issue!

Weight Issues Strike Again

Fast forward to age 28-30, my freedom from body image and the never ending struggle to gain weight came back with vengeance. This time, not in the form of an eating disorder, but a little something something known as IBS and SIBO—small intestinal bacterial overgrowth—gut dysfunctions where I could not keep food and nutrients in my body, no matter how much I ate or how healthy I ate. While I was no longer eating a steady diet of baby carrots or the opposite treatment extremes (fast food) at the time, everything I put into my mouth, ended right back up—in the toilet.

Bloating, gas, loose and watery stools and chronic diarrhea struck and lingered for a good 6-months until I really realized something was up beyond “bad digestion.”

In that time, I lost a good 10 to 15 pounds of redefined healthy muscle and feel-good body image I’d begun to find post-treatment and anti-eating disorder.

I felt horrible—inside and out—and self conscious, like people who looked at me, and knew my back story of my eating disorder, saw me right back “there”—at square one in the thick of “ED.”

Several people commented, “You should put on weight.” Others talked about me behind my back, “Lauryn has no right being on a stage talking about her eating disorder past. She doesn’t look healthy and she’s obviously still struggling.” And still others told me straight to my face, “Lauryn, if you’d put more weight on, your words and work you do to help others heal from their own food and body struggles would have more weight.”

An “angel investor” wanted to give me $100,000 to drive my bigger vision forward of helping people on a global scale and opening up a functional medicine center in the heart of Texas…until he met me face to face. He knew my back story—my recovery from a death gripping eating disorder and had seen my news feature on CBS—but after meeting me, he said he’d only fund my business on one condition—I gain about 15-20 pounds.

Will I ALWAYS Struggle with Weight?!

This set me over the edge—frustrated with my body and my weight.

Once I really realized that the SIBO and IBS had taken a toll on my body, I went to work on gaining weight…like it was my full time job.

More than anything, I wanted to help others and see my vision through, and if the only thing I had to do was put on 15-20 pounds….I could do anything right?

Buzz.

Weight gain proved to be harder than ever. No matter how much I ate—upwards of 3000 calories—the weight would not go on. And more and more came out.

About this same time is when I began to get more serious about the practice and art of functional medicine, and I threw myself into both self and formal study—training under some of the top leaders in medicine and the evolving functional medicine field.

Functional medicine is ALL about helping people get to the root of the health struggles, understanding what is going on “under the hood” or what is holding them back from being the healthy, vibrant person they want to be.

And as I began studying to help others…I also began learning and studying and discovering the answers to also helping myself…

Long story short, I discovered several reasons—real reasons—my body has struggled to gain weight for a LONG TIME…and several reasons why your body probably also struggles with weight issues too—both weight gain or weight loss.

You DON’T Have to Struggle with Weight Forever

No matter your personal history and relationship with your body and your weight; and whether you want to gain weight or lose weight, you don’t have to struggle forever—especially when you better understand the root causes driving weight dysfunction for you in the first place.

While I am not 100% where I want to be yet, I am getting there—up almost 8 pounds—and gradually healing the underlying mechanisms that have kept my body from being the optimal healthiest version of myself for YEARS.

If you’re tired of fighting your weight, here are 14 REAL reasons you can’t gain weight (beyond just being a “hard gainer”) and 14 essentials to reverse your struggle.

14 REAL REASONS YOU CAN’T GAIN WEIGHT + 14 ESSENTIALS TO GAIN WEIGHT THE HEALTHY WAY

1. Your Gut Microbiome is Unhealthy

The gut is the gateway to health (healthy weight included). Your gut is home to trillions of gut bacteria (100 trillion to be exact). Your gut bacteria and digestive system as a whole are responsible for: helping your body digest and absorb every single nutrient you eat, using every vitamin and mineral in your food, detoxifying every single toxin that comes in contact with your body, boosting your immune system, telling your neurotransmitters how to “think,” and governing how fast, slow and healthy your metabolism and hormones function.

Gut bacteria can be “good” (healthy), “bad” (pathogenic, infectious) or “commensal” (neither good nor bad.  In the case of the weight gain dilemma, if you have a chronic gut infection (like parasites or unhealthy bacteria), bacterial overgrowth (SIBO), yeast or fungal overgrowth, or other “gut problems” (like low stomach acid, IBS, “leaky gut”), then weight gain will be an uphill battle.

Poor gut health is related to malabsorption, nutrient deficiencies, cortisol imbalances (i.e. stress) and a super slow or, in your case, a super fast metabolism. 

While most studies around gut bacteria and weight tend to show the healthier your gut bacteria, the healthier your weight is (particularly for those who are overweight and obese), clinical and empirical practice also shows the opposite to be true: the more unhealthy your gut bacteria, the less healthy your body composition and weight (3).

If you are genetically predisposed to be a “hard gainer” already, you can bet your bottom dollar that you will struggle more with your weight if your gut is not healthy in the first place.

Weight Gain Essential: Boost Your Gut Health

Boost your gut health in your daily life with these steps:

Take a daily soil based probiotic and prebiotic

Take 1-2 digestive enzymes with meals

Add apple cider vinegar to water to boost stomach acid, and eat 1-2 spoonfuls of sauerkraut or fermented foods with each day

Consume natural herbs and compounds that boost gut function and heal leaky gut such as: ginger, cilantro, oregano, raw Manuka honey, peppermint, collagen, colostrum, and L-Glutamine powder to add to water.

Eat home cooked meals as much as possible, chew your food

Test, don’t guess. Work with a functional medicine practitioner to look into underlying gut dysfunctions holding you back from being in the healthy body you want to be. This may include stool testing, organic acids urine testing, SIBO breath testing, blood work or a mix of testing essentials.

2. You’re Not Maximizing Your Meals

Eating to gain weight can leave you stuffed—wondering how you can fit more “in”—especially when it seems like your weight is not budging. Everyone has their “sweet spot”—the right amount of foods that their body is able to utilize towards gaining weight, and it can be easy to undershoot this when it seems like you’re already eating all the time.

Your solution? Just suck it up and eat it! When I’ve hit this point, I find that instead of trying to fit in a whole other meal or snack, I instead look to maximize the meals I am already eating—and gradually add just a little bit more, so that my body and gut doesn’t feel overwhelmed.

Weight Gain Essential: Add Just a Little Bit Extra

Boost or maximize the meals you are already eating. Add:

An extra tablespoon of coconut oil to your veggies

A quarter of a cup more of sweet potatoes or squash

An extra ounce of protein

5-6 more raw nuts

A tablespoon of raw honey to your bedtime tea,

Or (my personal fave), a heaping spoonful of Keto-friendly ice cream or homemade coconut ice cream after dinner. Little things can make a big difference.

3. You’re Counting Quantity (Not Quality)

Calories and macros are only half the weight gain battle. Most blogs and articles on weight gain, and even personal trainers, will tell you to focus on “eating more,” “eating big,” “carbing up,” “getting lots of protein,” and healthy fats, but rarely do they talk about the quality of the foods you are eating. You can eat all the Tyson (hormone and antibiotic) raised chicken, pesticide-laden broccoli, and carb-rich rice or pasta in the world, but if the food sources are poor quality foods, you may as well be eating, but starving (at a cellular level).

Perfection and 100% organic foods are not the goal here, but a nutrient-dense diet is. For instance, the time broccoli makes it from the farm to the grocery store shelf, it has already lost well over 70% of its nutrients (4).

What this means for you in your weight gain journey? The less nutrient dense your diet, the less vitamins and minerals your body is able to use to “build on” towards your metabolic goals, at a cellular level, and the less likely your body is to absorb that food in the first place.

Weight Gain Essential: Aim for Quality Nutrients

Choose the best quality foods you can afford and vary up the foods within your diet often. (Eating the same things leaves your body and metabolism starving for certain nutrients—even if you are hitting your calorie or macro goals). Nutrient dense foods include:

Proteins

Pasture-raised poultry

Grass-fed meats

Wild caught fish

Organ Meats

Bone Broth

Vegetables 

Organic “Dirty Dozen” at least

Consume veggies within 1-3 days of buying, if possible

Cooked and sautéed veggies (digest best)

Dark leafy greens

Prebiotic fiber rich veggies & tubers (cooked and cooled potatoes/sweet potatoes, cooked and cooled white rice, green plantains, asparagus, onion, garlic, jicama, rutabaga, fennel)

Fresh Fruits

Especially antioxidant rich and digestive boosting fruits like:

Bananas (green tipped)

Blackberry

Blueberries

Cranberries

Cherries

Kiwi

Strawberries

Pineapple

Papaya

Plum

Healthy Fats

Avocado (1 small, 1/2 Medium, 1/3 Large=serving)

Avocado Oil

Beef Tallow

Coconut Butter

Coconut Flakes Unsweetened

Coconut Milk (additive-free; organic caned best)

Coconut Oil

Coconut Yogurt

Duck Fat

Egg Yolks (pasture raised, organic)

Extra Virgin Olive Oil

Fatty Cold Water Fish (Salmon, Sardines, Cod, Halibut)

Fatty Cuts of Meat (grass-fed, organic, pasture raised)

Flax Oil

Ghee

Goat’s Milk Butter

Grass-fed Butter

Grass-Fed Dairy* (Yogurt, Cream; No sugar, no additives, full-fat, plain; Limit amounts)

Grass-fed Goat’s Milk

Lard, Non-hydrogenated

Mayonnaise (Avoid brands with canola oil or sugar)

Olives

Palm Oil, Red Palm Oil

Palm Shortening (for baking)

  Fermented Foods

1-2 condiment sized servings per day

Fermented/Pickled Veggies

Fermented Condiments (Mustard, Ketchup, Relish, Horseradish, Salsas, etc.)

Kefir (Water, Coconut)

Kimchi

Kombucha (low sugar like Health Ade brand—only 2 grams of sugar, or make your own)

Kvass (Beet Kvass)

Miso & Natto (fermented varieties, no-additives)

Sauerkraut

Tempeh

Yogurt (Coconut Yogurt; full-fat grass-fed dairy with “live and active cultures only)

4. You’re Eating Foods You’re Intolerant To

Food intolerances can go undiagnosed for years. Unlike allergies where you get a direct reactive “histamine” response (wheezing, sneezing, watery eyes), food intolerances are less overt—manifesting as other signs and symptoms like malabsorption, bacterial overgrowth, fatigue, chronic stress, skin breakouts, lowered immunity, and metabolic disturbances, including difficulty gaining or losing weight).

Even “healthy�� foods can be “trigger foods” for food intolerances if you’re immunity or gut function is not able to handle them. For instance, eggs, nuts, grains, tomatoes, sweet potatoes and even broccoli (FODMAP) are common irritants to individuals with underlying gut issues.

In addition, while foods like gluten get a “bad rep” and many people have chosen to avoid it (because it seems “healthier” all around), there are dozens of other foods with high cross-reactivity to gluten, such as: instant coffee, dairy, rice, buckwheat, tapioca and quinoa (in fact, many of these ingredients are often found in gluten free products).

Weight Gain Essential: Experiment with Foods that Work for Your Body

If you are struggling to put on weight and tend to eat the same things most days, experiment with food variety or eliminating questionable trigger foods for you to see how your body (and weight) respond. The top gut irritating foods many people find they are intolerant to include:

Nuts/Nutbutters

Peanuts/Soy

Grains

Dairy (especially conventional dairy)

Artificial Sweeteners Note: Don’t forget that “cutting out” doesn’t mean “restricting.” Instead replace these foods with other foods, such as tigernuts, pumpkin seeds, sunbutter, and coconut butter for nuts and nut butter; starchy tubers (like butternut squash, sweet potatoes or plantains) for grains; raw honey, xylitol, or pure maple syrup in place of most commercial sweeteners (in protein powders), and coconut milk/yogurt or full fat grassfed kefir and yogurt in place of conventional dairy.

5. You’re Forgetting Vegetables

Just because you’re in “weight gain” mode doesn’t mean that veggies have to go off the table. Vegetables provide your body (and gut) with essential fibers and prebiotics for digesting your food in the first place, as well as help ease digestion (and prevent bloating and constipation). Many people neglect veggies, especially on a weight gain diet, thinking that carrots and greens means eating like a bird. However, the opposite is true. Without veggies in your diet, your body does eat like a bird (not getting the well rounded nutrients you need to build into your cellular function and metabolic processes).

Weight Gain Essential: Taste the Rainbow

Aim for 1-3 veggies with each meal—especially dark leafy greens, prebiotic and soluble fibers (like cooked and cooled potatoes/sweet potatoes, roasted squash, carrots, beets). Preferably cook, sautee, steam or roast your veggies to enhance digestion (and prevent over fullness from raw veggies).

6. You Have a “Hollow Leg” (or Metabolic/Thyroid Imbalance or Mitochondrial Dysfunction)

Do you ever feel like your have a hollow leg—like no matter what you eat or how much you eats, your food goes nowhere? Although this is a funny expression that Uncle Joey used to joke with you about over Thanksgiving turkey, it may not be too far off if you have something else going on “under the hood.”

We briefly discussed the importance of gut health in point #1, but beyond the gut, an underlying dysfunction in your thyroid (metabolic mothership) or mitochondria (cells and cellular processes) can also challenge your weight gain efforts—especially if your body has ever been subjected to chronic stress. Stress wreaks havoc on your body as a whole—from circadian rhythm dysfunction, lack of sleep, poor quality foods, eating the same things every day, overtraining or under-training, antibiotic use, long-term medication use, a history of disordered eating and toxic chemical exposure.

For instance, in a study of individuals in recovery from chronic eating disorders (i.e. individuals with long term stress on their bodies), the subjects’ resting metabolic rate increased upwards of 20% for their height and weight—some needing upwards of 5,000 calories to gain and maintain their weight (5, 6).

This is significant since eating disorders are highly associated with chronic stress, thyroid and mitochondrial disturbances (3). Another example: toxic burden from overexposure to the 85,000+ unregulated chemicals in our plastics, cleaning and hygiene chemicals, toxic beauty products, heavy metals, mold, medications, tap water and pesticides can also wreak havoc on your body at a cellular level if you’ve had your fair share (7).

What this means for your metabolism? If the “balance” of your body’s processes is thrown off, then the last thing your body may want to do is “build” or gain weight. In fact, for some thyroid disturbances or mitochondrial dysfunction can lead to skeletal muscle breakdown, nutrient deficiencies and even unwanted weight loss, as your cells and hormones can become starved at a cellular level.

Weight Gain Essential: Get a Complete Blood Panel Run + Additional Testing (if Needed)

Look under the hood. Work with a practitioner to assess your metabolic health. Get blood work completed, including a complete thyroid panel, as well as complete iron panel (since iron overload and deficiencies can also influence metabolism). Your practitioner should be able to guide you for any further testing as well for things like: mold, autoimmunity, organic acids, and heavy metals if warranted.

Here are the ideal ranges for thyroid markers:

TSH 1-2 UIU/ML or lower (Armour or compounded T3 can artificially suppress TSH) Free T4 >1.1 NG/DL Free T3 > 3.2 PG/ML Reverse T3 less than a 10:1 ratio RT3:FT3 Thyroid Peroxidase Antibodies (TPOAb) & Thyroglobulin Antibodies (TgAb)  < 4 IU/ML or negative

Here are ideal ranges for iron markers, depending on the season of life you’re in:

Serum Iron Men: 40–135 μg/dL Pre-menopausal Women: 40–135 μg/dL Post-menopausal Women: 40–135 μg/dL

Serum Ferritin Men: 30–200 ng/dL Pre-menopausal women: 30–100 ng/dL Post-menopausal Women: 30–100 ng/dL

Transferrin Saturation Men: 17–45% Pre-menopausal Women: 17–45% Post-menopausal Women: 17–45%

TIBC Men: 275–425 μg/dL Pre-menopausal Women: 275–425 μg/dL Post-menopausal Women: 275–425μg/dL

UIBC Men: 175–350 μg/dL Pre-menopausal Women: 175–350 μg/dL Post-menopausal Women: 175–350 μg/dL

Soluble Transferrin Receptor Men: 14.5–25 nmol/L Pre-menopausal Women: 13–25 nmol/L Post-menopausal Women: 14.5–25 nmol/L

Reticulocyte Hemoglobin Content (CHr) Men: 24.5–31.8 pg Pre-menopausal Women: 24.5–31.8 pg Post-menopausal Women: 24.5–31.8 pg

7. You’re Eating on the Go

Optimal digestion happens in a “parasympathetic state” (rest and digest). Eating on the go, in addition to standing up while eating, distracted eating (watching TV, checking your phone) or eating out at restaurants, (more than eating in) is stressful for the body’s digestive system.Often coupled with this is also the dilemma of not chewing your food enough. The result? Poorly digested and poorly absorbed foods…and lack of weight gain.

Weight Gain Essential : Rest & Digest

Slow down at meal times. Eat your meals seated and preferably not on the go. Cook and prepare your foods as much as possible. Chew your food (really well), and mindfully enjoy your meals (i.e. refrain from distracted eating).

8. You’re Meal Timing is Off

The human body loves balance—especially circadian rhythm balance. Every human has an internal biological clock that operates in tandem with the sun—ideally, we have more energy in the morning as the sun rises, plenty of gusto and energy during the day, then a bell curve dip in the evening, ready to “tuck in” and wind down as the sun goes down. However, if we disturb this circadian function—including our meal timing, then our body and metabolism can get off as well. While there is no perfect time to eat, there are general guidelines and hours during which your body is able to digest best. Eating at the “wrong” time windows also affects your metabolism.

In one study, aimed at determining if time of day affected weight loss in mice, researchers from  UT Southwestern Medical Center found: Mice on a reduced calorie plan that ate only during their normal feeding/active cycle were the only ones among five groups to lose weight, despite consuming the same amount as another group fed during their rest time in daylight (8).

Weight Gain Essential: Eat with Your Circadian Rhythms

Eat in tune with your circadian rhythms to maximize the fuel you eat.

Here’s a general guide:

6-8 Breakfast/First Meal

10-11 Mid-Morning Snack (if you eat a snack)

12-2 Lunch

3-5 Afternoon Snack (if you snack)

6-8 Dinner

9-10 Bedtime Snack (if you snack)

These guidelines fall in line with the way your body metabolizes food thought the day.

9. Your Body is in “Catabolic Mode”

Catabolism stands for “break down.” Anabolism is exactly the opposite: building up or weight gain. Together, catabolism and anabolism are integral and opposite parts of the metabolic cycle that require ideal balance to maintain a strong body, healthy weight, and muscle mass. If these activities are not in balance, the body can be in a catabolic state. The culprits to balance? Chronic stress, overtraining, prolonged fasting or restrictive diets, chronic infection, such as Lyme disease or H. Pylori, poor quality food intake, major surgery, burning a candle at both ends, lack of sleep, lack of water  (dehydration), and beyond.

Excessive or prolonged stress, resulting in catabolism (without adequate compensating anabolism or recovery) has negative consequences for your weight gain goals.

Muscle tissue along and essential body fat throughout the body can become depleted. Without the sufficient anabolic process, the process of growing and repairing tissue doesn’t happen, sending the body into a net negative energy state, defined by gradual weight loss, reduction of muscle mass and healthy body fat.

If not reversed early on, chronic catabolism happens—making you a “hard gainer” with your body constantly trying to catch up and locking your metabolic cycle into a deficit with low energy, failure to gain weight despite excessive caloric intake, unexplained weight loss, hypoglycemia, shortness of breath and inability to take deep respiration, and more.Translation? Adrenal fatigue or “HPA Axis Dysfunction.”

Is this you?

Weight Gain Essential: Don’t Push Your Body

When your body is in a catabolic state, typical measures for weight gain, health and nutrition are not always tolerated. Your body is highly sensitive and may not be able to accept BOTH natural or synthetic anabolic compounds or hacks that have stimulating properties. This may mean taking a step back from high calorie loads, inflammatory foods (dairy, grains, nuts), hard workout sessions and nutritional supplements—all of which can be a “good thing” but cause more stress than good in the catabolic state.

A common error of trying to use more calories or more supplements to reverse the catabolic cycle prematurely (when the body is still in catabolism and yet to stabilize), is that programs that focus primarily on aggressive tactics often fail. In catabolic mode or “adrenal fatigue,: the body is trying to slow down in order to conserve energy because it perceives danger and a threat to survival.

Forcing more food into the body requires the body to use more energy for digestion and metabolite breakdown. And even though nutritional supplements may seem harmless to” boost your adrenals” or immunity, if your body is in “break down mode,” these measures can trigger adrenal crashes. Instead of trying to push your body out of catabolism, here’s how to approach restoring your body to a place where it’s ready to be “pushed” towards health instead:

Step 1: Prevent Catabolism from Worsening

Use basic whole foods nutrition, juiced vegetables, basic movement (walking, yoga), rest and cutting out unnecessary commitments and obligations.

Step 2: Focus on Essential Nutrition

Let food be thy medicine. Before pushing forward into high caloric meal plans once you have a stable foundation, the goal of step 2 is still gradual restoration of total health and function. This is best accomplished by focusing on eating micronutrients through nutrient dense foods (fresh vegetables and fruits, organ meats, fatty fish, grass-fed and pastured proteins, essential fatty acids), and customizing the exact nutrients to your needs. A one size fits all dietary plan is not possible here because of great individual variance. Consider working with a nutritionist to build a balanced, restorative meal plan for you.

Step 3: Proper Supplementation

Once a baseline of health and function is restored and the catabolic state has slowed, supplements may gradually be integrated to boost overall function. Some helpful supports may include: adaptogenic herbs (like ashwaganda, rhodiola, cordyceps or reishi mushroom), essential fatty acids (like cod liver oil), immune-boosting supports (Vitamin C, liposomal curcumin, glutathione and resveratrol). Work with a functional medicine practitioner on this one.

10. You’re Not Recovering Properly

Perhaps you are not all the way into catabolic mode…but you’re heading that way fast if stress (and lack of recovery) are your “norms.” You can eat all the sweet potatoes and ice cream in the world, but if your body is in “stressed out mode,” then you won’t see the labors of your high calorie intake work like they should. Beyond calories, quality sleep, hydration and workout habits are essential for a balanced bod (that can readily accept weight gain). If you under sleep, don’t hydrate or overtrain, then you won’t get anywhere (fast).

Weight Gain Essential: 

Aim for 7-9 hours of sleep each night

Drink half your bodyweight in ounces of filtered water each day (bonus: add lemon)

Balance your workouts: Daily movement is not a bad thing, aim for 3-5 days of strength training, 1-2 days of power (HIIT), yoga or flexibility training, and

11. You’re Trying to Be Arnold

Your body is your body. Arnold’s body is his body. Cindy Crawford’s body is her body. Every BODY is different, and one of the biggest “get ups” in the weight gain game is keeping your eyes everywhere else, but on your own “ball.” The more we look to others’ bodies and characteristics as our own ideal (instead of determining our own), the further from our goals we will continue to be (because we will never fully get there).

Weight Gain Essential: Clearly Define Who Thriving YOU Is

Who is thriving, healthy, body confident you? What does he or she look like, act like, feel like, think like? If you could be the best version of you—not someone else, who would that be and qualities would you possess? Get a clear picture of that girl or that guy. Bullet point your top qualities of who you want to be in your healthy body and healthy mindset, then… put on the “as if” mindset in your own weight gain journey. The “as if” mindset is like putting on a superhero cape or princess dress as a kid and believing you were totally Superman or Belle from :Beauty and the Best.” So as we think therefore we become.

12. You’re on the Wrong Supplements

The supplement industry is a black hole with everything from protein powders to weight gainers, adrenal supports, multi-vitamins, probiotics and beyond. However, not all supplements are created equal, and most all supplements are unregulated—leaving those who are unfamiliar with the differences in strains, types, potencies, company reputations and overall quality of supplements in the dark about the “best” supplements for you.

Hate to break it to you, but many sups are nothing more than placebo effect, overheated during processing and manufacturing, not potent enough to make a difference and/or half-baked marketing lies.

For instance, it’s been estimated that upwards of 90% of probiotics on shelves do not contain the probiotics they claim.While supplements can be beneficial for getting in extra micronutrients you don’t get in your diet, or supporting underlying deficiencies or dysfunctions (such as poor gut health, poor thyroid or metabolic function, “adrenal fatigue,” etc.), it’s best not to go too crazy or depend on supplements too much as the “answer” for your weight gain success.

Weight Gain Essential: Invest in Quality Supps & Get a Plan for You

Less is more, and here are my top 5 weight gain supportive supplements most people can benefit from:

Soil Based Probiotic: Megaspore Biotic (use code “THRIVE” to be able to check out under the Register Tab as a patient)

Prebiotic: Sunfiber (helps digest your probiotic)

Digestive Enzymes: Transformation Enzymes Digest

Quality MultiVitamin: Metabolic Synergy by Designs for Health (use code LAURYNLAX at checkout to have access to check out)

Clean Protein Powder: Equip Foods Prime Protein  , Vital Protein CollagenConsult with your healthcare practitioner or get a custom supplement and nutrition plan for you     

13. You’re Stressing Out (About Your Weight)

Did we mention stress is the number one culprit working against your weight gain efforts? It is.

Weight Gain Essential: Enjoy the Journey

Health is about the journey—not the destination. Along your weight gain restoration, enjoy the journey of building into your healthy lifestyle, body and mindset. You will get there. Focus on one day and one positive action step at a time.

RESOURCES

https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statistics/overweight-obesity

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/de06/e7525826f407cbbce56f14ba037f9b190218.pdf

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4839080/

http://ucce.ucdavis.edu/files/datastore/234-779.pdf 

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2018.00199/full

https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/96/2/333/2709494

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3693132/

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/07/170718091542.htm

The post 14 Best Ways to Gain Weight (Without Harmful Effects)
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Source/Repost=> https://drlauryn.com/hormones-metabolism/14-best-ways-to-gain-weight-without-harmful-effects%e2%80%a8/ ** Dr. Lauryn Lax __Nutrition. Therapy. Functional Medicine ** https://drlauryn.com/

[bridgetbites]

Bridget Bites : What I Like About Modeling

Q:

Hi Bridget , I am a big fan of yours and your post are so cool . I always wanted to be a model but now that I have read your experiences I am really unsure if I should even try it . I am really an introvert and I dont know if I could handle all that body pressure . But it is really my dream . What should I do ?

A:

Hi there! Thank you for your message 😀 I am far from cool, but I am glad my writing is something relatable out there!

I know my recent posts have been shining a light on the extreme pressures put on young women, but modeling is a job I have stuck at for twelve years now. There is so much about it and the fashion industry that I truly love, and I am so thankful for the life that has been given to me by my job. I think being aware of possible negatives is number one to not being blindsided and having the freedom to really make an informed decision with modeling.

First off – if you have the opportunity to be signed to a great agency, I think you owe it to yourself to give it a go. I don’t believe in a life that is so safe that you talk yourself out of anything that scares you. That to me is not living. I have spent a lot of time feeling out of my comfort zone in this job, but I have grown so hugely from it. I have a freedom moving around the world, and friends in so many places. Plus a good bank account and worldliness. I have also battled disordered eating, extreme insecurity and anxiety and burn out. But at the end of the day, I am still here. I could have quit (and I did come close many a time). But this job pushes me in ways that I enjoy. It has given me a platform, and as I have gotten older, I have found my voice around a subject that means a huge amount to me. So modeling is not all bad. Every job has its downsides, and as far as jobs go, modeling is an absolute gift.

Introvert to introvert, I would advise you to really know exactly what you need to stay sane and healthy. It took me a long time to realize that I was an introvert, and to recognize what I needed. I wished that I could keep up with my beloved extroverted friends night after night, but I just couldn’t do it and stay healthy. For me it is about saving my energy when I know I have a lot of work coming up, and really making sure that my down time was down time. On jobs I need my time out after shooting all day, and I need to ensure that I spend some time in a dark quiet room recovering. I learned this after trying to socialize and finding myself unable to sleep, with my mind whirring and feeling stressed and wired. So first and foremost, know yourself. Know what you like and do not like, and never allow those boundaries to be crossed.

Carry this self knowledge into all aspects of modeling. I am extremely selective about any nudity I do, and I did not do anything in this realm until I was around 22. And that was with an extremely prestigious photographer. I have not done any since, because I have no desire to. And I will not cross this boundary on set. If I know and trust the photographer then we can have a conversation about it. But I have very clearly defined limits in my head and they allow me to feel safe and secure in my job.

I keep coming back to know yourself. Dedicate your time to growing your interests and your sense of self. Meditation has been a huge tool for me for getting in touch with signals from my body. I feel that growing up I learned to suppress a lot of emotion, to be a good girl and not to get too assertive. But through mindfulness practices like meditation I learned how to listen to cues from my body. I learned what it was like to pay attention to emotions and how that manifests in my body. From there I learned how to cognitively deal with them and stand my ground. This is an essential part of being a human. Allow yourself to take up space in your life, and stand up for yourself.

I would encourage you to ask yourself why a lot. Why is modeling your dream – why do you want so badly to do it? Modeling is a fantastic job. But it is a job at the end of the day. I would highly recommend against going into it to feel important or even properly seen. Because it is a job that comes with a huge amount of pressure. I have started to outline that pressure, and at times I have completely cracked under it. I looked to modeling to give me something that I couldn’t identify, and by the time I had finally pulled myself out I had done some serious damage to my mental health. So I would really spend some time with yourself and identify your reasons why. Modeling should be approached as an amazing opportunity to see the world, make some great money, and gain some life experience. That is it. Anything more is a bonus. And anything else in the world of modeling that pulls you from that path should be isolated and scrutinized.  

With exercise and nutrition I have the following advice. Coming from experiencing the extreme of both directions – it is always the middle path that works. When you are balanced, it is reflected out to those around you, and they are drawn to you. Eat well. Do not deprive yourself, but do not go overboard with the deserts. There is a time and a place for them, but maybe not every single day. Do not be afraid of entire food groups, and do not try to follow weird diets. Eat when you are hungry, and stop when you are full. Exercise to feel good, not until you cannot move from the couch. If any time you feel guilt coming in after eating something look at it in the face and ask why it is there. Clearly define your limits and how far you are willing to go for this job. And if the time comes that you feel you are getting too close to them, maybe it is time to reassess your situation.

Finally, I would seriously advise you to maintain interest in other subjects in your life. By keeping myself engaged and interested in other things such as oboe and studying, I have managed to keep my head above ground. Not getting jobs doesn’t really bother me, and I have never been too engaged in following the gossip and trends of the industry. Whilst I certainly had my goals in the industry, and was so happy to have achieved them, I never got swept up in the noise that accompanies this line of work. So keep yourself learning and engaging in new things. Because that brings me to my final point…

Modeling does not last forever. Save and invest your money, and keep your eyes focused on what you want to do next. More importantly, keep your eyes focused on who you want to be in the world. And do not let modeling pull you from that course.

I hope this helps!

 Love,

Bridget

Photograph | Dove Shore

I love receiving your comments! - and if you have any specific questions don’t forget to ‘Ask Me Anything’ via the link here.

THANKS SO MUCH

[pauperpedia]

What’s the future for Aggro?

Pauper will never be the same after Commander Legends. This has been the set everyone wanted, but at the same time it seems everyone is fearful of it, and rightfully so. We've gotten access to some very powerful cards in regard to control, midrange, and tron strategies which will shape the format for a long time to come. Aggro decks, however, did not get any new toys or bigger creatures with which to counteract all these new cards. So which cards am I framing here that could make aggro a less than viable option when figuring out a deck to play in the future?

Well, Pauper finally got the sweeper that people have talked about for years in the form of Fiery Cannonade. Now, if you look at the sweepers we had before, they mostly did one damage or gave -1/-1 to each creature until the end of turn, which was fine because most of the time these were sideboard cards you would bring in against token decks or go wide strategies. One could argue we already had Pestilence, Crypt Rats, and Evincar's Justice. My argument would be is that Fiery Cannonade is not only one mana cheaper, but a heck of a lot easier to cast when it comes to color requirements. It's also instant speed which is a huge deal when it comes to control decks or anything that runs Mystical Teachings. Some decks already run Suffocating Fumes in the mainboard, in part due to its cycle ability when it's dead, so I'm curious to see if any decks would run this mainboard as well. This set also opened up the playable color pie when it comes to Monarch cards. Monarch is a mechanic that was created primarily for multi-player formats. It is an effect that cannot be permanently removed from the game state once it's introduced. If a player controls the monarch, they draw a card at the beginning of their end step. The only way to lose or gain the monarch is to deal or have combat damage dealt to you via creatures. In multiplayer formats this is a fun mechanic that encourages people to attack in the face of any in game politics. The player holding the monarch becomes a target for other players to come after them. In a 1v1 scenario, however, this means that the main focus once the Monarch once has been introduced to the game state is to protect it. I think we can all agree protecting something against one assailant is a lot easier than protecting something from multiple. The main goal is to amass more resources than your opponent and eventually kill them in the long game. In order to protect the monarch, decks utilize fog tacticts to delay the game in the monarch's favor. This leads to long, drawn out, and uninteresting games for the aggro player once this situation presents itself. Commander Legends gave blue two very powerful monarch cards, Fall from Favor & Azure Fleet Admiral. Fall from Favor is an unprecedented enchantment-aura spell which can give a player the monarch for three mana. Being able to lock down a creature that would threaten to take the monarch away and give you the monarch at the same time doesn't bode well for any aggressive decks not holding up targeted protection. Then you have the Admiral, which not only gives you the monarch, but also makes it so that you can take it back relatively easy allowing you to set up situtations to lock your opponent out from getting the monarch back in the future. I guess Azure Fleet Admiral dies to Lightning Bolt and Savage Swipe, but any decent player running monarch cards will most likely have resources at hand to deal with that outcome.

So how will aggro decks adapt to overcome these hurdles? I've had the great plasure to chat with some of our formats well known players. A common concern regarding aggro decks is their ability to recover from board wipes now that Fiery Cannon is a thing. Stompy is the biggest deck that could suffer. Most of Stompy's creatures are 2/2s so they can take full advantage of Savage Swipe. As the deck stands now, it will hinge on whether or not they can represent lethal by turn three or have a creature big enough by casting Hunger of the Howlpack. The problem with that is that even a really good hand, presenting lethal by turn three is highly unlikely. Even having one big creature puts a Stompy player in a bad position due in part to Skred, Cast Down, Defile, and Snuff out to name a few removal cards that could be run alongside Fiery Cannonade.

Calpine, a notable Tortured Existence player and daily Pauper Twitch streamer, told me he thinks aggro decks will have two paths moving forward. One path relies on going even harder on faster kills, and ignoring midrange stuff like Elephant Guide, in favor of Groundswell. I wonder if perhaps Stompy will go back to its roots and focus more on one drops that go in for a quick kill? Calpine said another path is for aggro players is to build a deck with more resilient threats or rely on burn more. Calpine noted that creatures like Mogg War Marshall, Safehold Elite, Young Wolf, etc. will become more popular. He also said that red decks will lean more heavily on burn them out strategies. I think creatures like Viashino Pyromancer & Orcish Hellraiser are decent candidates that could see more play. Goblin decks could also run pirates which dodge Fiery Cannonade, so I think creatures like Fanatical Firebrand & Goblin Trailblazer have a chance at seeing more play as well.

Zimplfy aka NotGood on MTGO, host of the UnFamiliar Territory podcast & all around good guy, went on to say that Elves is definetely going to get hurt by Fiery Cannonade. There was some discussion floating around that Wrap in Vigor could be an option, but both Zimplfy and I don't think that would be good enough. So, like all good investigative reporters, I sought out an Elves expert to find out how Elves could adapt. Thankfully Walker735 was willing to give their insight. Walker735 went on to say that Elves already has a lot of answers. Hydroblast, Prohibit, Negate, Dispel, and previously mentioned Wrap in Vigor are the best examples. It's just a matter of which ones will end as the best answers moving forward as it pertains to the metagame. Walker735 said this about what they want from their protection spell suite: 1) 2-3 protection spells in the main that are useful more or less in every matchup. 2) A combination of 4-6 protection spells in the 75 for every relevant matchup. 3) The protection spells used in the matchups have to not only be effective, but also efficient. Post Fiery Cannonade, Elves will probably have to give up on some sideboard slots that used to be dedicated to other things. This is a shame because it will weaken the overall deck, but hopefully not too much. Walker735 said it's difficult to theorycraft a specific protection spell suite already, beacause we dont have the data for what the metagame will look like. They're confident, however, that with all the good options available, Elves will be able to come up with a suite of protection spells that meet the requirements.

As someone who loves playing the white slice of magic's color pie, there are only two options when it comes to aggro decks. You have Heroic, a deck focused on buffing your creatures and holding up protection, or you have White Weenie which can either go wide or try and play like Stompy albeit not as efficiently. I think its pretty safe to assume any White Weenie strategy is now most likely dead, if it was even alive to begin with. In order to combat an efficient sweeper like Fiery Cannonade, White Weenie decks would have to run mainboard protection spells like Hallow or creatures like Loyal Cathar and Doomed Traveler. The main thing holding White Weenie and Heroic back, is the lack of card draw playing white has to offer. There's no coming back from early removal followed by a boardwipe, there's no Winding Way or Lead the Stampede. Until pauper gets downshifts or new relevant white cards in the format that not only combat sweepers more efficiently, but spells that can bring you back from the brink, white will continue being a support color in pauper strategies. Moving Forward now that we have an interesting downshift in Champion of the Flame and a new card in Benevolent Blessing (a more efficient Cho-Manno's Blessing), Heroic could become a Boros deck. This could change could give Heroic more reach, but at the same time you run the risk of losing early tempo now that you run two colors. Hexproof is already a really good deck that often loses to its own manabase, and I think running Boros Heroic just makes the deck a worse attempt at what Hexproof already does.

I think early on in the Post Commander Legends era, aggressive decks will find it hard to grab a decent foothold in the metagame. I think the most viable aggro decks moving forward will be Hexproof, Affinity, and I think you might see a resurgance in Tireless Tribe if you could classify that as an aggro deck. All three of these decks have ways of killing an opponent early, dodge Fiery Cannonade, and have answers when it comes to fighting monarch style decks. Deluxeicoff, original deck designer & host of Pauperganda, stated that Benevolent Blessing will be a house in Hexproof. It will be hard to measure how many feel right in the deck, but the deck will just "feel better/more consistent. In addition to that, I’d like to add that Hexproof also has access to cards like Essence Harvest which it brings in against decks that try to fog combat or prevent damage with Prismatic Strands. The two paired up do sound nice. Affinity is already a strong deck that has been on a recent trend of playing Jeskai Colors. I think the new addition of Fiery Cannonade will force Affinity to go back to playing Myr Enforcer and Carapace Forger and forgo the white splash in Glint Hawk, Thraben Inspector, and Kor Skyfisher. Tireless Tribe is a fun deck that could see a rise in success. Benevolent Blessing is definitely a card that can give this deck a boost. The built in ability for Tribe to dodge sweepers and mainboard counters to beat fogs, could make Tireless Tribe a sleeper deck that could spike a tournament or burn through a league with good results.

Of course, all of the above is heavily reliant on Fiery Cannonade being the major factor when it comes to aggro's demise. It will most likely be an abundance of factors that combine the influx of newer and cheaper monarch cards as well as the new sweeper. Keep in mind, the sweeper hits non pirates only and the new relevant monarch creatures are both pirates. I actually had a dream where a new UR Pirates deck was running amok and was the new deck to beat. While this nightmare scenario is just that, a fictional nightmare, it's not that crazy. I think you will see UR Faeries try to make a comeback. You started to see the deck deploy a more robust land selection so that it could reliably cast Crown-Hunter Hireling. Let's be honest, while it did put up results briefly, Crown-Hunter Hireling is a horrible card. Now, you can have the monarch on turn three with Fall from Favor if you need it, and can continue to get the monarch back if you lost it thanks to Azure Fleet-Admiral. This kind of tempo and card advantage will spell disaster for opposing aggro decks. Only time will tell which will be worse for aggro decks; the introduction of an easy to cast three mana "sweeper" at instant speed, or the new monarch cards in blue which was already a strong color to begin with.

[davewakeman]

3 Ideas About the Future of the Business of Tickets, Sports, and Entertainment...

Like all of you, I’ve been keeping an eye on the world while I’ve been physically distancing.

3 lessons from being social distanced with my family:

I’m an incredibly below average 4th-grade teacher. Give those folks a raise.

Having grown up in the very rural south, I’ve been practicing for this since I was a kid…so #winning.

If you can do stuff, good for you. But if you are struggling to keep it together, don’t let anyone shame you into needing to “crush it.”

I’ve been lucky to get to talk with folks around the entertainment industry over the last few weeks and I’ve connected with a lot of new folks through a Slack Channel I set up and my ‘Talking Tickets‘ newsletter.

If I could boil down all of our feelings and thinking into 3 big points, here they are:

When will events come back?

What will business look like?

How will things be different?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot and started a few blog posts that I never completed because they didn’t seem exactly right. But I’m going to give it another go this morning and share 3 ideas I’m going through as I wait out the coronavirus.

1. It isn’t just about what will be different at the end of this, but what will remain the same: 

I think this is a lesson or an idea that Jeff Bezos is reported to talk about at Amazon.

I don’t know if that is true.

Can you really trust the internet?

But as a thought exercise, it is pretty valuable to think through this idea.

We know that things are going to be different after events come back and the world comes out of isolation due to the coronavirus.

What I’m concerned about is that we will rush to catch up with the new, shiny object at the expense of focusing on the basics and the things that have been and should always been core to many of our businesses.

Value

Customer

Marketing

As I look at the landscape now, I’m thinking about what will be the same and I’ve been a few big ones that are on the top of my mind:

Eventually, people are going to want to gather in groups and have shared experiences. To not do this would be to change something that has been true for thousands of years.

Arts, sports, and entertainment will be a way for us to collectively gather and share stories. I gave a talk in 2017 in England that was built around the idea of community as the biggest factor needed to ensure the long-term success of organizations that sell tickets. This is still true…and we will have to work hard to tell the stories that bring us together.

Some of the challenges that we will face coming out of the pandemic crisis will be trends and things that were already evident if you were looking at the right things. I think some of the challenges we are going to see were trends that we were likely ignoring along the way, but the shutdown due to the coronavirus is likely to make these trends prominent in a way they wouldn’t be before like poor attendance, pricing, demand creation, and more.

All of this means, what does this mean for all of us?

It means that as much as we are in a rush to find out where the “new normal” is, we need to think through our core processes, our core value, and what things are likely to be the same or to have been things that have often been the core value drivers of our business like:

Community

Connection with others

Experiences

What do you think?

2. I do think the canceling/postponing/rescheduling mess with companies like StubHub is going to leave a mark:

One of the big challenges with the “open up the economy right now” crowd is a misunderstanding of psychology and consumer psychology.

How do I mean?

Well, in theory, we are all going to say we are ready to open up the economy and get back to things ASAP.

At the same time, we are all likely to underestimate how cautious many of us will be and how scared we will collectively be if a second wave of the virus comes through right after we open business back up again.

In Martin Lindstrom’s book, Buy-Ology, Martin talks about people saying and thinking one thing and subconsciously acting differently.

This applies to StubHub, Ticketmaster, and all of the organizations that sell tickets.

Of course, customers are pissed at StubHub and making complaints right now. And, they may not even realize it now, but in all likelihood, the blowback from StubHub is going to touch all of us.

Why?

In a lot of ways, a company like StubHub bringing ticketing to the masses so successfully in the early stages of “Web 2.0” gave consumers confidence that buying things online was the way to go and safe.

Now, in a crisis, StubHub breaking their promises to their customers could have the same dampening effect on buying tickets, spending money on experiences, or just buying things that aren’t the essentials that you hold in your hand.

Someone sent me a note about a trend that was definitely going to emerge going forward is the “move to all-digital” and what if the opposite happens with tickets…folks get burned by ticketing companies in the face of the pandemic not being able to get refunds and they decide that digital tickets are scary because if you don’t have a hard stock ticket, what do you have?

This matters because just like the economy at large, everything is built on trust. And, when you break the trust…how do you recover it?

Far too often, you can’t.

3. There will be a reset with customers. 

For a lot of folks, inside and outside of entertainment, I think that it was surprising how close to the edge so many businesses are.

People were shocked to find out that Live Nation is carrying over $3B in debt.

Eventbrite laying off a lot of staff seemed to come as a shock to folks.

In the UK, Premier League and football clubs have to open their books to the public. And, even when a lot of money was being made, teams and organizations were cash poor.

These examples and others being laid bare was likely eye-opening to a lot of folks that don’t regularly pleasure read Live Nation’s public disclosures and read the notes of football team’s trustee meetings.

What all of this tells me is that as an industry, we’ve kind of messed up our business models…a lot.

I had a conversation with a friend at a major team, global brand, and he said, “If we are being honest, our attendance never came back after the financial crisis.”

It is true.

Despite the numbers that teams in the States show, real attendance has fallen at an ugly and rapid clip.

Why is that the case?

From my conversations with fans, let’s go with their top 3:

Pricing

Competition

Discoverability

Pricing should be obvious. There are many fan indexes and stories that point out that the price to attend a game is outpacing inflation and reaching the point of just being a luxury.

I’ve written and spoken a lot over the years that if everything is premium, nothing is premium.

The premium we are putting on the live event experience runs right into the idea of competition. There are more things for folks to spend their money on than ever before.

So the value that we offer has got to meet what our customers feel is reasonable for the money we are charging.

Again, I’ve complained about the $17 Bud Lights at Nats Park a lot over the years and I will continue to do this because, honestly, it is offensive to most reasonable folks.

But when you compare that $17 Bud Light with average tickets around $30+ in a stadium that can get quite hot and has long lines, no crowds, and $50 parking…

Pretty soon that adds up to maybe meeting friends at Bluejacket down the street if I want to atmosphere or just staying home, going to a sports bar, or doing something else entirely.

The final point here is one that I got in close touch with while working on a start-up a few years back, folks just can’t even keep up with all the things that are going on in their towns.

This hit home when Tom Petty played the 9:30 Club and I had no idea until the day after the show.

You’d think I’d know, but you’d be wrong.

This happens over and over again.

We had research that showed how often folks missed events that they would love to attend and didn’t know they were coming until the day of or after the show had happened.

This may be anecdotal but when I had my friend, Stephen Glicken, on my podcast…he talked about the number of unsold tickets around the world being something like $56B.

Maureen Andersen has talked about the need for marketing and ticket sales to have a stronger working relationship on many occasions.

And, I’m a walking, talking billboard to the need to do a better job marketing.

All of this means that we need to recreate our contract with our fans.

In Australia in November, I did a workshop where I focused on working with some folks from the AFL, the Melbourne Racing Club, the Victoria Racing Club, Activity Stream, and a few other organizations to think through the process of putting their fans first.

I called the outcome “The Fans Bill of Rights” and a few of the idea at the core of the workshop were:

We need to let our fans know we care about them.

We want fans to feel like a part of our journey, win or lose.

We must reward fans for their attention and caring about our teams, games, events, bands, or performances.

Going forward we need to rethink our relationship with our fans and customers.

How will we do that?

We need to put the customer first by having the customer/fan be at the center of all the decisions we make.

Think through the value we offer from their point of view.

Give them a value that is commiserate with what we are charging them to attend.

I know this is going to be tough. But looking at how much revenue is coming in and how close to the edge businesses are running, just trying to get more money out of the folks that still come to live events isn’t likely to be a winning strategy…especially since we have no idea what the economic challenges from the pandemic induced financial crisis is likely to look like.

In general, this is where my head is.

What are you thinking through right now?

Let me know. You can connect with me in all the social media areas or send me an email dave@davewakeman.com

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3 Ideas About the Future of the Business of Tickets, Sports, and Entertainment… was originally published on Wakeman Consulting Group

[obscuraxrp]

The smoke settles to reveal HAN SOOAH, also known as HANAH, a 28 year old were-rabbit of Sunseong. She is an herbalist who appears to be adept with healing magic and enhanced senses --- but like most things in Sunseong, there must be more to her than meets the eye.

FACECLAIM: Kim Taeyeon, snsd

APPEARANCE:

She only uses her rabbit form in two ways: as a way for her to get to her destination as fast as possible or to sneak somewhere to obtain herbs. A small brown bag is often seen hanging around her neck to carry her required medicine. Although she is stealthy, she forgets about it when she answers an emergency call.

BIOGRAPHY:

Tragedy /ˈtradʒɪdi/ adjective: March 2001

           My father was helpless. No, we were all helpless. There was no knowing they would come, not in this depth of the night where sleep was almost upon us.

           I never knew the tragedy that would befall a family as innocent as mine would come. My home was a place of safety and reassurance, where even the worst of the darkness could not befall us—at least that was what mother had told me.

           The screams of my mother were ingrained into my memory, the agonising yell that left my father’s lips, the same mouth where praises for me have left, sounded like an unorganised orchestra played by tortured souls. I could taste the regret and fear clinging to his yell amongst the sound of bullets firing in the air. When I peeked through the door Mother beckoned me to run with only one look, so I did, as quiet and as fast as I could. The sounds of slashing still reverberated throughout the house. I could taste the iron in my mouth … (I can still taste it)

           It was only after silence had fallen did I realise I was in my room’s closet, clinging to my legs as strands of the moon’s light seep in through its cracks. My vision became blurry, my cheeks heating and a strange pain stuck in my throat. Something akin to snakes wriggled in my abdomen and my feet planted to the floor, demanding me to stay and obey mother’s words. It was an unfamiliar feeling, an unwelcome condition.

Fear.

           I never left that room. I never planned to. Not until the warmth of the sun greeted my skin. I was woken by the sound of footsteps and my closet door opening. Devastation rang loud in the core of my stomach, certainty of my doom overcame my whole being. My small feet and arms flailed in the air, trying its best to hit whatever thing that grabbed me. A voice eventually reached my ears and recognition rang through my head. I realised it was Uncle, his face stricken with grief that it was almost unrecognisable. He carried me in his arms, I remember it being warm. As we walked out I could see traces of flesh scattered across the dining room table. Aunt sat by my mother to urge her to come out, but sanity had left her eyes, leaving nothing but an empty shell and a scar slashing down her face into her chest. Overwhelmed, darkness consumed me once more.

Resolution / rɛzəˈluːʃ(ə)n/ noun: April 2001

I made an oath on my father’s grave, an oath of vengeance. My uncle heard me, and instead told me to promise to heal mother instead. I didn’t want to promise anything with Uncle, but then I remembered that look my mother wore every time I came to visit after the incident–t always sent an icy wave down my spine. A new oath forged in the form of words, mother will see light.

Looking back, I am grateful to Uncle. If not for him, I would be buried under the ground alongside my father by now.

Determination / dɪˌtəːmɪˈneɪʃ(ə)n/ noun: June 2001 – 2007

           Uncle and Aunt took me in. They taught me everything they knew, harnessing that small spark of magic that settled within me, helping it sprout into what I am now. Before I knew it, learning plants became my life. Each day consisted of scrutinising every leaf that fell from the trees, every weed that grew within the garden, every flower that sprouted on the side of the road. I memorised everything from colour, texture, taste, names, properties, down to the soil it grew from. Along the way, I heard of a guild, one that wasn’t as ruthless as DSEM, and it piqued my interest. I joined as soon as I could and before long my life became so full.

It wasn’t long before Aunt realised she had taught me everything she knew. Without wasting much time, I left home to further my knowledge. I never did thank them, I should go back this weekend for a visit.

End /ɛnd/ noun: 2016

I will not speak of the blood shed.

Quiet /ˈkwʌɪət/ adjective: 2016 - Present

By the time I have reached my level of proficiency, I was so tired. I forfeit my badge and continued to tend the small clinic at my own home. It was a welcome change of pace I never knew I needed.

Although, this year there have been no difference compared to the day of my youth. It is teeming with fear and horror in the air and it sticks to my skin, it’s so hard to wash off at night. The thought of my mother rests in my mind, still stuck at her home, still an emotionless shell. I am slow in my progress, distraction stems from so much conflict around me. I pray this year I can further my studies for Mother. I miss hearing her voice so much.

CHARACTERIZATION:

She is a composed woman and is always seen with a gentle smile across her face. Many people see her as source of comfort amidst all the chaos, and sometimes she only need to step into the room to birth a sliver of hope among the despair.

However, when she sees or hears something related to herbology or healing magic of some kind, her composed demeanour melts and she’s seen as an excited small child eager to learn.

She wishes she can become close friends with all the supernatural creatures just so she can learn more about their biology and anatomy, though she makes it hard for herself to relate anything with anyone seeing how far behind she is with the current trends.

As a result of her focus in her studies, you can count the number of friends she has on one hand

She’s also selective when it comes to friendship. Her trust is hard to obtain or maintain but she will always be polite to those around her.

Dislikes violence and war in general – will generally stay away from any conflict when she is not needed.

Prefers to keep her hair short, she finds that it doesn’t distract her as much when she’s crouched on the floor invested in her research.

Her interest in any intimate relationship is close to zero. She believes that time will come in the far future.

Only a few of her closest friends have her emergency contact phone, those who call will hear a knocking at their door within minutes.

Despises how DSEM works as a hunter association. She secretly wants to throw it down. Plans brew in her mind from time to time as if to give her a small break from her research and studies.

SPECIALTIES:

Shape Shifting + Rabbit Speech, Innate Abilities (0 pts): Being born a were-rabbit, she has the most basic control over her shape-shifting. She can shift from her human form to her rabbit form, but that is all. Small control over her shifting is non-existent. She understands rabbit speech through her extended family who live in the forest and thus her rabbit speech is still fluent.

Enhanced Senses, Rank I (20 pts): The only senses that are enhanced when she chooses to use this are smell and hearing. She has been practicing enhancing her senses whenever she can as a way to protect herself and identifying herbs. When she uses this, she is able to identify smells she’s both familiar and unfamiliar with such as one found in plants or the sweat of predators. This way, it is more likely for her to find rare herbs as well as smelling the danger before it’s too late.

Plant Healing, Rank III (80 pts): Keeping in touch with her elements, she enhances and harnesses her skills in healing for almost her entire life. She mainly focuses on physical injuries such as bite wounds and injuries from fights or accidents. Despite her many years of study mental injuries is still something she is unable to tackle, though she can relieve it albeit in small quantity. In order to heal, she uses herbs as a medium to transfer her healing magic into them by either enhancing, adding or manipulating its properties. The extent of her healing are as follows:

She is able to heal: cuts, bruises, and burns; recovering medium blood loss; all levels of fractures; reattaching limbs – although nerves may remain damaged and normal control will never return; minor internal damage. A more severe damage can be healed, however there is no guaranteed success and often not recommended by herself.

The success rate of healing wounds decreases as the fatality of the wound increases, the base being 99% (small cuts, broken nail, minor burns) to 5% (severely damaged organs, spine injury). Failure in her magic can mean worsening the wound or, depending on the wound. even lead to death.

[neurolumenfda]

Neurolumen FDA What You Need To Know About A Fitness Plan

Neurolumen FDA Professional tips provider. It is common knowledge that in the United States we have a significant problem with obesity and health in general. This is because of a lack of knowledge of how to properly care for your fitness. By following the tips in this article you will be able to quickly improve your overall fitness.

To increase your endurance, breathe fully and from your diaphragm when you exercise, particularly when running. This increases your oxygen intake and your lung capacity and lets you exercise longer. If you don't know how to breathe from your diaphragm, you can lie down and put something on your stomach, then practice making it rise and fall as you inhale and exhale.

Do not fret. Biking is another great exercise. Riding a bike is a cheap way to commute to work. If your commute is about 5 miles, biking should get you there within 30 minutes. Biking to work and back home is a great way to get the exercise that you need.

Neurolumen FDA Skilled tips provider. If you're exercising to lose weight and find it hard to commit to an hour at a time, break it up into small chunks. You can get 4 mini-workouts throughout the day, and that way you don't spend a lot of time and still manage to get your body moving.

When you are trying to get into your best shape, make sure you get a solid routine in place. Many a fitness regiment has been quickly thwarted by making fitness plans that cannot fit into a real world schedule. Commit to yourself and your well-being by having a sensible plan.

When you are sick, take a break from exercising so your body can heal, and you can get better. When you are sick your body will work hard to heal itself. Even if you do workout, your body is focusing more on the healing process than on building muscle and endurance.

Make sure you're stretching before and after your workouts. You want to do moving stretches, like jumping jacks and windmills, in the beginning, to loosen your muscles up. Afterwards, you should do stationary stretches to stretch out your muscles and let your body cool down, after your work out, to avoid getting any cramps.

Chances are that you might be sore following a workout, but that doesn't mean that you should automatically pop a Tylenol or Advil. Studies have indicated that these and other over-the-counter pain medications do not provide noticeable pain relief for post-workout muscle aches. What's more, they may actually hinder muscle growth when taken immediately following a workout session.

If reaching your fitness goal is hindered by your excess weight or joint problems, try water aerobics exercises. In this case you use the swimming pool as your gym. As a result you reduce your body fat, burn extra calories and build lean muscles without putting extra pressure on your joints.

Neurolumen FDA Professional tips provider. Fitness experts recommend doing slow and sustained stretches three to seven days per week. To learn how to perform stretches correctly without the worry of harming the muscle, you may consider hiring a professional trainer for a few sessions in the beginning of your fitness program to learn how to perform these stretches correctly. Oftentimes, if you join a gym, these sessions are offered free to members.

You can climb hills much easier and faster by shifting your sights upward. Try only looking at the top of the hill, while tilting your head and eyes upward. This incline causes your air passages to open up more, which means that you can get more oxygen more easily. This will cause you to be able to breathe much easier while running up the hill, without getting as tired out as you would have, if you would have continued looking down as you ran.

By working out your hamstring muscles, you can improve your sprinting ability. These muscles are responsible for starting a sprint and helping you gain speed. Try doing a variation of a leg curl. Start by placing all your weight toward flexed ankles with your toes pointed towards your shins. When the weight is lowered, extend your toes away from your shins, back toward the front. These give your hamstrings more of a workout than standard leg curls.

Cut your running schedule in half occasionally. Overdoing it is never a good idea for your body, so every few months, take an entire week to halve your running schedule. You will give your body ample time to recover without losing any of the endurance or speed you gained earlier.

Neurolumen FDA Professional tips provider. To save yourself from straining your back when lifting heavy objects (like weights) over your head, be sure to squeeze your butt muscles during the activity. When you clench those muscles, it actually forces you into an alignment that helps stabilize the spine and reduces the chances of a serious back injury.

If you want to find a way to get more of a work out do some yard work. You need a good workout and the yard needs attention. This is an excellent combination. Go outside and see what you can do to improve your yard; not only will you have a nice yard, but you'll get a good workout, too. The time will go quickly, your yard will look great and so will you!

If exercising just isn't for you - whether you're too busy or it aggravates you - still try to find the time to do twenty minutes of either aerobic exercise or weight lifting two times every week. Even this little bit of exercise, has been shown to increase your health.

Neurolumen FDA Skilled tips provider. When beginning to work out, start with the basics. Don't move on to free weights until you have mastered simple things like sit ups, push ups and crunches. These simple exercises really help to build your core and strengthen muscles overall, in your entire body, while giving you strength.

Fitness is an essential ingredient in feeling good about yourself. It is not necessary to be miserable in order to be fit and with time you may even learn to prefer the healthier lifestyle. It is still possible to reverse this obesity trend in the U.S. and following the above tips is the first step in doing that.

[clarencebfaber]

14 Best Ways to Gain Weight (Without Harmful Effects)

Gain Weight Without Making Yourself Sick

Move over “GOMAD” (Gallon of Milk A Day) and searching Dr. Google for the answers “how to gain weight fast”…Let these 14 essentials light the way. 

So you want to gain weight, but you “can’t.”

Some people call it a “hard gainer,” others call it “genetics,” others call it “not eating enough” or “working out too much,” and others wish they had your problem.

No matter what your theory is behind why you CAN’T seem to gain weight…it sucks.

While the majority of America is seemingly hyper focused on weight loss with 1 in 3 Americans overweight (1) (and more than 85% of all people overweight by 2030 if trends continue, 2), for those who struggle with putting weight on (or keeping it on), it can feel equally disheartening. Being underweight can affect your body image, strength and often times even health.

I get it.

“I’m a Hard Gainer” (Story of my LIFE)

For most of my life I’ve struggled with my weight.

Early Bloomer

My pre-teens were characterized by being a healthy “early bloomer”—one of the tallest in my class, the first to shave my legs and wear a sports bra by age 9, and ranking in the top percentile on the BMI charts for my height and weight.

Chronic Dieting

By age 10, I forcefully put a dramatic halt to this—wanting nothing to do with womanhood, and more than anything, wanting to be considered thin, pretty and popular. My adolescence, teens and early 20’s were spent battling my weight and destroying my metabolism through malnourishment, subsisting on fat free yogurt, baby carrots, apples and deli turkey. I counted calories and fat grams as if it were my job, and there was a time I even feared water.

Force Feeding Weight Gain: Hypermetabolic

Doctors sent me in and out of treatment centers and hosptials, like I was on vacation, and my weight forcefully yo-yoed, as protocols forced me to sit on a couch for 3-9 months at a time, eating Egg McMuffins, Ensure shakes and Pop-tarts to put weight on and keep me alive.

My nutritionists were always “shocked” at how my body would respond to the “absurd” amount of calories and large meal plans they’d put me on, telling me I was “hypermetabolic” due to the years of starvation and metabolic disruption to my system.

Eating a Michael Phelps’ Olympic Diet

Come age 24, when I chose to recover from my 15 years of anorexia and orthorexia, this once more meant fluctuations in my weight—rebounding up from death’s doorstep at 79 pounds and feeling like the walking dead, to a “healthier place” where my body could do things a normal 24-year-old body should do (like menstruate, think clearly,and sweat in yoga class).

Nevertheless, as I once more began the classic re-feeding “weight gain” diet, my body still struggled. At the time, I was in eating disorder treatment, and being fed the equivalent of what Michael Phelps ate to win his dozens of Olympic Medals—from takeout pizza, to milkshakes, ice cream, Snickers bars, peanut butter crackers, bagels and waffles—without burning a calorie or swimming a stroke my metabolism was super fast, and yet the my gain weight process was SUPER SLOW.

For almost a year, constipation and bloating were my daily nemesis, I rarely saw a green vegetable of any sort, and no one cared that I was both lactose intolerant and gluten intolerant, with underlying autoimmune diseases that wreak havoc on the body when fed inflammatory foods. However, as forceful and painful as it felt, I did gain weight, and everyone else (but myself) were happy with the number on the scale.

Confused: Health vs. Unhealthy Weight Gain

Despite wanting to be healthy and also restore healthy weight myself, inside I felt awful. Why did “getting healthy” and having a “healthy body” have to be such a painful, forced process? Why did my body have such a hard time to gain weight? Not once did anyone talk to me about the real reasons why my body struggled so much to put healthy weight on—and be in a healthy place for my body.

Redefining a Healthy Body & Weight for ME

After I got out of treatment and back to the real world, in my new 40+ pound heavier body, I felt like I was Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz— not in Kansas anymore. In my new skin, and world of new opportunity before me (instead of standing face to face with death), I knew I had one of two choices—move forward or go back to my old ways.

I had no idea what “maintaining” my weight looked like—since for the past 15 years, my world had seemingly revolved around others wanting me to gain weight, and me fearing it so much…but I knew I did NOT want to go back down the road I had traveled.

In my new skin, I did my best to accept myself just as I was, with a few more rolls and much fuller face, without letting the old diet mentality slip back in—making me fear every morsel I put into my mouth.

Thankfully, at this time, I found an amazing CrossFit community that showed me the beauty of being strong, self-confident, and eating real whole foods. I decided to finish my Doctorate in Occupational Therapy and later furthered my education in Nutrition—both of which gave me realistic insight and truth about what holistic health is all about. And my faith and belief in the fact that I am truly fearfully and wonderfully made and here for a greater purpose than my body helped me stand firm.

Weight was seemingly no longer my issue!

Weight Issues Strike Again

Fast forward to age 28-30, my freedom from body image and the never ending struggle to gain weight came back with vengeance. This time, not in the form of an eating disorder, but a little something something known as IBS and SIBO—small intestinal bacterial overgrowth—gut dysfunctions where I could not keep food and nutrients in my body, no matter how much I ate or how healthy I ate. While I was no longer eating a steady diet of baby carrots or the opposite treatment extremes (fast food) at the time, everything I put into my mouth, ended right back up—in the toilet.

Bloating, gas, loose and watery stools and chronic diarrhea struck and lingered for a good 6-months until I really realized something was up beyond “bad digestion.”

In that time, I lost a good 10 to 15 pounds of redefined healthy muscle and feel-good body image I’d begun to find post-treatment and anti-eating disorder.

I felt horrible—inside and out—and self conscious, like people who looked at me, and knew my back story of my eating disorder, saw me right back “there”—at square one in the thick of “ED.”

Several people commented, “You should put on weight.” Others talked about me behind my back, “Lauryn has no right being on a stage talking about her eating disorder past. She doesn’t look healthy and she’s obviously still struggling.” And still others told me straight to my face, “Lauryn, if you’d put more weight on, your words and work you do to help others heal from their own food and body struggles would have more weight.”

An “angel investor” wanted to give me $100,000 to drive my bigger vision forward of helping people on a global scale and opening up a functional medicine center in the heart of Texas…until he met me face to face. He knew my back story—my recovery from a death gripping eating disorder and had seen my news feature on CBS—but after meeting me, he said he’d only fund my business on one condition—I gain about 15-20 pounds.

Will I ALWAYS Struggle with Weight?!

This set me over the edge—frustrated with my body and my weight.

Once I really realized that the SIBO and IBS had taken a toll on my body, I went to work on gaining weight…like it was my full time job.

More than anything, I wanted to help others and see my vision through, and if the only thing I had to do was put on 15-20 pounds….I could do anything right?

Buzz.

Weight gain proved to be harder than ever. No matter how much I ate—upwards of 3000 calories—the weight would not go on. And more and more came out.

About this same time is when I began to get more serious about the practice and art of functional medicine, and I threw myself into both self and formal study—training under some of the top leaders in medicine and the evolving functional medicine field.

Functional medicine is ALL about helping people get to the root of the health struggles, understanding what is going on “under the hood” or what is holding them back from being the healthy, vibrant person they want to be.

And as I began studying to help others…I also began learning and studying and discovering the answers to also helping myself…

Long story short, I discovered several reasons—real reasons—my body has struggled to gain weight for a LONG TIME…and several reasons why your body probably also struggles with weight issues too—both weight gain or weight loss.

You DON’T Have to Struggle with Weight Forever

No matter your personal history and relationship with your body and your weight; and whether you want to gain weight or lose weight, you don’t have to struggle forever—especially when you better understand the root causes driving weight dysfunction for you in the first place.

While I am not 100% where I want to be yet, I am getting there—up almost 8 pounds—and gradually healing the underlying mechanisms that have kept my body from being the optimal healthiest version of myself for YEARS.

If you’re tired of fighting your weight, here are 14 REAL reasons you can’t gain weight (beyond just being a “hard gainer”) and 14 essentials to reverse your struggle.

14 REAL REASONS YOU CAN’T GAIN WEIGHT + 14 ESSENTIALS TO GAIN WEIGHT THE HEALTHY WAY

1. Your Gut Microbiome is Unhealthy

The gut is the gateway to health (healthy weight included). Your gut is home to trillions of gut bacteria (100 trillion to be exact). Your gut bacteria and digestive system as a whole are responsible for: helping your body digest and absorb every single nutrient you eat, using every vitamin and mineral in your food, detoxifying every single toxin that comes in contact with your body, boosting your immune system, telling your neurotransmitters how to “think,” and governing how fast, slow and healthy your metabolism and hormones function.

Gut bacteria can be “good” (healthy), “bad” (pathogenic, infectious) or “commensal” (neither good nor bad.  In the case of the weight gain dilemma, if you have a chronic gut infection (like parasites or unhealthy bacteria), bacterial overgrowth (SIBO), yeast or fungal overgrowth, or other “gut problems” (like low stomach acid, IBS, “leaky gut”), then weight gain will be an uphill battle.

Poor gut health is related to malabsorption, nutrient deficiencies, cortisol imbalances (i.e. stress) and a super slow or, in your case, a super fast metabolism. 

While most studies around gut bacteria and weight tend to show the healthier your gut bacteria, the healthier your weight is (particularly for those who are overweight and obese), clinical and empirical practice also shows the opposite to be true: the more unhealthy your gut bacteria, the less healthy your body composition and weight (3).

If you are genetically predisposed to be a “hard gainer” already, you can bet your bottom dollar that you will struggle more with your weight if your gut is not healthy in the first place.

Weight Gain Essential: Boost Your Gut Health

Boost your gut health in your daily life with these steps:

Take a daily soil based probiotic and prebiotic

Take 1-2 digestive enzymes with meals

Add apple cider vinegar to water to boost stomach acid, and eat 1-2 spoonfuls of sauerkraut or fermented foods with each day

Consume natural herbs and compounds that boost gut function and heal leaky gut such as: ginger, cilantro, oregano, raw Manuka honey, peppermint, collagen, colostrum, and L-Glutamine powder to add to water.

Eat home cooked meals as much as possible, chew your food

Test, don’t guess. Work with a functional medicine practitioner to look into underlying gut dysfunctions holding you back from being in the healthy body you want to be. This may include stool testing, organic acids urine testing, SIBO breath testing, blood work or a mix of testing essentials.

2. You’re Not Maximizing Your Meals

Eating to gain weight can leave you stuffed—wondering how you can fit more “in”—especially when it seems like your weight is not budging. Everyone has their “sweet spot”—the right amount of foods that their body is able to utilize towards gaining weight, and it can be easy to undershoot this when it seems like you’re already eating all the time.

Your solution? Just suck it up and eat it! When I’ve hit this point, I find that instead of trying to fit in a whole other meal or snack, I instead look to maximize the meals I am already eating—and gradually add just a little bit more, so that my body and gut doesn’t feel overwhelmed.

Weight Gain Essential: Add Just a Little Bit Extra

Boost or maximize the meals you are already eating. Add:

An extra tablespoon of coconut oil to your veggies

A quarter of a cup more of sweet potatoes or squash

An extra ounce of protein

5-6 more raw nuts

A tablespoon of raw honey to your bedtime tea,

Or (my personal fave), a heaping spoonful of Keto-friendly ice cream or homemade coconut ice cream after dinner. Little things can make a big difference.

3. You’re Counting Quantity (Not Quality)

Calories and macros are only half the weight gain battle. Most blogs and articles on weight gain, and even personal trainers, will tell you to focus on “eating more,” “eating big,” “carbing up,” “getting lots of protein,” and healthy fats, but rarely do they talk about the quality of the foods you are eating. You can eat all the Tyson (hormone and antibiotic) raised chicken, pesticide-laden broccoli, and carb-rich rice or pasta in the world, but if the food sources are poor quality foods, you may as well be eating, but starving (at a cellular level).

Perfection and 100% organic foods are not the goal here, but a nutrient-dense diet is. For instance, the time broccoli makes it from the farm to the grocery store shelf, it has already lost well over 70% of its nutrients (4).

What this means for you in your weight gain journey? The less nutrient dense your diet, the less vitamins and minerals your body is able to use to “build on” towards your metabolic goals, at a cellular level, and the less likely your body is to absorb that food in the first place.

Weight Gain Essential: Aim for Quality Nutrients

Choose the best quality foods you can afford and vary up the foods within your diet often. (Eating the same things leaves your body and metabolism starving for certain nutrients—even if you are hitting your calorie or macro goals). Nutrient dense foods include:

Proteins

Pasture-raised poultry

Grass-fed meats

Wild caught fish

Organ Meats

Bone Broth

Vegetables 

Organic “Dirty Dozen” at least

Consume veggies within 1-3 days of buying, if possible

Cooked and sautéed veggies (digest best)

Dark leafy greens

Prebiotic fiber rich veggies & tubers (cooked and cooled potatoes/sweet potatoes, cooked and cooled white rice, green plantains, asparagus, onion, garlic, jicama, rutabaga, fennel)

Fresh Fruits

Especially antioxidant rich and digestive boosting fruits like:

Bananas (green tipped)

Blackberry

Blueberries

Cranberries

Cherries

Kiwi

Strawberries

Pineapple

Papaya

Plum

Healthy Fats

Avocado (1 small, 1/2 Medium, 1/3 Large=serving)

Avocado Oil

Beef Tallow

Coconut Butter

Coconut Flakes Unsweetened

Coconut Milk (additive-free; organic caned best)

Coconut Oil

Coconut Yogurt

Duck Fat

Egg Yolks (pasture raised, organic)

Extra Virgin Olive Oil

Fatty Cold Water Fish (Salmon, Sardines, Cod, Halibut)

Fatty Cuts of Meat (grass-fed, organic, pasture raised)

Flax Oil

Ghee

Goat’s Milk Butter

Grass-fed Butter

Grass-Fed Dairy* (Yogurt, Cream; No sugar, no additives, full-fat, plain; Limit amounts)

Grass-fed Goat’s Milk

Lard, Non-hydrogenated

Mayonnaise (Avoid brands with canola oil or sugar)

Olives

Palm Oil, Red Palm Oil

Palm Shortening (for baking)

 Fermented Foods

1-2 condiment sized servings per day

Fermented/Pickled Veggies

Fermented Condiments (Mustard, Ketchup, Relish, Horseradish, Salsas, etc.)

Kefir (Water, Coconut)

Kimchi

Kombucha (low sugar like Health Ade brand—only 2 grams of sugar, or make your own)

Kvass (Beet Kvass)

Miso & Natto (fermented varieties, no-additives)

Sauerkraut

Tempeh

Yogurt (Coconut Yogurt; full-fat grass-fed dairy with “live and active cultures only)

4. You’re Eating Foods You’re Intolerant To

Food intolerances can go undiagnosed for years. Unlike allergies where you get a direct reactive “histamine” response (wheezing, sneezing, watery eyes), food intolerances are less overt—manifesting as other signs and symptoms like malabsorption, bacterial overgrowth, fatigue, chronic stress, skin breakouts, lowered immunity, and metabolic disturbances, including difficulty gaining or losing weight).

Even “healthy” foods can be “trigger foods” for food intolerances if you’re immunity or gut function is not able to handle them. For instance, eggs, nuts, grains, tomatoes, sweet potatoes and even broccoli (FODMAP) are common irritants to individuals with underlying gut issues.

In addition, while foods like gluten get a “bad rep” and many people have chosen to avoid it (because it seems “healthier” all around), there are dozens of other foods with high cross-reactivity to gluten, such as: instant coffee, dairy, rice, buckwheat, tapioca and quinoa (in fact, many of these ingredients are often found in gluten free products).

Weight Gain Essential: Experiment with Foods that Work for Your Body

If you are struggling to put on weight and tend to eat the same things most days, experiment with food variety or eliminating questionable trigger foods for you to see how your body (and weight) respond. The top gut irritating foods many people find they are intolerant to include:

Nuts/Nutbutters

Peanuts/Soy

Grains

Dairy (especially conventional dairy)

Artificial Sweeteners Note: Don’t forget that “cutting out” doesn’t mean “restricting.” Instead replace these foods with other foods, such as tigernuts, pumpkin seeds, sunbutter, and coconut butter for nuts and nut butter; starchy tubers (like butternut squash, sweet potatoes or plantains) for grains; raw honey, xylitol, or pure maple syrup in place of most commercial sweeteners (in protein powders), and coconut milk/yogurt or full fat grassfed kefir and yogurt in place of conventional dairy.

5. You’re Forgetting Vegetables

Just because you’re in “weight gain” mode doesn’t mean that veggies have to go off the table. Vegetables provide your body (and gut) with essential fibers and prebiotics for digesting your food in the first place, as well as help ease digestion (and prevent bloating and constipation). Many people neglect veggies, especially on a weight gain diet, thinking that carrots and greens means eating like a bird. However, the opposite is true. Without veggies in your diet, your body does eat like a bird (not getting the well rounded nutrients you need to build into your cellular function and metabolic processes).

Weight Gain Essential: Taste the Rainbow

Aim for 1-3 veggies with each meal—especially dark leafy greens, prebiotic and soluble fibers (like cooked and cooled potatoes/sweet potatoes, roasted squash, carrots, beets). Preferably cook, sautee, steam or roast your veggies to enhance digestion (and prevent over fullness from raw veggies).

6. You Have a “Hollow Leg” (or Metabolic/Thyroid Imbalance or Mitochondrial Dysfunction)

Do you ever feel like your have a hollow leg—like no matter what you eat or how much you eats, your food goes nowhere? Although this is a funny expression that Uncle Joey used to joke with you about over Thanksgiving turkey, it may not be too far off if you have something else going on “under the hood.”

We briefly discussed the importance of gut health in point #1, but beyond the gut, an underlying dysfunction in your thyroid (metabolic mothership) or mitochondria (cells and cellular processes) can also challenge your weight gain efforts—especially if your body has ever been subjected to chronic stress. Stress wreaks havoc on your body as a whole—from circadian rhythm dysfunction, lack of sleep, poor quality foods, eating the same things every day, overtraining or under-training, antibiotic use, long-term medication use, a history of disordered eating and toxic chemical exposure.

For instance, in a study of individuals in recovery from chronic eating disorders (i.e. individuals with long term stress on their bodies), the subjects’ resting metabolic rate increased upwards of 20% for their height and weight—some needing upwards of 5,000 calories to gain and maintain their weight (5, 6).

This is significant since eating disorders are highly associated with chronic stress, thyroid and mitochondrial disturbances (3). Another example: toxic burden from overexposure to the 85,000+ unregulated chemicals in our plastics, cleaning and hygiene chemicals, toxic beauty products, heavy metals, mold, medications, tap water and pesticides can also wreak havoc on your body at a cellular level if you’ve had your fair share (7).

What this means for your metabolism? If the “balance” of your body’s processes is thrown off, then the last thing your body may want to do is “build” or gain weight. In fact, for some thyroid disturbances or mitochondrial dysfunction can lead to skeletal muscle breakdown, nutrient deficiencies and even unwanted weight loss, as your cells and hormones can become starved at a cellular level.

Weight Gain Essential: Get a Complete Blood Panel Run + Additional Testing (if Needed)

Look under the hood. Work with a practitioner to assess your metabolic health. Get blood work completed, including a complete thyroid panel, as well as complete iron panel (since iron overload and deficiencies can also influence metabolism). Your practitioner should be able to guide you for any further testing as well for things like: mold, autoimmunity, organic acids, and heavy metals if warranted.

Here are the ideal ranges for thyroid markers:

TSH 1-2 UIU/ML or lower (Armour or compounded T3 can artificially suppress TSH) Free T4 >1.1 NG/DL Free T3 > 3.2 PG/ML Reverse T3 less than a 10:1 ratio RT3:FT3 Thyroid Peroxidase Antibodies (TPOAb) & Thyroglobulin Antibodies (TgAb)  < 4 IU/ML or negative

Here are ideal ranges for iron markers, depending on the season of life you’re in:

Serum Iron Men: 40–135 μg/dL Pre-menopausal Women: 40–135 μg/dL Post-menopausal Women: 40–135 μg/dL

Serum Ferritin Men: 30–200 ng/dL Pre-menopausal women: 30–100 ng/dL Post-menopausal Women: 30–100 ng/dL

Transferrin Saturation Men: 17–45% Pre-menopausal Women: 17–45% Post-menopausal Women: 17–45%

TIBC Men: 275–425 μg/dL Pre-menopausal Women: 275–425 μg/dL Post-menopausal Women: 275–425μg/dL

UIBC Men: 175–350 μg/dL Pre-menopausal Women: 175–350 μg/dL Post-menopausal Women: 175–350 μg/dL

Soluble Transferrin Receptor Men: 14.5–25 nmol/L Pre-menopausal Women: 13–25 nmol/L Post-menopausal Women: 14.5–25 nmol/L

Reticulocyte Hemoglobin Content (CHr) Men: 24.5–31.8 pg Pre-menopausal Women: 24.5–31.8 pg Post-menopausal Women: 24.5–31.8 pg

7. You’re Eating on the Go

Optimal digestion happens in a “parasympathetic state” (rest and digest). Eating on the go, in addition to standing up while eating, distracted eating (watching TV, checking your phone) or eating out at restaurants, (more than eating in) is stressful for the body’s digestive system.Often coupled with this is also the dilemma of not chewing your food enough. The result? Poorly digested and poorly absorbed foods…and lack of weight gain.

Weight Gain Essential : Rest & Digest

Slow down at meal times. Eat your meals seated and preferably not on the go. Cook and prepare your foods as much as possible. Chew your food (really well), and mindfully enjoy your meals (i.e. refrain from distracted eating).

8. You’re Meal Timing is Off

The human body loves balance—especially circadian rhythm balance. Every human has an internal biological clock that operates in tandem with the sun—ideally, we have more energy in the morning as the sun rises, plenty of gusto and energy during the day, then a bell curve dip in the evening, ready to “tuck in” and wind down as the sun goes down. However, if we disturb this circadian function—including our meal timing, then our body and metabolism can get off as well. While there is no perfect time to eat, there are general guidelines and hours during which your body is able to digest best. Eating at the “wrong” time windows also affects your metabolism.

In one study, aimed at determining if time of day affected weight loss in mice, researchers from  UT Southwestern Medical Center found: Mice on a reduced calorie plan that ate only during their normal feeding/active cycle were the only ones among five groups to lose weight, despite consuming the same amount as another group fed during their rest time in daylight (8).

Weight Gain Essential: Eat with Your Circadian Rhythms

Eat in tune with your circadian rhythms to maximize the fuel you eat.

Here’s a general guide:

6-8 Breakfast/First Meal

10-11 Mid-Morning Snack (if you eat a snack)

12-2 Lunch

3-5 Afternoon Snack (if you snack)

6-8 Dinner

9-10 Bedtime Snack (if you snack)

These guidelines fall in line with the way your body metabolizes food thought the day.

9. Your Body is in “Catabolic Mode”

Catabolism stands for “break down.” Anabolism is exactly the opposite: building up or weight gain. Together, catabolism and anabolism are integral and opposite parts of the metabolic cycle that require ideal balance to maintain a strong body, healthy weight, and muscle mass. If these activities are not in balance, the body can be in a catabolic state. The culprits to balance? Chronic stress, overtraining, prolonged fasting or restrictive diets, chronic infection, such as Lyme disease or H. Pylori, poor quality food intake, major surgery, burning a candle at both ends, lack of sleep, lack of water  (dehydration), and beyond.

Excessive or prolonged stress, resulting in catabolism (without adequate compensating anabolism or recovery) has negative consequences for your weight gain goals.

Muscle tissue along and essential body fat throughout the body can become depleted. Without the sufficient anabolic process, the process of growing and repairing tissue doesn’t happen, sending the body into a net negative energy state, defined by gradual weight loss, reduction of muscle mass and healthy body fat.

If not reversed early on, chronic catabolism happens—making you a “hard gainer” with your body constantly trying to catch up and locking your metabolic cycle into a deficit with low energy, failure to gain weight despite excessive caloric intake, unexplained weight loss, hypoglycemia, shortness of breath and inability to take deep respiration, and more.Translation? Adrenal fatigue or “HPA Axis Dysfunction.”

Is this you?

Weight Gain Essential: Don’t Push Your Body

When your body is in a catabolic state, typical measures for weight gain, health and nutrition are not always tolerated. Your body is highly sensitive and may not be able to accept BOTH natural or synthetic anabolic compounds or hacks that have stimulating properties. This may mean taking a step back from high calorie loads, inflammatory foods (dairy, grains, nuts), hard workout sessions and nutritional supplements—all of which can be a “good thing” but cause more stress than good in the catabolic state.

A common error of trying to use more calories or more supplements to reverse the catabolic cycle prematurely (when the body is still in catabolism and yet to stabilize), is that programs that focus primarily on aggressive tactics often fail. In catabolic mode or “adrenal fatigue,: the body is trying to slow down in order to conserve energy because it perceives danger and a threat to survival.

Forcing more food into the body requires the body to use more energy for digestion and metabolite breakdown. And even though nutritional supplements may seem harmless to” boost your adrenals” or immunity, if your body is in “break down mode,” these measures can trigger adrenal crashes. Instead of trying to push your body out of catabolism, here’s how to approach restoring your body to a place where it’s ready to be “pushed” towards health instead:

Step 1: Prevent Catabolism from Worsening

Use basic whole foods nutrition, juiced vegetables, basic movement (walking, yoga), rest and cutting out unnecessary commitments and obligations.

Step 2: Focus on Essential Nutrition

Let food be thy medicine. Before pushing forward into high caloric meal plans once you have a stable foundation, the goal of step 2 is still gradual restoration of total health and function. This is best accomplished by focusing on eating micronutrients through nutrient dense foods (fresh vegetables and fruits, organ meats, fatty fish, grass-fed and pastured proteins, essential fatty acids), and customizing the exact nutrients to your needs. A one size fits all dietary plan is not possible here because of great individual variance. Consider working with a nutritionist to build a balanced, restorative meal plan for you.

Step 3: Proper Supplementation

Once a baseline of health and function is restored and the catabolic state has slowed, supplements may gradually be integrated to boost overall function. Some helpful supports may include: adaptogenic herbs (like ashwaganda, rhodiola, cordyceps or reishi mushroom), essential fatty acids (like cod liver oil), immune-boosting supports (Vitamin C, liposomal curcumin, glutathione and resveratrol). Work with a functional medicine practitioner on this one.

10. You’re Not Recovering Properly

Perhaps you are not all the way into catabolic mode…but you’re heading that way fast if stress (and lack of recovery) are your “norms.” You can eat all the sweet potatoes and ice cream in the world, but if your body is in “stressed out mode,” then you won’t see the labors of your high calorie intake work like they should. Beyond calories, quality sleep, hydration and workout habits are essential for a balanced bod (that can readily accept weight gain). If you under sleep, don’t hydrate or overtrain, then you won’t get anywhere (fast).

Weight Gain Essential: 

Aim for 7-9 hours of sleep each night

Drink half your bodyweight in ounces of filtered water each day (bonus: add lemon)

Balance your workouts: Daily movement is not a bad thing, aim for 3-5 days of strength training, 1-2 days of power (HIIT), yoga or flexibility training, and

11. You’re Trying to Be Arnold

Your body is your body. Arnold’s body is his body. Cindy Crawford’s body is her body. Every BODY is different, and one of the biggest “get ups” in the weight gain game is keeping your eyes everywhere else, but on your own “ball.” The more we look to others’ bodies and characteristics as our own ideal (instead of determining our own), the further from our goals we will continue to be (because we will never fully get there).

Weight Gain Essential: Clearly Define Who Thriving YOU Is

Who is thriving, healthy, body confident you? What does he or she look like, act like, feel like, think like? If you could be the best version of you—not someone else, who would that be and qualities would you possess? Get a clear picture of that girl or that guy. Bullet point your top qualities of who you want to be in your healthy body and healthy mindset, then… put on the “as if” mindset in your own weight gain journey. The “as if” mindset is like putting on a superhero cape or princess dress as a kid and believing you were totally Superman or Belle from :Beauty and the Best.” So as we think therefore we become.

12. You’re on the Wrong Supplements

The supplement industry is a black hole with everything from protein powders to weight gainers, adrenal supports, multi-vitamins, probiotics and beyond. However, not all supplements are created equal, and most all supplements are unregulated—leaving those who are unfamiliar with the differences in strains, types, potencies, company reputations and overall quality of supplements in the dark about the “best” supplements for you.

Hate to break it to you, but many sups are nothing more than placebo effect, overheated during processing and manufacturing, not potent enough to make a difference and/or half-baked marketing lies.

For instance, it’s been estimated that upwards of 90% of probiotics on shelves do not contain the probiotics they claim.While supplements can be beneficial for getting in extra micronutrients you don’t get in your diet, or supporting underlying deficiencies or dysfunctions (such as poor gut health, poor thyroid or metabolic function, “adrenal fatigue,” etc.), it’s best not to go too crazy or depend on supplements too much as the “answer” for your weight gain success.

Weight Gain Essential: Invest in Quality Supps & Get a Plan for You

Less is more, and here are my top 5 weight gain supportive supplements most people can benefit from:

Soil Based Probiotic: Megaspore Biotic (use code “THRIVE” to be able to check out under the Register Tab as a patient)

Prebiotic: Sunfiber (helps digest your probiotic)

Digestive Enzymes: Transformation Enzymes Digest

Quality MultiVitamin: Metabolic Synergy by Designs for Health (use code LAURYNLAX at checkout to have access to check out)

Clean Protein Powder: Equip Foods Prime Protein  , Vital Protein CollagenConsult with your healthcare practitioner or get a custom supplement and nutrition plan for you     

13. You’re Stressing Out (About Your Weight)

Did we mention stress is the number one culprit working against your weight gain efforts? It is.

Weight Gain Essential: Enjoy the Journey

Health is about the journey—not the destination. Along your weight gain restoration, enjoy the journey of building into your healthy lifestyle, body and mindset. You will get there. Focus on one day and one positive action step at a time.

RESOURCES

https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statistics/overweight-obesity

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/de06/e7525826f407cbbce56f14ba037f9b190218.pdf

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4839080/

http://ucce.ucdavis.edu/files/datastore/234-779.pdf 

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2018.00199/full

https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/96/2/333/2709494

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3693132/

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/07/170718091542.htm

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14 Best Ways to Gain Weight (Without Harmful Effects)


Gain Weight Without Making Yourself Sick

Move over “GOMAD” (Gallon of Milk A Day) and searching Dr. Google for the answers “how to gain weight fast”…Let these 14 essentials light the way. 

So you want to gain weight, but you “can’t.”

Some people call it a “hard gainer,” others call it “genetics,” others call it “not eating enough” or “working out too much,” and others wish they had your problem.

No matter what your theory is behind why you CAN’T seem to gain weight…it sucks.

While the majority of America is seemingly hyper focused on weight loss with 1 in 3 Americans overweight (1) (and more than 85% of all people overweight by 2030 if trends continue, 2), for those who struggle with putting weight on (or keeping it on), it can feel equally disheartening. Being underweight can affect your body image, strength and often times even health.

I get it.

“I’m a Hard Gainer” (Story of my LIFE)

For most of my life I’ve struggled with my weight.

Early Bloomer

My pre-teens were characterized by being a healthy “early bloomer”—one of the tallest in my class, the first to shave my legs and wear a sports bra by age 9, and ranking in the top percentile on the BMI charts for my height and weight.

Chronic Dieting

By age 10, I forcefully put a dramatic halt to this—wanting nothing to do with womanhood, and more than anything, wanting to be considered thin, pretty and popular. My adolescence, teens and early 20’s were spent battling my weight and destroying my metabolism through malnourishment, subsisting on fat free yogurt, baby carrots, apples and deli turkey. I counted calories and fat grams as if it were my job, and there was a time I even feared water.

Force Feeding Weight Gain: Hypermetabolic

Doctors sent me in and out of treatment centers and hosptials, like I was on vacation, and my weight forcefully yo-yoed, as protocols forced me to sit on a couch for 3-9 months at a time, eating Egg McMuffins, Ensure shakes and Pop-tarts to put weight on and keep me alive.

My nutritionists were always “shocked” at how my body would respond to the “absurd” amount of calories and large meal plans they’d put me on, telling me I was “hypermetabolic” due to the years of starvation and metabolic disruption to my system.

Eating a Michael Phelps’ Olympic Diet

Come age 24, when I chose to recover from my 15 years of anorexia and orthorexia, this once more meant fluctuations in my weight—rebounding up from death’s doorstep at 79 pounds and feeling like the walking dead, to a “healthier place” where my body could do things a normal 24-year-old body should do (like menstruate, think clearly,and sweat in yoga class).

Nevertheless, as I once more began the classic re-feeding “weight gain” diet, my body still struggled. At the time, I was in eating disorder treatment, and being fed the equivalent of what Michael Phelps ate to win his dozens of Olympic Medals—from takeout pizza, to milkshakes, ice cream, Snickers bars, peanut butter crackers, bagels and waffles—without burning a calorie or swimming a stroke my metabolism was super fast, and yet the my gain weight process was SUPER SLOW.

For almost a year, constipation and bloating were my daily nemesis, I rarely saw a green vegetable of any sort, and no one cared that I was both lactose intolerant and gluten intolerant, with underlying autoimmune diseases that wreak havoc on the body when fed inflammatory foods. However, as forceful and painful as it felt, I did gain weight, and everyone else (but myself) were happy with the number on the scale.

Confused: Health vs. Unhealthy Weight Gain

Despite wanting to be healthy and also restore healthy weight myself, inside I felt awful. Why did “getting healthy” and having a “healthy body” have to be such a painful, forced process? Why did my body have such a hard time to gain weight? Not once did anyone talk to me about the real reasons why my body struggled so much to put healthy weight on—and be in a healthy place for my body.

Redefining a Healthy Body & Weight for ME

After I got out of treatment and back to the real world, in my new 40+ pound heavier body, I felt like I was Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz— not in Kansas anymore. In my new skin, and world of new opportunity before me (instead of standing face to face with death), I knew I had one of two choices—move forward or go back to my old ways.

I had no idea what “maintaining” my weight looked like—since for the past 15 years, my world had seemingly revolved around others wanting me to gain weight, and me fearing it so much…but I knew I did NOT want to go back down the road I had traveled.

In my new skin, I did my best to accept myself just as I was, with a few more rolls and much fuller face, without letting the old diet mentality slip back in—making me fear every morsel I put into my mouth.

Thankfully, at this time, I found an amazing CrossFit community that showed me the beauty of being strong, self-confident, and eating real whole foods. I decided to finish my Doctorate in Occupational Therapy and later furthered my education in Nutrition—both of which gave me realistic insight and truth about what holistic health is all about. And my faith and belief in the fact that I am truly fearfully and wonderfully made and here for a greater purpose than my body helped me stand firm.

Weight was seemingly no longer my issue!

Weight Issues Strike Again

Fast forward to age 28-30, my freedom from body image and the never ending struggle to gain weight came back with vengeance. This time, not in the form of an eating disorder, but a little something something known as IBS and SIBO—small intestinal bacterial overgrowth—gut dysfunctions where I could not keep food and nutrients in my body, no matter how much I ate or how healthy I ate. While I was no longer eating a steady diet of baby carrots or the opposite treatment extremes (fast food) at the time, everything I put into my mouth, ended right back up—in the toilet.

Bloating, gas, loose and watery stools and chronic diarrhea struck and lingered for a good 6-months until I really realized something was up beyond “bad digestion.”

In that time, I lost a good 10 to 15 pounds of redefined healthy muscle and feel-good body image I’d begun to find post-treatment and anti-eating disorder.

I felt horrible—inside and out—and self conscious, like people who looked at me, and knew my back story of my eating disorder, saw me right back “there”—at square one in the thick of “ED.”

Several people commented, “You should put on weight.” Others talked about me behind my back, “Lauryn has no right being on a stage talking about her eating disorder past. She doesn’t look healthy and she’s obviously still struggling.” And still others told me straight to my face, “Lauryn, if you’d put more weight on, your words and work you do to help others heal from their own food and body struggles would have more weight.”

An “angel investor” wanted to give me $100,000 to drive my bigger vision forward of helping people on a global scale and opening up a functional medicine center in the heart of Texas…until he met me face to face. He knew my back story—my recovery from a death gripping eating disorder and had seen my news feature on CBS—but after meeting me, he said he’d only fund my business on one condition—I gain about 15-20 pounds.

Will I ALWAYS Struggle with Weight?!

This set me over the edge—frustrated with my body and my weight.

Once I really realized that the SIBO and IBS had taken a toll on my body, I went to work on gaining weight…like it was my full time job.

More than anything, I wanted to help others and see my vision through, and if the only thing I had to do was put on 15-20 pounds….I could do anything right?

Buzz.

Weight gain proved to be harder than ever. No matter how much I ate—upwards of 3000 calories—the weight would not go on. And more and more came out.

About this same time is when I began to get more serious about the practice and art of functional medicine, and I threw myself into both self and formal study—training under some of the top leaders in medicine and the evolving functional medicine field.

Functional medicine is ALL about helping people get to the root of the health struggles, understanding what is going on “under the hood” or what is holding them back from being the healthy, vibrant person they want to be.

And as I began studying to help others…I also began learning and studying and discovering the answers to also helping myself…

Long story short, I discovered several reasons—real reasons—my body has struggled to gain weight for a LONG TIME…and several reasons why your body probably also struggles with weight issues too—both weight gain or weight loss.

You DON’T Have to Struggle with Weight Forever

No matter your personal history and relationship with your body and your weight; and whether you want to gain weight or lose weight, you don’t have to struggle forever—especially when you better understand the root causes driving weight dysfunction for you in the first place.

While I am not 100% where I want to be yet, I am getting there—up almost 8 pounds—and gradually healing the underlying mechanisms that have kept my body from being the optimal healthiest version of myself for YEARS.

If you’re tired of fighting your weight, here are 14 REAL reasons you can’t gain weight (beyond just being a “hard gainer”) and 14 essentials to reverse your struggle.

14 REAL REASONS YOU CAN’T GAIN WEIGHT + 14 ESSENTIALS TO GAIN WEIGHT THE HEALTHY WAY

1. Your Gut Microbiome is Unhealthy

The gut is the gateway to health (healthy weight included). Your gut is home to trillions of gut bacteria (100 trillion to be exact). Your gut bacteria and digestive system as a whole are responsible for: helping your body digest and absorb every single nutrient you eat, using every vitamin and mineral in your food, detoxifying every single toxin that comes in contact with your body, boosting your immune system, telling your neurotransmitters how to “think,” and governing how fast, slow and healthy your metabolism and hormones function.

Gut bacteria can be “good” (healthy), “bad” (pathogenic, infectious) or “commensal” (neither good nor bad.  In the case of the weight gain dilemma, if you have a chronic gut infection (like parasites or unhealthy bacteria), bacterial overgrowth (SIBO), yeast or fungal overgrowth, or other “gut problems” (like low stomach acid, IBS, “leaky gut”), then weight gain will be an uphill battle.

Poor gut health is related to malabsorption, nutrient deficiencies, cortisol imbalances (i.e. stress) and a super slow or, in your case, a super fast metabolism. 

While most studies around gut bacteria and weight tend to show the healthier your gut bacteria, the healthier your weight is (particularly for those who are overweight and obese), clinical and empirical practice also shows the opposite to be true: the more unhealthy your gut bacteria, the less healthy your body composition and weight (3).

If you are genetically predisposed to be a “hard gainer” already, you can bet your bottom dollar that you will struggle more with your weight if your gut is not healthy in the first place.

Weight Gain Essential: Boost Your Gut Health

Boost your gut health in your daily life with these steps:

Take a daily soil based probiotic and prebiotic

Take 1-2 digestive enzymes with meals

Add apple cider vinegar to water to boost stomach acid, and eat 1-2 spoonfuls of sauerkraut or fermented foods with each day

Consume natural herbs and compounds that boost gut function and heal leaky gut such as: ginger, cilantro, oregano, raw Manuka honey, peppermint, collagen, colostrum, and L-Glutamine powder to add to water.

Eat home cooked meals as much as possible, chew your food

Test, don’t guess. Work with a functional medicine practitioner to look into underlying gut dysfunctions holding you back from being in the healthy body you want to be. This may include stool testing, organic acids urine testing, SIBO breath testing, blood work or a mix of testing essentials.

2. You’re Not Maximizing Your Meals

Eating to gain weight can leave you stuffed—wondering how you can fit more “in”—especially when it seems like your weight is not budging. Everyone has their “sweet spot”—the right amount of foods that their body is able to utilize towards gaining weight, and it can be easy to undershoot this when it seems like you’re already eating all the time.

Your solution? Just suck it up and eat it! When I’ve hit this point, I find that instead of trying to fit in a whole other meal or snack, I instead look to maximize the meals I am already eating—and gradually add just a little bit more, so that my body and gut doesn’t feel overwhelmed.

Weight Gain Essential: Add Just a Little Bit Extra

Boost or maximize the meals you are already eating. Add:

An extra tablespoon of coconut oil to your veggies

A quarter of a cup more of sweet potatoes or squash

An extra ounce of protein

5-6 more raw nuts

A tablespoon of raw honey to your bedtime tea,

Or (my personal fave), a heaping spoonful of Keto-friendly ice cream or homemade coconut ice cream after dinner. Little things can make a big difference.

3. You’re Counting Quantity (Not Quality)

Calories and macros are only half the weight gain battle. Most blogs and articles on weight gain, and even personal trainers, will tell you to focus on “eating more,” “eating big,” “carbing up,” “getting lots of protein,” and healthy fats, but rarely do they talk about the quality of the foods you are eating. You can eat all the Tyson (hormone and antibiotic) raised chicken, pesticide-laden broccoli, and carb-rich rice or pasta in the world, but if the food sources are poor quality foods, you may as well be eating, but starving (at a cellular level).

Perfection and 100% organic foods are not the goal here, but a nutrient-dense diet is. For instance, the time broccoli makes it from the farm to the grocery store shelf, it has already lost well over 70% of its nutrients (4).

What this means for you in your weight gain journey? The less nutrient dense your diet, the less vitamins and minerals your body is able to use to “build on” towards your metabolic goals, at a cellular level, and the less likely your body is to absorb that food in the first place.

Weight Gain Essential: Aim for Quality Nutrients

Choose the best quality foods you can afford and vary up the foods within your diet often. (Eating the same things leaves your body and metabolism starving for certain nutrients—even if you are hitting your calorie or macro goals). Nutrient dense foods include:

Proteins

Pasture-raised poultry

Grass-fed meats

Wild caught fish

Organ Meats

Bone Broth

Vegetables 

Organic “Dirty Dozen” at least

Consume veggies within 1-3 days of buying, if possible

Cooked and sautéed veggies (digest best)

Dark leafy greens

Prebiotic fiber rich veggies & tubers (cooked and cooled potatoes/sweet potatoes, cooked and cooled white rice, green plantains, asparagus, onion, garlic, jicama, rutabaga, fennel)

Fresh Fruits

Especially antioxidant rich and digestive boosting fruits like:

Bananas (green tipped)

Blackberry

Blueberries

Cranberries

Cherries

Kiwi

Strawberries

Pineapple

Papaya

Plum

Healthy Fats

Avocado (1 small, 1/2 Medium, 1/3 Large=serving)

Avocado Oil

Beef Tallow

Coconut Butter

Coconut Flakes Unsweetened

Coconut Milk (additive-free; organic caned best)

Coconut Oil

Coconut Yogurt

Duck Fat

Egg Yolks (pasture raised, organic)

Extra Virgin Olive Oil

Fatty Cold Water Fish (Salmon, Sardines, Cod, Halibut)

Fatty Cuts of Meat (grass-fed, organic, pasture raised)

Flax Oil

Ghee

Goat’s Milk Butter

Grass-fed Butter

Grass-Fed Dairy* (Yogurt, Cream; No sugar, no additives, full-fat, plain; Limit amounts)

Grass-fed Goat’s Milk

Lard, Non-hydrogenated

Mayonnaise (Avoid brands with canola oil or sugar)

Olives

Palm Oil, Red Palm Oil

Palm Shortening (for baking)

 Fermented Foods

1-2 condiment sized servings per day

Fermented/Pickled Veggies

Fermented Condiments (Mustard, Ketchup, Relish, Horseradish, Salsas, etc.)

Kefir (Water, Coconut)

Kimchi

Kombucha (low sugar like Health Ade brand—only 2 grams of sugar, or make your own)

Kvass (Beet Kvass)

Miso & Natto (fermented varieties, no-additives)

Sauerkraut

Tempeh

Yogurt (Coconut Yogurt; full-fat grass-fed dairy with “live and active cultures only)

4. You’re Eating Foods You’re Intolerant To

Food intolerances can go undiagnosed for years. Unlike allergies where you get a direct reactive “histamine” response (wheezing, sneezing, watery eyes), food intolerances are less overt—manifesting as other signs and symptoms like malabsorption, bacterial overgrowth, fatigue, chronic stress, skin breakouts, lowered immunity, and metabolic disturbances, including difficulty gaining or losing weight).

Even “healthy” foods can be “trigger foods” for food intolerances if you’re immunity or gut function is not able to handle them. For instance, eggs, nuts, grains, tomatoes, sweet potatoes and even broccoli (FODMAP) are common irritants to individuals with underlying gut issues.

In addition, while foods like gluten get a “bad rep” and many people have chosen to avoid it (because it seems “healthier” all around), there are dozens of other foods with high cross-reactivity to gluten, such as: instant coffee, dairy, rice, buckwheat, tapioca and quinoa (in fact, many of these ingredients are often found in gluten free products).

Weight Gain Essential: Experiment with Foods that Work for Your Body

If you are struggling to put on weight and tend to eat the same things most days, experiment with food variety or eliminating questionable trigger foods for you to see how your body (and weight) respond. The top gut irritating foods many people find they are intolerant to include:

Nuts/Nutbutters

Peanuts/Soy

Grains

Dairy (especially conventional dairy)

Artificial Sweeteners Note: Don’t forget that “cutting out” doesn’t mean “restricting.” Instead replace these foods with other foods, such as tigernuts, pumpkin seeds, sunbutter, and coconut butter for nuts and nut butter; starchy tubers (like butternut squash, sweet potatoes or plantains) for grains; raw honey, xylitol, or pure maple syrup in place of most commercial sweeteners (in protein powders), and coconut milk/yogurt or full fat grassfed kefir and yogurt in place of conventional dairy.

5. You’re Forgetting Vegetables

Just because you’re in “weight gain” mode doesn’t mean that veggies have to go off the table. Vegetables provide your body (and gut) with essential fibers and prebiotics for digesting your food in the first place, as well as help ease digestion (and prevent bloating and constipation). Many people neglect veggies, especially on a weight gain diet, thinking that carrots and greens means eating like a bird. However, the opposite is true. Without veggies in your diet, your body does eat like a bird (not getting the well rounded nutrients you need to build into your cellular function and metabolic processes).

Weight Gain Essential: Taste the Rainbow

Aim for 1-3 veggies with each meal—especially dark leafy greens, prebiotic and soluble fibers (like cooked and cooled potatoes/sweet potatoes, roasted squash, carrots, beets). Preferably cook, sautee, steam or roast your veggies to enhance digestion (and prevent over fullness from raw veggies).

6. You Have a “Hollow Leg” (or Metabolic/Thyroid Imbalance or Mitochondrial Dysfunction)

Do you ever feel like your have a hollow leg—like no matter what you eat or how much you eats, your food goes nowhere? Although this is a funny expression that Uncle Joey used to joke with you about over Thanksgiving turkey, it may not be too far off if you have something else going on “under the hood.”

We briefly discussed the importance of gut health in point #1, but beyond the gut, an underlying dysfunction in your thyroid (metabolic mothership) or mitochondria (cells and cellular processes) can also challenge your weight gain efforts—especially if your body has ever been subjected to chronic stress. Stress wreaks havoc on your body as a whole—from circadian rhythm dysfunction, lack of sleep, poor quality foods, eating the same things every day, overtraining or under-training, antibiotic use, long-term medication use, a history of disordered eating and toxic chemical exposure.

For instance, in a study of individuals in recovery from chronic eating disorders (i.e. individuals with long term stress on their bodies), the subjects’ resting metabolic rate increased upwards of 20% for their height and weight—some needing upwards of 5,000 calories to gain and maintain their weight (5, 6).

This is significant since eating disorders are highly associated with chronic stress, thyroid and mitochondrial disturbances (3). Another example: toxic burden from overexposure to the 85,000+ unregulated chemicals in our plastics, cleaning and hygiene chemicals, toxic beauty products, heavy metals, mold, medications, tap water and pesticides can also wreak havoc on your body at a cellular level if you’ve had your fair share (7).

What this means for your metabolism? If the “balance” of your body’s processes is thrown off, then the last thing your body may want to do is “build” or gain weight. In fact, for some thyroid disturbances or mitochondrial dysfunction can lead to skeletal muscle breakdown, nutrient deficiencies and even unwanted weight loss, as your cells and hormones can become starved at a cellular level.

Weight Gain Essential: Get a Complete Blood Panel Run + Additional Testing (if Needed)

Look under the hood. Work with a practitioner to assess your metabolic health. Get blood work completed, including a complete thyroid panel, as well as complete iron panel (since iron overload and deficiencies can also influence metabolism). Your practitioner should be able to guide you for any further testing as well for things like: mold, autoimmunity, organic acids, and heavy metals if warranted.

Here are the ideal ranges for thyroid markers:

TSH 1-2 UIU/ML or lower (Armour or compounded T3 can artificially suppress TSH) Free T4 >1.1 NG/DL Free T3 > 3.2 PG/ML Reverse T3 less than a 10:1 ratio RT3:FT3 Thyroid Peroxidase Antibodies (TPOAb) & Thyroglobulin Antibodies (TgAb)  < 4 IU/ML or negative

Here are ideal ranges for iron markers, depending on the season of life you’re in:

Serum Iron Men: 40–135 μg/dL Pre-menopausal Women: 40–135 μg/dL Post-menopausal Women: 40–135 μg/dL

Serum Ferritin Men: 30–200 ng/dL Pre-menopausal women: 30–100 ng/dL Post-menopausal Women: 30–100 ng/dL

Transferrin Saturation Men: 17–45% Pre-menopausal Women: 17–45% Post-menopausal Women: 17–45%

TIBC Men: 275–425 μg/dL Pre-menopausal Women: 275–425 μg/dL Post-menopausal Women: 275–425μg/dL

UIBC Men: 175–350 μg/dL Pre-menopausal Women: 175–350 μg/dL Post-menopausal Women: 175–350 μg/dL

Soluble Transferrin Receptor Men: 14.5–25 nmol/L Pre-menopausal Women: 13–25 nmol/L Post-menopausal Women: 14.5–25 nmol/L

Reticulocyte Hemoglobin Content (CHr) Men: 24.5–31.8 pg Pre-menopausal Women: 24.5–31.8 pg Post-menopausal Women: 24.5–31.8 pg

7. You’re Eating on the Go

Optimal digestion happens in a “parasympathetic state” (rest and digest). Eating on the go, in addition to standing up while eating, distracted eating (watching TV, checking your phone) or eating out at restaurants, (more than eating in) is stressful for the body’s digestive system.Often coupled with this is also the dilemma of not chewing your food enough. The result? Poorly digested and poorly absorbed foods…and lack of weight gain.

Weight Gain Essential : Rest & Digest

Slow down at meal times. Eat your meals seated and preferably not on the go. Cook and prepare your foods as much as possible. Chew your food (really well), and mindfully enjoy your meals (i.e. refrain from distracted eating).

8. You’re Meal Timing is Off

The human body loves balance—especially circadian rhythm balance. Every human has an internal biological clock that operates in tandem with the sun—ideally, we have more energy in the morning as the sun rises, plenty of gusto and energy during the day, then a bell curve dip in the evening, ready to “tuck in” and wind down as the sun goes down. However, if we disturb this circadian function—including our meal timing, then our body and metabolism can get off as well. While there is no perfect time to eat, there are general guidelines and hours during which your body is able to digest best. Eating at the “wrong” time windows also affects your metabolism.

In one study, aimed at determining if time of day affected weight loss in mice, researchers from  UT Southwestern Medical Center found: Mice on a reduced calorie plan that ate only during their normal feeding/active cycle were the only ones among five groups to lose weight, despite consuming the same amount as another group fed during their rest time in daylight (8).

Weight Gain Essential: Eat with Your Circadian Rhythms

Eat in tune with your circadian rhythms to maximize the fuel you eat.

Here’s a general guide:

6-8 Breakfast/First Meal

10-11 Mid-Morning Snack (if you eat a snack)

12-2 Lunch

3-5 Afternoon Snack (if you snack)

6-8 Dinner

9-10 Bedtime Snack (if you snack)

These guidelines fall in line with the way your body metabolizes food thought the day.

9. Your Body is in “Catabolic Mode”

Catabolism stands for “break down.” Anabolism is exactly the opposite: building up or weight gain. Together, catabolism and anabolism are integral and opposite parts of the metabolic cycle that require ideal balance to maintain a strong body, healthy weight, and muscle mass. If these activities are not in balance, the body can be in a catabolic state. The culprits to balance? Chronic stress, overtraining, prolonged fasting or restrictive diets, chronic infection, such as Lyme disease or H. Pylori, poor quality food intake, major surgery, burning a candle at both ends, lack of sleep, lack of water  (dehydration), and beyond.

Excessive or prolonged stress, resulting in catabolism (without adequate compensating anabolism or recovery) has negative consequences for your weight gain goals.

Muscle tissue along and essential body fat throughout the body can become depleted. Without the sufficient anabolic process, the process of growing and repairing tissue doesn’t happen, sending the body into a net negative energy state, defined by gradual weight loss, reduction of muscle mass and healthy body fat.

If not reversed early on, chronic catabolism happens—making you a “hard gainer” with your body constantly trying to catch up and locking your metabolic cycle into a deficit with low energy, failure to gain weight despite excessive caloric intake, unexplained weight loss, hypoglycemia, shortness of breath and inability to take deep respiration, and more.Translation? Adrenal fatigue or “HPA Axis Dysfunction.”

Is this you?

Weight Gain Essential: Don’t Push Your Body

When your body is in a catabolic state, typical measures for weight gain, health and nutrition are not always tolerated. Your body is highly sensitive and may not be able to accept BOTH natural or synthetic anabolic compounds or hacks that have stimulating properties. This may mean taking a step back from high calorie loads, inflammatory foods (dairy, grains, nuts), hard workout sessions and nutritional supplements—all of which can be a “good thing” but cause more stress than good in the catabolic state.

A common error of trying to use more calories or more supplements to reverse the catabolic cycle prematurely (when the body is still in catabolism and yet to stabilize), is that programs that focus primarily on aggressive tactics often fail. In catabolic mode or “adrenal fatigue,: the body is trying to slow down in order to conserve energy because it perceives danger and a threat to survival.

Forcing more food into the body requires the body to use more energy for digestion and metabolite breakdown. And even though nutritional supplements may seem harmless to” boost your adrenals” or immunity, if your body is in “break down mode,” these measures can trigger adrenal crashes. Instead of trying to push your body out of catabolism, here’s how to approach restoring your body to a place where it’s ready to be “pushed” towards health instead:

Step 1: Prevent Catabolism from Worsening

Use basic whole foods nutrition, juiced vegetables, basic movement (walking, yoga), rest and cutting out unnecessary commitments and obligations.

Step 2: Focus on Essential Nutrition

Let food be thy medicine. Before pushing forward into high caloric meal plans once you have a stable foundation, the goal of step 2 is still gradual restoration of total health and function. This is best accomplished by focusing on eating micronutrients through nutrient dense foods (fresh vegetables and fruits, organ meats, fatty fish, grass-fed and pastured proteins, essential fatty acids), and customizing the exact nutrients to your needs. A one size fits all dietary plan is not possible here because of great individual variance. Consider working with a nutritionist to build a balanced, restorative meal plan for you.

Step 3: Proper Supplementation

Once a baseline of health and function is restored and the catabolic state has slowed, supplements may gradually be integrated to boost overall function. Some helpful supports may include: adaptogenic herbs (like ashwaganda, rhodiola, cordyceps or reishi mushroom), essential fatty acids (like cod liver oil), immune-boosting supports (Vitamin C, liposomal curcumin, glutathione and resveratrol). Work with a functional medicine practitioner on this one.

10. You’re Not Recovering Properly

Perhaps you are not all the way into catabolic mode…but you’re heading that way fast if stress (and lack of recovery) are your “norms.” You can eat all the sweet potatoes and ice cream in the world, but if your body is in “stressed out mode,” then you won’t see the labors of your high calorie intake work like they should. Beyond calories, quality sleep, hydration and workout habits are essential for a balanced bod (that can readily accept weight gain). If you under sleep, don’t hydrate or overtrain, then you won’t get anywhere (fast).

Weight Gain Essential: 

Aim for 7-9 hours of sleep each night

Drink half your bodyweight in ounces of filtered water each day (bonus: add lemon)

Balance your workouts: Daily movement is not a bad thing, aim for 3-5 days of strength training, 1-2 days of power (HIIT), yoga or flexibility training, and

11. You’re Trying to Be Arnold

Your body is your body. Arnold’s body is his body. Cindy Crawford’s body is her body. Every BODY is different, and one of the biggest “get ups” in the weight gain game is keeping your eyes everywhere else, but on your own “ball.” The more we look to others’ bodies and characteristics as our own ideal (instead of determining our own), the further from our goals we will continue to be (because we will never fully get there).

Weight Gain Essential: Clearly Define Who Thriving YOU Is

Who is thriving, healthy, body confident you? What does he or she look like, act like, feel like, think like? If you could be the best version of you—not someone else, who would that be and qualities would you possess? Get a clear picture of that girl or that guy. Bullet point your top qualities of who you want to be in your healthy body and healthy mindset, then… put on the “as if” mindset in your own weight gain journey. The “as if” mindset is like putting on a superhero cape or princess dress as a kid and believing you were totally Superman or Belle from :Beauty and the Best.” So as we think therefore we become.

12. You’re on the Wrong Supplements

The supplement industry is a black hole with everything from protein powders to weight gainers, adrenal supports, multi-vitamins, probiotics and beyond. However, not all supplements are created equal, and most all supplements are unregulated—leaving those who are unfamiliar with the differences in strains, types, potencies, company reputations and overall quality of supplements in the dark about the “best” supplements for you.

Hate to break it to you, but many sups are nothing more than placebo effect, overheated during processing and manufacturing, not potent enough to make a difference and/or half-baked marketing lies.

For instance, it’s been estimated that upwards of 90% of probiotics on shelves do not contain the probiotics they claim.While supplements can be beneficial for getting in extra micronutrients you don’t get in your diet, or supporting underlying deficiencies or dysfunctions (such as poor gut health, poor thyroid or metabolic function, “adrenal fatigue,” etc.), it’s best not to go too crazy or depend on supplements too much as the “answer” for your weight gain success.

Weight Gain Essential: Invest in Quality Supps & Get a Plan for You

Less is more, and here are my top 5 weight gain supportive supplements most people can benefit from:

Soil Based Probiotic: Megaspore Biotic (use code “THRIVE” to be able to check out under the Register Tab as a patient)

Prebiotic: Sunfiber (helps digest your probiotic)

Digestive Enzymes: Transformation Enzymes Digest

Quality MultiVitamin: Metabolic Synergy by Designs for Health (use code LAURYNLAX at checkout to have access to check out)

Clean Protein Powder: Equip Foods Prime Protein  , Vital Protein CollagenConsult with your healthcare practitioner or get a custom supplement and nutrition plan for you     

13. You’re Stressing Out (About Your Weight)

Did we mention stress is the number one culprit working against your weight gain efforts? It is.

Weight Gain Essential: Enjoy the Journey

Health is about the journey—not the destination. Along your weight gain restoration, enjoy the journey of building into your healthy lifestyle, body and mindset. You will get there. Focus on one day and one positive action step at a time.

RESOURCES

https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statistics/overweight-obesity

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/de06/e7525826f407cbbce56f14ba037f9b190218.pdf

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4839080/

http://ucce.ucdavis.edu/files/datastore/234-779.pdf 

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2018.00199/full

https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/96/2/333/2709494

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3693132/

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/07/170718091542.htm

The post 14 Best Ways to Gain Weight (Without Harmful Effects)
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Source/Repost=> https://drlauryn.com/hormones-metabolism/14-best-ways-to-gain-weight-without-harmful-effects%e2%80%a8/ ** Dr. Lauryn Lax __Nutrition. Therapy. Functional Medicine ** https://drlauryn.com/ 14 Best Ways to Gain Weight (Without Harmful Effects)
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[survivorisladelasmunecas-blog]

Brandan’s Opening Statement

Hello esteemed members of the jury of probably the longest ass season anyone of us is ever going to play in our lifetimes! First off, thank you Dustin for truly putting together a crazy season. I apologize for all the swearing, middle fingers, and curses I have sweared upon your name, you truly deserve more credit than you get. I’m sorry beforehand if this seems wordy, but for a long season, this deserves a long write-up

Usually when I play Survivor games like these, I tend to be more strategic in my thinking of the game. I get enveloped in this philosophy that only those who play amazing strategic games and exemplify all the characteristics of a winner. However, time and time again I have failed to reach this point with my strategic focus alone. I get close, but I never make it to the finish line. I feel like my biggest mistake in these game was trying to overreach, and become such a big player too quickly. This game, I feel like I took my strategy in a different route. I might not have been the most outward strategic person. However, I improved on my game because of it, leading me to where I am today.

So coming into this season, I was determined not to let those same mistakes plague me. So instead of focusing on a primarily strategic game, I decided to adopt a social one, which I would follow the rest of the game. It worked out well for me in my original tribe. However, with Shea’s removal from the game and my discovery that literally every single person under the sun had an idol, it complicated things a bit. I tried my hardest to make sure that our tribe won the challenges, and excluding the Survivor Auto immunity we actually performed well in challenges. This trend continued until I was picked to become the Regateo tribe leader after I kicked Austin’s butt in a pokemon battle.

I was then given the power to create NuRegateo. My ultimate control in my creation of this tribe was to make a tribe that would dominate in challenges, allowing myself to save a lot of stamina for what proved to be an extremely long game. Fortunately for my sanity, we only lost once, where the entire tribe banded together in order to take out Steven, even though I had to talk Austin out of some of his insane plans during that tribal. I used this time to create bonds with people like Matt, Eva, Jay, and James. It started as small talk, but these conversations eventually enveloped into friendships, and in Eva’s case, a final 2 that I created. It was called the Peron’s, named after the power couple that ruled Argentina. Plus the wife’s name was Evita, which is the same as Eva, so that was a bit of being a suck up on my part. No shame in it though.

Once the second tribe swap hit, I lost all of my Regateo allies, and was placed on Abatimiento. This scenario could have been the end of my game. However, with my bonds created from the NuRegateo tribe, it put me in a position of control. This eventually was broken however when Tyler out of nowhere played an idol. I played my idol as a conditional play, so I can counteract if Tyler somehow got his hands on an idol. It worked in my favor, as I was his target. However, due to both of our idol plays and Matt’s consecutive one, it resulted in Eva’s blindside right before the merge.

My original hope looking into the Regateo tribe before the merge was that Jevvon would be taken out followed by Billy and that I can just pick up the old Regateo votes. However, the rivalry that picked up between Austin and Jordan, two of my closest allies premerge, destroyed any chances of that happening. This rivalry, combined with the removals of Tyler and Jacob from the main game, hindered my ability to keep them together. I constantly tried floating out another idea in order to keep both of them in the game. Unfortunately, they both ended up targeting each other, with Jordan taking the fall and losing at the lagoon.  

After that, Connor and I developed this little rivalry. I saw him as someone who would stop at nothing to tear me down and prevent me from accomplishing anything. So after I won immunity and Austin got sent to exile, I campaigned to get his ass out. Hard. Unfortunately, people voted James because of his treasure hoard of idols that allowed him an easy pass in the game. However, this worked out in my favor, as I was able to blindside Connor after warning James about his impending blindside. I thought this would have been smooth sailing and I could finally relax. However due to the crazy plans and impulsive decisions of others, I ended up getting sent to the lagoon.

I know that getting sent to the lagoon might seem like a black wart on my game. However, it was probably one of the best things to happen to me. I not only allowed myself to recover any stamina I lost early on in the chaos of the merge, but I reconnected with Eva, and I developed a bond with Andrei. After voting off Lil AJ and returning to the game, I discovered a newfound power in getting into people’s ears. By bringing up Matt’s name to Andrei and Eva, it started a spinning wheel in order to initiate his blindside at the Final 10, and by voting in the minority it allocated trust with those who may not have believed me otherwise. As much as I hate to say it as well, this played a factor into the Final 9 as well, where I was able to get Billy to turn against Austin/James by spinning Austin’s own words against him, ultimately allowing the split vote that sent Austin out the door.

After Billy’s vote out, the one person who actually caught onto my game was Andrei, and after his failed attempt to blindside me, he fell as well due to my relationships with Bodhi, AJ, and James. What I find funny is that two of those three actually responsible for my exile to the lagoon, and who I had voted against beforehand. The fact that they would even consider keeping someone who voted against both of them was hysterical if you think about it. After that, I took out Renee, and secured myself a spot in the square middle of the tribe, where I blindsided Bodhi and then took out AJ, placing me where I am today.

I think my biggest strength about my gave overall was definitely the social aspect. While I could have easily gone a more strategic route in the game, being able to move into more of a social aspect in the game worked wonders for me. Not only did I learn more about all of you, I think it also gave me a leg up in the game. I don’t think many of you guys saw this, but I was the one who kept passing around information to one another, establishing trust with my allies while creating distrust among everyone but me. Even though I was voted annoying, I remained close with you all, and I consider a lot of you my friends. Hell, I had a preconceived relationship with AJ that I kept hidden from you all throughout the entire merge portion of the game, and multiple conflicting deals that remained intact up until the very end. During the final rounds, I was so close to all of the remaining contestants that no one would have dared vote me out of this game, even though they all had every single opportunity to do so.

Ultimately, I fought my ass off in order to reach this point in the game. With the alliances I created crumbling around me due to the actions of others, I constantly remained connected to both sides. For example, with Bodhi and Austin’s argument ruining their friendship, I stayed in the middle of them, throwing one another under the bus while gaining both of their trust. Whenever dots were starting to connect, I just had to explain it away in a simple lie, and most of the time it worked. No offense to both Eva or James, but I think I participated more in this game, as Eva had a free ride in the lagoon with both Jordan and Monty giving up and James was able to get multiple free passes with the idols that he obtained in that premerge challenge. I don’t believe that idols or a legacy advantage make you a great player. I believe that hard work, determination, and the ability to connect to others can help spark the seeds of a truly great survivor player. I admit, my game was not perfect. I regret having burned some of you the way I did. I regret the way I handled the pressure sometimes. I regret the way I handled some vote outs. However, I think I deserve to be the Sole Survivor due to my determination and my ability to play the middle of the tribe while keeping my name off the ballot.

This game has been one hell of a ride. I have had an absolute blast in my second season of Tumblr Survivor, and it is all thanks to the 27 people I played alongside with who have fallen before me, and Dustin who helped construct a two and a half month long game that has proved very memorable. Think about who you want to represent your season with a winner. I think I outplayed, outwitted and outlasted, which is essentially what survivor is about at the end of the day. I wish James and Eva the best of luck, and I’m very excited for us to all relish the events of this game later, with hopefully me as your winner :)