emerygoat26-blog

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Author Nathan Englander Gets His Syrup in New Hampshire - Grub Street

At Mike’s Coffee Shop in Clinton Hill. Photo: Christian Rodriguez

At 30, Nathan Englander was the youngest ever recipient of the PEN award for “excellence in the art of the short story,” and this week he published his fifth book, the comically probing kaddish.com. His writing has been called “genre-hopping” and several variations on “playful,” descriptions that might also apply to his relationship with eating. Like many food lovers, Englander can appreciate a great restaurant as much as he can a well-written recipe — but he also isn’t above eating his daughter’s leftovers. “My wife can’t believe it,” he says. “I’m like, ‘Oh, yeah, I am definitely more than happy to find myself eating the kid food.’” Over the past week, he also had time to eat stoop pizza, consider the qualities that make a neighborhood diner great, and think, wistfully, about bagels. Read all about it in this week’s Grub Street Diet.

Thursday, March 21 I wish this had started Wednesday night. My wife and I actually got a babysitter, and went to a grown-up restaurant with another couple. One half of that couple was our friend JJ, who writes cookbooks, and when you go to restaurants with him, things you didn’t order just appear — “lamb chops, compliments of the food mafia!” — and I think that would have been a fun meal to share. But my Grub Street Diet started this morning! And I was doing drop-off, and was late getting our 4-year-old daughter to preschool — as I am every day.

While I packed her lunch, I ate a piece of wheat toast and drank a gallon of Kitten Coffee’s Tandem blend. I don’t like that super-black, melt-your-tongue coffee. I drink way too much coffee for that, and Kitten’s is just the perfect live-on-it-all-day roast. Also, I was once leaving the coffee shop on our corner, and the Kitten guy was delivering, and I screamed, “Hey, I love your coffee.” And he said, “Try this, I think you’ll like it,” and he threw me a pound of something new they were making, and I swooned with neighborhood good cheer.

So, my book was coming out on Tuesday and I was in prelaunch madness. I was stuck in the house, doing assignments, like 500 words on fingernails for Fingernail Digest, and I had a half-hour phone interview that somehow ran to an hour and a half and I was going to miss eating lunch. But JJ checked in, as he does about a million times a day. He was over on Henry Street, and he texted me a picture of the sandwiches chalked up on the board at Lillo, and offered to deliver. And, as with the Kitten coffee, it’s that kind of neighborly niceness that just kills me. He brought me the Mediterraneo, as ordered. It’s Italian tuna, arugula, sweet marinated onions, and tomato. It was delicious. (He also brought a couple of desserts, which I put aside.) And we both worked on our laptops at the table for a while.

Also, while I was waiting for JJ to show up, I ate the cold tortellini from Olivia’s dinner the night before. I’m all about the cold kid noodles from yesterday’s dinners. I enjoy that stuff. It’s not just that I’m eating it, I actually love it. I am definitely more than happy to find myself eating the properly aged fish sticks, and the apples with bites missing. I think that’s a big parent thing, to be like, “Now I’m going to have a second meal that I found on the counter.”

A friend I hadn’t seen in years was in town visiting, and she was coming by for dinner. So, at the end of the workday, I ran over to Mekelburg’s for a loaf of She Wolf sourdough (which we’re crazy for). I also got Firehook sea salt crackers, and some cheddar and manchego and our favorite cheese, Délice de Bourgogne, which is about one inch away from just eating butter with a spoon. I got olives and radishes, and I also got all the fixings for my red lentil soup. I served it over brown rice, and finished it off with wilted spinach and some Greek yogurt, as the recipe recommends. My wife, Rachel, made a butter lettuce, endive, and grapefruit salad.

Also, it was Purim, and Rach got some hamantaschen that we served along with the desserts that JJ had brought. One was a kind of Italian version of a Boston cream doughnut, and there was a blueberry tart with a lattice top.

Friday, March 22 I made Olivia French toast, which was not at all a weekday thing, but she asked for it, and getting to school on time, as I’ve said, is not my strong suit. I had Greek yogurt, banana, and honey. And coffee. And Rach had a version of the same.

It was Friday, which was a gym day. So we do speed things up as best we can. We’ve been working out at CrossFit South Brooklyn for years, even though it’s over in Gowanus. But we love it, and it feels like family now. And we’re pretty religious about our Monday-Wednesday-Friday class, which is a kind of body-weight-centric thing that we love.

When I need to do busywork before writing, I often head to Three’s Brewing, one street over from the gym. It’s not for a post-workout beer. The brewery is closed during the day, but they have a cozy little outpost of Ninth Street Espresso inside that uses the space during the daytime. I headed over and got a coffee and, to ruin any gym-related gains, a cheddar and chive scone (which is just to say, I should have had the French toast).

Let’s sing the praises of leftovers. I cook so much more lately,, and the more complicated or ridiculous, the better. That, is I like to make the things where people say, “Ummm, you know, they sell that at the grocery store. You can buy that a lot more easily than you can make that.” I was recently cooking Middle Eastern food and I was like, “Well, I should also make the pita,” and there were a million steps, and I was really proud, but, man, that dinner would have been a lot easier if I’d just run to Damascus Bakery, or, you know, any supermarket in the whole city. I think it ties in to the writer brain. If I need to fix something I’m writing, I will stay up all night, and I will do it again and again until it’s where it needs to be.

Anyway, there was the leftover lentil soup and the cheese and that giant loaf from She Wolf waiting. And I had plans to meet my publicist, Jordan. We were both swamped, and so she swung by, and we set up shop at our dining room table (by which I mean, our only table), and we had a super nice lunch, but with screens out, typing away.

Rach and I are nutty for Ethiopian food. It’s a favorite. And, luckily, there’s a fantastic restaurant over on Fulton, across from Greenlight Bookstore, my local. It’s a big corner for me: books and Ethiopian food. The restaurant is called Bati. And the owner, Hibist, is an old friend. Back when I started writing and lived on the Upper West Side, I used to go do my work at the Hungarian Pastry Shop. I mean, I sat there all day, every day, and often closed the place down. And Hibist used to work behind the counter. And I love when a person’s dreams come true. That is, I remember Hibist pouring coffees in the ’90s and now she owns her own restaurant — and it’s the best. Also, they’re really nice to our daughter, who has gone from eating everything to a very beige-focused food phase (possibly inherited from my suburban, white-bread roots).

Anyway, we packed her a little dinner of her own as an emergency backup, which they were really nice about. And as for ordering at Bati, Rach and I haven’t touched a menu there in years. We always, always get a vegetarian combo for two — which had a bunch of things on it, gomen, and buticha, and key sir, and — what really matters to us — always lots of shiro. And, at Bati, I don’t even need JJ for special treatment. They always keep an eye on us and make sure there’s shiro on the tray.

Also, they were out of St. George beer that night, so I had a Walia, which was equally great.

Saturday, March 23 If I’m being honest here, this was a record amount of time for me not to have eaten a bagel. This diary should have already had five dozen or so in it. Anyway, I ate the She Wolf Sourdough toast, day 400 on that bread. If you amortize the initial investment, I was pretty much making money on that loaf.

After dance class (my daughter’s, not mine), we headed over to Tacombi with friends. It’s a great Mexican place with locations in Manhattan, but now we’ve got one across from BAM. I spotted one grown-up couple having beers in the main room when we got there, but otherwise there were lots of kids, and lots in tutus — it seemed to be the new post-dance hangout. We had a big order of kid-friendly plain versions of things, which the staff was really nice about (that is, quesadilla with nothing, rice and beans with nothing). As for this grown-up, I had the seared fish tacos and their Naranja, which is a papaya, carrot, pineapple, and orange juice.

So, it was the Montclair Literary Festival — go NJ! My event was near the end of the day, and, after it was over, I went straight into Joyce Carol Oates’s. Then there was a cocktail party for the festival, and I ate I don’t know what, some hummus and pita, and had a glass of white wine. And Joyce had invited me to dinner with friends, and we headed to a place called Scala del Nonna. The joint was jumping, it was packed out and loud and Saturday night-ish, and one table kept knocking over the wine bucket.

As for wine, apparently Montclair has some ancient liquor law thing, and the restaurant was dry. So my friend Julie ran out to the store next-door and bought a bottle of Gavi, and Joyce’s friend ordered porcini risotto with peas for the table. I got the branzino alla griglia, which was marinated sea bass lightly grilled with scarola Siciliana. And, well, if you replaced all the fish I ate this week with candy and bagels, once again, it would better represent my normal diet.

Sunday, March 24 The day was packed with playdates, which was lovely. My daughter and I headed over to a friend’s who has twins and lives right next to the bagel store — my chance to make a move. But when we got into their house, Melissa had already made a mountain of whole-grain silver dollar pancakes, and a fruit plate with strawberries, watermelon, and pear. And, as always, she put a cup of coffee right into my hand.

We all headed to the park. As the twins headed off, another friend of my daughter’s showed up with her dad. After another couple of hours of wildness, we took the girls for a slice of Luigi’s Pizza and sat on the stoop outside. My slice turns into two, and they keep their seltzers properly freezing in their fridge. Slices on a stoop make me extraordinarily happy in a New York way: I was being nostalgic while it was happening, like, “This is the life.”

For our third and final playdate of the day, we had another of our daughter’s friends over to the house, with her folks. I’d been wanting to make chili, and offered to do so, but — if I’m allowed to break the fourth wall — Oriana, the visiting mom, is a huge fan of this column. She said chili is boring. So we ordered in Vietnamese from Mekong Delta. The restaurant is in one of those neighborhood locations that never works out and keeps changing hands. But Mekong Delta seems to be doing great. We all shared a papaya salad, and I got chicken pho and shrimp summer rolls.

Monday, March 25 It felt like maybe it was one of the last cold mornings before spring kicked in, and even with the pancakes yesterday, I always need to make sure I’m getting enough maple syrup in my diet. Point is, I made oatmeal, and ate it with bananas and blueberries and maple syrup that we buy by the jug when we’re up at our friend’s farm in Sandwich, New Hampshire. So, yes, for the best maple syrup in the world, I’d head straight for the sugar shack at Booty Farm on Mt. Israel Road.

I really want to state again that my body mass is probably about 80 percent bagel. If you cut me in half, I imagine mostly sesame seeds would pour out — as that’s my bagel of choice. So I really can’t believe I haven’t had one since this diet started — it’s the longest stretch since we got back from a year in Malawi (where I broke down and made bagels from scratch).

It was the day before launch. I owed everybody a million things, and was sure I’d be working until the middle of the night. At 2 p.m., I ran over to Mike’s Coffee Shop to grab something. Mike’s has been our home diner since we moved to Brooklyn from Manhattan around a decade ago. And we love it. It’s super homey, and they’re super nice, and it has a proper diner-y, pressed-tin ceiling, and a proper neon sign in the window. You always bump into friends there, and the kids are often given lollipops when you pay, whether they need a lollipop or not. Also, the owners are really good about calmly managing the weekend waiting list when it’s chaos and the throngs of folks are roaming outside waiting on tables.

I sat in the last booth and I ordered a coffee and a tuna sandwich on wheat toast, with lettuce, tomato, and onion. And a pickle spear! If there’s a picture of me up above with a sandwich in front of me, that’s the one. If there’s a picture of me without it, it’s because it’s already in my belly.

The last supper. So, a friend was having a dinner party, and I did not go to that dinner party — though, again, I’d be killing it with the food over there. But, the next day was the launch event at Greenlight Bookstore, and I’d start traveling the morning after that, and except for a night here and there, well, I’ll be hawking books on the road like a brush salesman for the next few weeks. This was basically the last night I got to be home with my wife and daughter and Calli the dog until tour slows down. Also, I usually come home from tour looking like I’ve eaten a bag of salt. That is, I’m so thankful to get to do readings and meet readers and shepherd the novel out into the world, but I will be eating a lot from after-hours menus, and CIBO Express airport food, and the day was gray and cold and some comfort food at home sounded nice.

So Rachel started kid dinner, and my daughter and I ran out to the supermarket around the block. We love going to the supermarket, me and her. We were getting ingredients for my friend Kitty’s chili recipe. When my wife was in grad school (she’s a professor), we lived in Madison, Wisconsin for three years, and our friend Kitty gave us a little book of her very Wisconsin-style dishes, which are great for this kind of weather. At the store, we also got the stuff for a green salad, because it sounded nice and I also wanted to keep my heart from exploding on the road.

At home, while my daughter ate, I got the chili into a giant pot and let it simmer until — as happens in our building — the whole floor smelled like cayenne peppers and onion. For the salad, I just used lemon and olive oil and salt, which is my single favorite dressing. And after our daughter fell asleep, Rach emerged and served up the chili. I chopped up some cilantro and chives for toppings, and we sat down at the table and dug in, with the dog underneath the table at our feet, which is my kind of dinner.

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Source: http://www.grubstreet.com/2019/03/nathan-englander-grub-street-diet.html

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Medizinische Sensation: Chirurgen trennen erstmals Teenager von Smartphone

Eine medizinische Sensation gelang einem Chirurgenteam des AKH Wien. In einer 36-stündigen Operation trennten sie einen Teenager von seinem Smartphone. Der riskante Eingriff gilt als weltweit einmalig und sorgt unter Ärzten in aller Welt für großes Aufsehen.

WIEN – „Das Smartphone war bereits mit dem zentralen Nervensystem verwachsen. Der Anästhesist musste es für die OP möglichst sanft in den Flugmodus schalten, ohne die lebenserhaltenden Systeme wie WhatsApp oder Instagram zu beeinträchtigen“, erläutert Primarin Dr. Sabine Halik von der Universitätsklinik für plastische Telekommunikationschirurgie den heiklen Eingriff.

Neue Artikel jeden Morgen in Ihr Postfach.

Im Aufwachraum versuchte der Patient nach der Operation panisch, Instagram auf seinem Überwachungsmonitor aufzurufen. Der Teenager überlebte anschließend sogar vier weitere, qualvolle Stunden ohne Handy, eher er dann wie erwartet an Langeweile verstarb. Ethiker fragen sich jedoch, ob es nicht humaner gewesen wäre, den Patienten gleich nach der OP mit einem guten Buch sanft einzuschläfern.

Organspende

Doch der tragische Tod des Patienten war nicht umsonst. Sein entferntes Smartphone fungierte wenig später als lebensrettendes Spenderorgan für eine Gymnasiastin aus Wien-Döbling. Die 17-Jährige erlitt einen Schock, als ihr iPhone ins Klo fiel, und wurde in lebensbedrohendem Zustand mit dem Rettungshubschrauber eingeliefert.

Durch die sofortige Verpflanzung des entnommenen Smartphones konnte sie stabilisiert werden. „Leider handelt es sich beim Spenderorgan um ein gewöhnliches Galaxy S9 und wird vom Organismus der Spenderin bereits abgestoßen. Wir hoffen, dass wir bald ein goldenes iPhone XS reinbekommen, sonst schaut es schlecht aus.“

Source: https://dietagespresse.com/medizinische-sensation-chirurgen-trennen-erstmals-teenager-von-smartphone/

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[emerygoat26-blog]

LET'S MAKE A START

This morning I am going to make a start on that sanding in the spare bedroom! I'm feeling super excited about it really... and yes, I will be laying down sheets on the floor to save on the vacuming.    I know it's going to make a Hooahh of a mess!  But, once it's all sanded, I can just clean up the mess... simple really. Then the best part will happen... painting.  I do love painting.  And I have an idea for a 'feature'  wall too... but that's gunna stay secret till the big 'reveal'.  *smiles* I have an afternoon shift at the rest home today... just a short shift so I shouldn't be too tired afterwards.

ABOVE:  I saw this on Facebook... made me laugh. So appropriate for rest homes! Yesterday I was there for over 6 hours and NOT ONE BUM! I wonder if I'll be so lucky today? Stewy gets home at dinnertime, so that will be lovely.  I miss him when he's not here. I'm going now... those walls are waiting for me. ONWARD...

 ABOVE:  The room is ready.

 ABOVE: I am ready...

ABOVE:  Half a wall done.

5.55 pm:  Home from work.

NO NAKED BUMS.

But I did get an interesting 'proposal'.

Picture this:   Old fulla lying on his bed in just his under wear.  I go in with his clothes, put them away in his drawers.

He meanwhile, gets off his bed and stands beside me and says:  

"Want to play with W's Willy?"  And then he puckers up and does air kisses at me.

I am like:

"NO!"  and I walk out of his room quick smart.  

Kinda funny, kinda not.  Ewwwww.

And that was the sum total of my amusement for the day really.

It's been a hum drum afternoon.  Glad it's Friday night, Stew is home and we might have a rum and coke me thinks.

I've got work all weekend.  Not looking forward to that one iota.

I have kept the spare bedroom door shut ever since I finished the sanding, and by the look of it, all the dust has settled.  So tomorrow night I might set to and get rid of all the dust, and wipe every surface down in readiness for painting.

Signing off now, ain't nothing else happening around here ... catch ya tomorrow.

Source: https://diet-coke-rocks.blogspot.com/2019/07/lets-make-start.html

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6 Things You Should Never Buy From Amazon | The Lifestyle Fix

Source: http://www.youtube.com/oembed?format=xml&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DFGtlnAOv4Vo

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Macros!

Hey everyone!

I began keto about 3 weeks ago and am slightly satisfied with the results.. I know it takes time for your body to become fat adapted and weight loss should begin to occur. However my concern was, for some days I don’t reach my numbers. What should I do? I’m not hungry either!!

For instance, today I had 2 meals and a fat bomb that equates to 1300 calories 86g fat and 100g protein....finished with all meals for the day. My goals for the day are 2500cal. 196fats. 165protein based on the carb calculator app. ( I’m giving myself a caloric deficit so I try to stay below 2,000 calories )

I am also fasting. So I only eat from 12pm-8pm Any other tips and advice would be great. The goal is to maximize weight loss.

Thank you!!!

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/ketogains/comments/9ym30q/macros/

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Building a Data Mart with Pentaho Data Integration (Video Course)

I have been an enthusiastic follower of the Pentaho open source business intelligence movement for many years. At the beginning of 2013 I got asked to create a video tutorial/course on populating a star schema with Pentaho Kettle. This was my first foray into video tutorials. This video is now available on the Packt website.

To me the most interesting experience on this project was finding an open source columnar database. Certainly I could have just gone down the road of using a standard row-oriented one: But having worked on projects which made use of commercial columnar databases, I quite well understood their advantage. To my surprise, the landscape of open source columnar database was quite small. There has been some revival of sorts in the Hadoop world with Impala etc (using dedicated file formats), but this was at that time probably a bit too much cutting edge. The tutorial required a DB, which had established itself for some time and was easy to install: MonetDB. This is the same DB which is actually used by Kettle as well for Instaview.  This gave me the opportunity to discuss bulk loading and talk about some advantages of columnar DBs.

Creating these videos was not quite as easy as I initially anticipated. I spent actually quite a lot of time on this project and at the end of 2013 rerecorded most of the video sessions to fix some pronunciation problems (Although I’ve lived in the UK for 9 years now I can’t quite hide my roots ;)) as well as rewriting all the files to work with PDI v4.4 (initially I was working with a trunk version of PDI v5).

I do hope that these videos provide the viewer with a nice introduction into this exciting topic. As I mention at the beginning of the course, this is not an introduction to Pentaho Kettle in general - I do assume that the viewer already has some basic Pentaho Kettle knowledge. Furthermore I decided to only focus on the Linux command line - but it shouldn’t be all to difficult for the viewer to translate everything to a Windows or Mac OS X environment as well. Is this course perfect? I don’t think so - but for my first foray into the video tutorial world I do hope it is worthwhile and teaches the viewer a few tips and tricks.

Lastly I want to thank my reviews for their support and their honest feedback, Unnati at Packt Publishing for the administrative side and finally Brandon Jackson for his help, support and work on some bugs related to MonetDB bulk loader!

Source: http://diethardsteiner.blogspot.com/2014/01/building-data-mart-with-pentaho-data.html

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Making or breaking your Thanksgiving diet in 2018 - WEAU

EAU CLAIRE, Wis. (WEAU) -- ‘Tis the season for feasting! Along with skipping trips to the gym and ditching the dreaded scale, because, ‘Hey! It’s the holidays!’

“I think people tend to give themselves permission to overdo it because it's a holiday it only happens once a year,” Susan Kasik-Miller a Clinical Dietitian at HSHS Sacred Heart Hospital. “I think in general we tend to eat foods we don't eat the other times of the year.”

For many, Thanksgiving is the holiday to relax with family and indulge.

"All out the window, diets all out the window, I like to take the week off!" says Cade Lambrecht a student at UW-Eau Claire.

“They tend to be higher in fat, higher in calories, they tend to make us feel really good when we eat them,” says Kasik-Miller, talking about common Thanksgiving foods to appear at the table.

On average, Americans consume 3,000 to 4,500 calories at their thanksgiving celebrations compared to a typical 2,000 calorie diet, according to Consumer Report.

So how much of a difference does a little pre-planning and exercise make heading into your thanksgiving feast?

“Unless we do things to consciously think about how we're going to maintain a neutral calorie intake, we'll fall into trouble and find ourselves making a New Year’s resolution to lose 5-10 pounds,” says Kasik-Miller.

She recommends trading out fatty foods like artichoke dip for healthier, low-fat option like hummus and to get moving on Thanksgiving Day by taking a walk with the family or participating in a turkey trot.

“I think exercise not only helps you burn calories but it also makes you think about not overdoing with the calories, it gives you a much healthier mindset,” says Kasik-Miller.

Alyssa Kollross is a group exercise instructor and student at UW-Eau Claire.

“If you are eating a lot more calories and a lot more sweets things, you need to have that balance with exercise to kind of equal it,” she says.

Experts say going into the holiday with a plan can help you feel better and stay on track heading into the New Year.

Source: https://www.weau.com/content/news/Making-or-breaking-your-Thanksgiving-diet-in-2018-500956242.html

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How & Why I Traded My “Very Good Job” For Less Money (But More Balance)

I have been an avid reader of TFD for some months now, so when I realized I had a story to tell, I wanted to tell it here. In the midst of these articles, I have found advice, wisdom, and inspiration. I have also learned that every story is individual — and that, so long as we own our individual circumstances, there are many different stories worth writing. My husband and I have made some very big decisions lately, and as someone who turned to TFD whilst we were making them, I hope that my story may give some food for thought to other readers (or at the very least provide a Sunday-afternoon scrolling opportunity!).

Our circumstances are, of course, extremely specific to us. I’ll try to boil them down as much as my verbose, English-teacher style will allow: My husband and I have been married for nearly a year. He has a well-paid job which he enjoys and at which he is hugely successful. He also has a wonderful gift for compartmentalizing, which means that (most of the time), he is able to leave his work at the door and lead a full, balanced life. I, on the other hand, possess no such elusive skill, and we decided that I would leave my well-paid, mainly enjoyable but increasingly challenging job at Christmas and pursue self-employed roles alongside my family commitments. Our main goal? Less money, more life. By “more life,” we meant some very tangible changes: more quality time with each other, more days out at weekends, more dinners with friends in our home, a cleaner and more organized household, more time spent with my adored family who need my help.

In short, we sought a lower income in exchange for a better quality of life.

Of course, not everyone has the option we had. We are careful to note that we both had well-paid jobs that allowed us to save, and that we can live comfortably on my husband’s salary. By “live comfortably,” I don’t mean that we are overly wealthy — simply that my salary paid for luxuries that, in the face of a big decision, we decided we were willing to give up for our greater good. Faced with such a monumental decision, I offer you a snapshot of our process:

We weighed up what we needed most right now

In light of a family illness, our priorities suddenly became crystal clear — what we needed most was not surplus money or foreign holidays or a bigger house, but limited extraneous stress, better energy levels, and more time to help each other and our family. Your priorities may take a little more unpicking if disaster hasn’t struck to provide immediate perspective (and I sincerely hope that it hasn’t). Either way, it doesn’t take most people long to decide, in that moment, what is paramount. We were lucky that our priorities didn’t need to be financial — our house is big enough for the two of us, and there are no children to factor in. So we made our decision accordingly.

We did our maths

We would never have made the decision for me to leave my job without checking and double-checking that our finances looked the way we thought they did. Step one was to stay in our beloved (if small) terraced house instead of moving to a bigger property, which would require two consistent incomes to pay the mortgage.

Step two was to assess our day-to-day spending. Even with our relatively careful approach to money, we noticed that we were merrily spending frivolously at times, just because we could (dinners out were a real weakness of ours). We made ourselves spend two months as if we didn’t have my salary. This served two purposes: firstly, it gave us a clear indication of what needed to be reduced, refined and cut out of our budget to make our decision viable, and secondly, it helped us get to the next point a lot more quickly! Living without my salary for the last few months that we had it gave us added savings, and also meant that this first month without my usual income has not been a horrible shock.

We made sure our emergency fund was stable

It’s amazing how much it is possible to save when a wider goal is at stake. I took a piece of advice I learned from one of the TFD videos and renamed our bank accounts — priority one was to get the “Emergency Fund” account to a level with which we were comfortable. Anything we saved after that went into “House and Holiday” so that we would continue to do up our first home together and continue to look forward to (much more modest!) trips away. That emergency fund is always there and we hope it will never be needed, but it is enough that, should my husband need to stop working for any reason, our bills and mortgage could be met whilst I looked for a salaried job.

We knew what we’d do if things went wrong

See above. I’m highly trained in a profession that will always be needed (barring a post-apocalyptic existence, I can’t imagine a world with no English teachers) and I am confident that I could find a job when needed, whether supply, part-time or full-time. I worked extremely hard to be good at my job for six years – I will be in a good position to work as a teacher again if I need to. Back-up plan sorted.

We asked advice

We told the select people we trusted most (family, friends and colleagues) of our intentions and asked for their advice. We particularly sought out people who had done one or both of our two key intentions: self-employment and/or one half of the couple spending more time at home. We asked personal questions, promising and maintaining confidentiality. We talked together about what we had heard and weighed up the possible pros and cons. We listened to parts of their advice that we may not have wanted to hear but that were crucial to our decision-making process.

We made the decision

Having done all of the above, we decided that we wanted to go ahead with the change, and subsequently formed our mantra: Less money, more life. That mantra may seem daft or trite or the bastion of the privileged, but it got us through some challenging days. It reminds us daily why we’re not planning a foreign holiday any time soon and why our kitchen is so small that we trip over each other on occasion. It keeps us focused on our greater goals.

We kept (and keep) reassessing our choices

Finally, we continually reassess our choices. As I mentioned previously, I have an employment background that means I could earn well again if I needed to. As it happens, I am starting to build my self-employed status successfully, but we knew we could manage without me earning a bean. If that ever changes, we will reassess and start our process over again to make a new decision.

But for now, we are living more with less money. We are happier, healthier and more financially aware than we were before I left my salaried job. The future is in our hands — and we can’t wait to see what the next part of it holds.

Melanie had previously spent 6 years as an English teacher and middle-leader in a secondary school. Now she is working as a private tutor, a guest blogger and freelance contractor for an education consultancy and loving the opportunity to spend more time with her husband and other family members. In her spare time, she enjoys reading, writing, theatre and cinema trips, cultural days out and supporting her husband’s many running races!

Image via Unsplash

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Source: https://thefinancialdiet.com/how-why-i-traded-my-very-good-job-for-less-money-but-more-balance/

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[emerygoat26-blog]

Diet researched in Baton Rouge named second-best for overall health in 2019 - KPLC

“It doesn’t mean that people need to eat differently,” Champagne said. “You just give children and young adults more fruits, more vegetables. And actually, I think really setting a pattern as a food preparer, whether it be the mother, or the father, or even the children.”

Source: https://www.kplctv.com/2019/01/03/diet-researched-baton-rouge-named-second-best-overall-health/

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[emerygoat26-blog]

Soursop Leaf Extract Can Prevent Fibromyalgia Symptoms

Extract from soursop (Annona muricata L.) leaves can reduce chronic pain, anxiety, and depression and protect against fibromyalgia symptoms, reports a new study.

Researchers from the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Seville have recently published a study in which they state that diets supplemented with aqueous extract of Annona muricata L. leaves can prevent the symptoms associated with fibromyalgia, so improving the lives of these patients.

‘Extract from soursop (Annona muricata L.) leaves can prevent the symptoms associated with fibromyalgia.’ Read More..

Leaves of the species Annona muricata L. come from a tree of between 4 and 6 metres in height, from the botanical family Annonaceae. They are simple leaves, oblong and egg-like or oblong and elliptical in shape and between 5 and 15 cm in length. This species is native to the tropical areas of the Americas and is especially abundant in the Amazon region. It is usually cultivated for its medicinal use. The leaves have different ethnomedical uses according to their country of origin. The most important uses in traditional medicine, scientifically validated in pre-clinical tests, are for inflammation, pain, infections, diabetes, and cancer.

"The consumption of extract of Annona muricata L. leaves in pharmaceutical form and in the correct dosage can reduce the chronic pain, anxiety, and depression that accompany this disease. This extract comes from the traditional preparation using decoction", informs the expert Ana María Quilez from the Medicinal Plants research group at the University of Seville.

This study was carried out over one month using 60 five-week-old female rats in the laboratories of the Faculty of Pharmacy. The animals were divided into six groups that were fed a standard diet supplement with different quantities of this plant.

After the results obtained by the researchers, the next step will be to carry out clinical tests with patients, to corroborate the extract's activity and establish a safe and effective dose in humans.

Source: Eurekalert

Source: https://www.medindia.net/news/soursop-leaf-extract-can-prevent-fibromyalgia-symptoms-184105-1.htm

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[emerygoat26-blog]

Syn Free Vegetable and Bean Stew (Stove Top and Instant Pot)

Syn Free Vegetable and Bean Stew – A perfect hearty filling dish to serve on a cold winter’s day.

An amazing dish to make for Meat Free Mondays, if you are Vegan or simply just fancy a filling vegetable dish.

It’s packed with healthy vegetables, mixed beans and has a delicious flavour that the whole family will enjoy. 

This is one of my go-to recipes to make when I am batch cooking some stew and soup type dishes, as the ingredients are always items I have on hand in my fridge and pantry.

The only hard part is the chopping of vegetables. Unless of course, you use one of these vegetable choppers– It can come in super handy when you have lots of ingredients to dice up.

I recommend using a big casserole type pot to cook this in or a dutch oven, my favourite to cook stews and casseroles in, is my Staub Cast Iron Pot.

Own an Instant Pot or Pressure Cooker? You will be pleased to know you can cook this yummy Syn Free Vegetable and Bean Stew in your pressure cooker.

I use an Instant Pot which is basically a 7in1 cooker, which can slow cook, pressure cook, sauté and has various settings for soup, chilli, rice, porridge and even makes yoghurt (I haven’t tried that yet).

Manual high pressure is my choice of setting the majority of the time, picking my own timings depending on what it is I am making.

I use canned beans – six bean blend for the Vegetable and Bean stew, as it adds a great mixture, but you really can add in any beans you have on hand if there is a particular bean you don’t enjoy. I just like all the flecks of different colours from the variety of beans. 

I do recommend using the little bit of fennel, it is okay without, but it really does make such a difference to the flavour. 

Looking for some additional support on your weight loss journey? Did you know Slimming Eats has a friendly Slimming World Facebook Support Group where you can get daily meal ideas and recipe ideas? Come and check us out, we’d love to have you join

Love vegetable dishes like this? Check out some of my other Vegetarian recipes:

or head on over to my FULL RECIPE INDEX with over 850+ delicious Slimming World Recipes all fully searchable by meal type, ingredient, syn value etc. 

What Kitchen Items do I need to make this Syn Free Vegetable and Bean Stew?

Love dumplings? Give these Vegan Lentil Dumplings a try, they pair perfectly with this Syn Free Vegetable and Bean Stew.

Gotta love a yummy dumpling in your soup, stew or casserole right? These are not quite like your traditional dumpling, but perfectly hold together and are super easy to make. 

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Yield: 6

Syn Free Vegetable and Bean Stew – A perfect hearty filling dish to serve on a cold winter’s day.

Prep Time 15 minutes

Cook Time 40 minutes

Total Time 55 minutes

Ingredients

1 onion, chopped

2 cloves of garlic, crushed

1 large leek, chopped

2 medium carrots, diced

2 stalks of celery, chopped

300g of butternut squash, chopped

2.5 cups of mixed beans (canned)

2 tbs of tomato paste

6 cups of vegetable stock

1/2 tbs of Italian mixed herbs

1/2 tsp of fennel seed, crushed

salt and black pepper

cooking oil spray

Instructions

Stove Top:

Spray a large pot over a medium high heat with cooking oil spray

Add the onion, garlic, leeks, celery and carrot and fry for a couple of mins

Add in a little bit of stock to prevent any sticking and continue to fry until the onions are translucent.

Stir in the tomato paste, mixed herbs and fennel.

Add in the beans, butternut squash and stock, then bring to a boil, reduce heat, cover and simmer for 25-30 mins

Season as needed with salt and black pepper and stir through some fresh chopped parsley.

Instant Pot:

Set the Instant Pot to saute mode, spray with some cooking oil spray, and once hot, add in the onion, garlic, leeks, celery and carrot and fry for a couple of minutes.

Add in a little bit of the stock to prevent any sticking and continue to fry until the onions look translucent.

Add in the tomato paste, mixed herbs, fennel, beans, butternut squash and stock and stir to combine.

Add the lid (close valve if not self closing)

Set to 8 mins (manual) high pressure.

Once finished cooking, quick release the pressure.

Season as needed with salt and black pepper and stir through some fresh chopped parsley.

Notes

This recipe is gluten free, dairy free, vegan, Slimming World and Weight Watchers friendly

Extra Easy - Syn Free per serving

Green/Vegan - Syn Free per serving

WW Smart Points - 0 per serving

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Nutritional information is an estimate and is to be used for informational purposes only. Ingredients can vary greatly from brand to brand and therefore it would be impossible to give accurate information.

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Nutrition Information:

Yield:

6

Serving Size:

1 Amount Per Serving:Calories: 171 Total Fat: 1g Saturated Fat: 0.2g Sodium: 818mg Carbohydrates: 33.9g Fiber: 8.2g Sugar: 6.5g Protein: 7.7g

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Source: http://www.slimmingeats.com/blog/vegetable-and-bean-stew

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[emerygoat26-blog]

7 Truths About the FODMAP Diet Plan (I Wish I'd Known 4 Years Ago!)

Like many of you, when I first heard about the FODMAP diet plan as a way to change my own IBS symptoms, I was overwhelmed. Not just with all the information out there, although that definitely was the case. Sometimes, it was overwhelming how much I didn’t know.

Four years ago, there was very little information to go on, no explanation of the nuances. Suddenly having to change my diet overnight felt very difficult and complex, with no guidance on how to make it work in a practical sense.

There's more info out there now, but I think people can still relate to what I experienced. Also, a lot of the current information is still conflicting or out-dated.

I had to forge my own path. And a huge part of why I do what I do is that I believe that you shouldn’t have to do that to change your life for the better! 

(Which is why I started Calm Belly Kitchen!) 

Looking back on it, there’s so much I wish I’d known before I started. So many tips and tricks and even affirmations that would’ve made this whole thing a lot smoother—and a lot less emotional. 

I've also asked members of the community what they wish someone had told them when they first started out with the FODMAP diet plan. Many of the answers lined up with my experience!

So today, I'm going to share the things that I wish I knew when I first started. Hopefully, you’ll find this useful, no matter where you are in your journey.

#1 Onion and garlic are not absolutely essential for flavor

It seems like such a minor thing now, but this was definitely my number one source of anxiety and fear and stress when I started to grasp what the FODMAP diet really entailed. All those recipes I relied on would have to be modified or thrown out—and at first, I had no idea how to even begin. 

(This is also one of the biggest struggles that I hear from folks who send me emails, easily in the top three questions that I receive!) 

For years, I made my living as a recipe developer. I love food, and own an embarrassing amount of cookbooks! And I can tell you that giving up onion and garlic is not the end of the world.

Sure, it’s an adjustment, but it’s not impossible. While I, personally, can tolerate a bit of onion, I don’t do great with garlic, and I don’t really keep either of them in the house. It’s worth it, to me, to see the success of following the FODMAP diet plan in my own symptoms. 

In a way, whether it’s onion, garlic, or any other food, it really won’t be as bad as you think, giving it up temporarily or even for longer periods of time. I promise. 

You can check out this ultimate guide for other ways to flavor food that won’t trigger your IBS!

#2 A major diet change is hard, and it will take you time to get in your groove

Okay, I know I just said that giving up some foods isn’t the end of the world. And it’s not! But any major lifestyle change means changing all of your patterns—even ones you might not be aware you have. It will take time. It doesn’t happen overnight. 

Doctors love to give you a little two- or three-page handout that makes it seem super easy to just completely overhaul your diet overnight, but the truth is, not many people can just turn completely change the way that they cook, shop, and eat in one day. 

You have to be patient with yourself. You have to give yourself time (and grace!) as you begin the process. 

Even though I had cooking skills and already was a healthy eater, I couldn't turn it around overnight. I needed time to get comfortable with the changes in my eating habits.

Whatever you do, don't let beginner overwhelm hold you back from starting.

Just know that it's going to take time to get comfortable, and it's okay to be to be stressed about it when you start. If you mess up, that's okay! Don't beat yourself up—keep going.

#3 Eating in a social setting is less of a big deal than you might think

A lot of people ask me this one, especially as they start to really think about how often we all eat in social settings—restaurants, work lunches, family meals.

When you can control the food, things tend to work fine. But when other people are cooking? That can be a little stressful. 

I get it. 

If you’re worried about how the changes in your diet will affect eating out at restaurants—whether it’s asking for order changes or worrying about being judged for what you put in your face—that’s normal. 

No matter how much we worry that other people are judging us, people are always more concerned about what they are doing, than what other people are thinking. It’s just our nature! We’re all a little self-centered like that. 

And if someone does give you grief or side-eye for swapping your asparagus for a side salad? Then they really need to find a hobby. 

What you eat isn’t a judgement, or critique, of anyone else’s eating. Refusing a food, making healthier choices, these are all worth it, to make your body feel better. 

Prefer to watch? Check out the video below...

#4 You really do need to listen to your body

If you’ve spent any time on this site, then I know you’ve heard this one before. But it’s absolutely true. Listen to what your body is saying—not just with the food, but with all of it. 

The great thing about making this kind of diet change is that you have this really excellent opportunity to learn about all the other factors that affect your digestion, besides just the FODMAPs. When you take those away, you start to listen to the other little messages your body is sending. 

For example, stress is a big deal for me. It messes with my stomach. Now I can hear that message more clearly, and adjust my lifestyle accordingly. 

Another thing I learned was that adjusting the overall volume of food I was eating helped with my symptoms. I was just giving it too much to do! Eating smaller meals, letting them digest well, allowed my body to tell me, hey, you’ll feel less bloated and heavy and gross. 

For many of my clients, I often hear that their period sends them a huge message, thanks to fluctuating hormones! As you can see, all of these non-food factors can affect your gut.

Listen to them. 

Every body is different. What’s yours telling you? 

#5 Sourdough bread is your best friend

For those of you who love bread, this one is really exciting. 

(What? Bread is exciting! Especially bread that’s safe and delicious!)

This wasn’t even established when I was first beginning my FODMAP diet journey, but within the last two years, Monash has tested sourdough bread and found that, because of the slow fermentation process, sourdough bread has an extremely low FODMAP content. 

The only catch is that it MUST be made using a traditional slow rise process.

Luckily, it’s easy to tell if sourdough is indeed slow rise: Check the ingredients. If the sourdough bread contains yeast or enzymes, then it was not made with the slow rise method.

Traditional slow-rise sourdough requires just three main ingredients: flour, water, and salt. Instead of yeast, a “starter” causes the bread to rise. This happens when natural bacteria occurring in the air slowly ferments by consuming the FODMAPs and other carbohydrates in the flour. This produces gas, which creates the rise in the bread. 

Great news if you’ve been missing bread!

#6 You really do need to reintroduce FODMAPs by category

Like most of us, I spent a long time on the elimination phase of the FODMAP diet. Because I was feeling better, and seeing a reduction in my own symptoms, it felt really comfortable just to stay in that highly restricted zone. 

And yet it’s really important to test foods and reintroduce them—not just because it’s healthier to have more variety in your diet, but also because that’s the only way you’re going to know your personal FODMAP tolerance levels.

One thing I learned when I did finally reintroduce FODMAPs is that I have a pretty high tolerance for wheat. I can still eat my homemade pizza and croissants, and for me, that’s amazing. 

On the other hand, I used to love making sweet potato fries, but now I can only have a few bites. A bigger serving of sweet potato makes my stomach feel heavy and creates unpleasant symptoms the next day. And there’s no way I would’ve known that without reintroducing FODMAP categories one by one. 

You might be taking a risk with a certain food during this phase, but the knowledge you will gain will be priceless. 

#7 You won’t always feel deprived!

When we talk about diet changes, there is always this lingering worry, this fear of deprivation. 

And it makes sense: We’re taking away a lot of common foods that are in favorite dishes, at home and out in the world. It’s a huge adjustment, looking at food in this new way. 

Yes, it will absolutely feel like an adjustment. You’re definitely going to hate taking away some foods—but eventually, the feelings of being so healthy and feeling so much better and feeling empowered will begin to outweigh the difficulties. 

You may still experience IBS symptoms. That’s totally normal. But overall, you will feel so much better, because you’ll finally have control over how your body feels. 

And those are my top seven items I wish I’d known before starting the FODMAP diet!

They’re definitely truths for me, and ones I hear from my clients as well. I hope that they can empower you to begin your FODMAP journey.

If you're in that place of overwhelm...

...and just want a clear guide on what to eat, what to do, and what NOT to do, check out our D.I.Y. program to help you do the FODMAP elimination phase >>> Click to learn about Calm Belly Quickstart...

...because you deserve to have a calm belly too!

Source: https://calmbellykitchen.com/blog/7-truths-about-the-fodmap-diet

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[emerygoat26-blog]

Health benefits of elderberry

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Source: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/323288.php

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[emerygoat26-blog]

Grocery-store based nutrition education improves eating habits

Hypertension affects over 60 million adults in the United States and less than half have their condition under control. A new study published in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior found that grocery store?based nutrition counseling was effective in changing dietary habits of patients being treated for hypertension.

"Primary care providers face multiple barriers when delivering nutrition information to patients, including lack of training on how to provide lifestyle behavior counseling combined with lack of time to interact with the patient," said lead author Rosanna P. Watowicz, PhD, RDN, LD, Department of Nutrition, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA. "This study's aim was to evaluate the effectiveness of a nutrition counseling program provided by a registered dietitian in the familiar setting of a grocery store."

This study recruited patients from three primary care offices that were part of an urban academic medical center. Thirty adults aged 18-60 years diagnosed with hypertension participated. Study participants represented a diverse demographic in regard to sex, race, education, and employment.

Participants received individual counseling at one of three local grocery stores from two registered dietitians trained to provide lifestyle modification information based on the DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) diet. Three counseling sessions, provided free to the patients, occurred over 12 weeks. The first visit was 60 minutes long followed by two 30-45-minute sessions. Following each session, a recap of the visit and patient's progress towards goals were provided to the primary care provider to be included in the patient's records.

Diet quality was assessed using the Healthy Eating Index-2010, a measure of overall diet quality compared to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Patients completed a food frequency questionnaire, documenting food and beverages consumed at least once during the previous three months, prior to beginning the study and at the end of the study. Blood pressure measurements were also taken.

Following the education, patients' eating habits significantly improved in regard to total fruit, whole fruit, greens and beans, whole grains, fatty acids, refined grains, and empty calories. Sodium, saturated fat, discretionary solid fat, and total fat intake decreased significantly as well. Intake of added sugar also decreased although not to the same extent as the other categories.

Blood pressure measurements also decreased during the study, but due to the small number of participants the differences were not statistically significant. Additionally, patients reported a high level of compliance in taking their hypertension medication as prescribed during the study.

"Providing education at the grocery store offers a convenient location on a schedule with more flexibility than a primary care office and reinforces dietary changes in the environment where food decisions are made," said Dr. Watowicz. "This strategy should be researched with other health conditions."

Story Source:

Materials provided by Elsevier. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/02/190211131517.htm

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[emerygoat26-blog]

Liver Support by Balance ONE

One of the most common questions we receive is, “How do I get relief from these Candida symptoms?”

By giving your liver the support that it needs, you can eliminate many of the symptoms like fatigue, bloating, and brain fog that are associated with an intestinal yeast overgrowth.

To understand why this is, we need to take a closer look at the reasons why those symptoms are appearing.

Most Candida symptoms result from the toxic metabolites produced by Candida albicans. These are created as part of Candida’s lifecycle, and include acetaldehyde, uric acid, ammonia, and more.

Your body is usually very capable of dealing with these toxins. Your liver, which is the most important detoxification organ, processes them and gets them ready to be excreted from your body.

A good example is acetaldehyde. This neurotoxin, which is also a product of alcohol metabolism, is produced by Candida albicans in relatively large amounts. Inside your liver, an enzyme named Aldehyde oxidase converts it into acetic acid, which can then be used or expelled.

For this process to happen efficiently, you need a trace mineral named molybdenum. This is commonly found in many foods, but in some circumstances your body needs extra support. For example, if you have a long-running yeast overgrowth that has been producing acetaldehyde for years, it’s very possible that you are low in molybdenum.

If your body doesn’t have enough of this important trace mineral, you might experience headaches, brain fog, and other common Candida symptoms.

How to Support Your Liver

That’s just one example of how your liver can end up overloaded, stressed, and unable to do its job properly.

There are herbal supplements and minerals that will give your liver the support that it needs. We have recommended these for years as part of our Ultimate Candida Diet program. They include molybdenum, milk thistle, NAC, dandelion extract, and more.

Sourcing these supplements used to be challenging, and many Candida sufferers would only choose one or two supplements to give them relief from their symptoms. By doing this, they would miss out on the benefits offered by the others.

That’s why I decided to create a new, high-quality supplement that contains all of those liver-supportive ingredients. It’s convenient, economical, and the best choice for Candida.

We have named it Liver Support, and it’s selling under our Balance ONE brand. You can find it on Amazon, or on the Balance ONE website.

Liver Support by Balance ONE

We included all the liver-supportive ingredients that we could in this supplement. Each of these ingredients is scientifically proven to support the liver and promote detoxification. Here’s a full list:

Milk thistle

NAC

Molybdenum

Artichoke Leaf

Turmeric Root

Dandelion Root

Yellow Dock Root

Beet Root

Ginger Root

Choline

Selenium

If you’re suffering from Candida and looking to get relief from your symptoms, this supplement contains all the scientifically-backed, liver-supportive ingredients that you need.

Let’s take a closer look at three of those ingredients:

Molybdenum is the most effective substance you can take to eliminate acetaldehyde, the neurotoxin that causes many Candida symptoms. The ‘glycinate’ form, which this supplement uses, tends to be well absorbed and tolerated.

Milk thistle stimulates protein synthesis in your liver, helping to repair damaged liver cells and restoring their function. It actively protects your liver cells, and encourages the growth of new liver cells. It is regularly used for cirrhosis, liver poisoning and viral hepatitis, and is widely used in the medical community.

NAC is a dual-purpose supplement that is a great choice for your Candida diet. Firstly, NAC is very supportive for good liver health. And secondly, it disrupts the protective biofilms that are created by Candida albicans and other pathogens.

Here are a few other important points about Liver Support:

Free of allergens like dairy, soy, nuts, wheat, and gluten.

Free of preservatives, and artificial colors and flavors.

Non-GMO and vegan.

Made in Oregon, USA, in an GMP-certified, NSF-approved facility.

Rigorous quality control at every step of the manufacturing process.

Where Can You Find Liver Support by Balance ONE?

I’m confident that Liver Support is the best supplement on the market for getting relief from Candida symptoms. You won’t find this combination of ingredients in any other supplement.

If you’d like to try Liver Support, you can find it for sale on Amazon, or through the Balance ONE website.

Let me know how it works for you!

Source: https://www.thecandidadiet.com/liver-support-by-balance-one/

[emerygoat26-blog]

The Great SSRI Scam: How Taking Anti-Depressant Drugs Can Kill You, Part 1

Warning: This article contains strong language. If you don't like strong language, then please leave this page immediately.

I haven’t written much about anti-depressant drugs over the years. The reason is simple: They were of little interest to me. Quite frankly, I found the idea of solving a complex psychological issue like depression simply by popping a daily pill to be utterly absurd. The so-called “chemical imbalance” theory of depression is an absolute farce, a Big Pharma-contrived tale created purely to sell anti-depressants. To this day, no-one – I repeat, no-one – has ever presented anything even resembling proof for the nonsensical “chemical imbalance” theory. 

My disinterest in anti-depressants recently changed - in a big way. I had the opportunity to witness someone I know closely go through pure hell on a SSRI drug known as fluvoxamine. The changes in his outlook and behaviour while on fluvoxamine were truly alarming – he began morphing into a different person.

Let’s call this person Adriano. What follows is Adriano’s scary SSRI experience, followed by the research showing anti-depressants dramatically increase suicide risk and often cause – yes, cause - depression, anxiety, mania, agitation, insomnia, aggression, impulsivity, and an especially dreadful condition known as akathisia.

After witnessing Adriano’s frightening ordeal, I promptly began scrutinizing the research on anti-depressants, especially the widely prescribed variants known as Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs).

What I uncovered truly shocked me.

These drugs are dangerous junk, pure and simple.

Anti-Depressants: Turning the Black Dog into a Fire-Breathing Dragon

For reasons that will soon become obvious, I’ll endeavour to recount Adriano’s story in a manner that will minimize the chance of identifying him. Let’s just say Adriano hasn’t had an easy life. But he’s a survivor; several of his childhood and teen acquaintances, who grew up in similar trying circumstances, have since succumbed to suicide, fatal drug overdoses and mental illness.

However, the last few years have sorely tested Adriano’s resilience, and his mental outlook has suffered accordingly. An energetic guy whose positive vibes used to rub off on those around him, Adriano started to become despondent and withdrawn. Adriano’s doctor, increasingly concerned by this worrisome change, repeatedly tried to get his patient on anti-depressants. He’d already prescribed Adriano an anti-depressant known as Lexapro (escalitopram) after the latter hit a rough patch back in 2010, but Adriano took it for less than a week. Almost immediately, Lexapro turned Adriano into a zombie. Within days of taking it, he felt like all the emotion had been sucked from his body. “I wasn’t happy, I wasn’t sad, I was simply void of all emotion,” recalls Adriano. Because Adriano – a feisty Italian - didn’t fancy going through life with the personality and passion of a concrete slab, he promptly stopped taking Lexapro.

Like yours truly, Adriano is a highly active individual who places a premium on health and fitness. As such, Adriano has never used illicit recreational drugs. Ever. Heck, Adriano’s idea of a “hard drug” is dark ale. Even when it comes to prescription drugs, Adriano is reluctant to take something unless he truly feels it is necessary.

And so Adriano’s doctor really had his work cut out for him this time around.

The ‘anti-depressant’ Adriano’s doctor was pimping this time was fluvoxamine maleate, a drug introduced decades ago by Belgian company Solvay and originally marketed under the name Luvox.

After a particularly impassioned speech, in which his doctor told Adriano all the wonderful things the “very safe” fluvoxamine would do for him, how it would cure his “chemical imbalance”, put him on an even keel, lift his mood, make him think clearly, make him feel much better, and pretty much turn him into an international sex symbol adored by millions of gorgeous, panting women around the world, Adriano finally relented. Okay, his doctor never really mentioned the sex symbol thing, but he sure did make fluvoxamine sound like the closest thing to sex in a pill.

The first red flag was raised almost immediately after Adriano reluctantly agreed to start taking fluvoxamine. “You will probably feel nauseous when you start taking it,” said his doctor. “That’s a good sign.”

“Throwing up is a good sign? You serious?”

“It means it’s working.”

“No, it means it’s making me sick.”

His doctor persisted, but Adriano remained wholly unconvinced that feeling sick and wanting to hurl could possibly be a good thing. So he presented his doctor with a compromise: He’d begin by taking half the starting adult dose (the ‘therapeutic’ adult dose for fluvoxamine ranges from 100 to 300mg daily). He’d take the 100mg tablets, slice them in half, and take 50mg a day. When Adriano felt game, he’d try a full tablet. If it made him sick, he’d cut back and attempt the higher dosage again at a later date.

His doctor concurred, and so off Adriano went to fill the script. He then did exactly as promised: Every night, he took 50mg, and after a while ventured into 100mg territory. But every time Adriano tried the 100mg dosage, he felt nauseous the next day. His doctor may have somehow been convinced that nausea is a good thing, but as someone who exercised a lot and needed to eat like a horse in order to keep his weight up, feeling queasy all day was a disaster.

Even at 50mg, Adriano noticed his appetite, which is normally voracious, had started to diminish. He couldn’t eat as many meals per day, and at mealtimes he couldn’t stomach as much food as previously. For a high voltage, high mileage exerciser like Adriano, this was not a good thing.

This went on for months. Fluvoxamine impaired his appetite, but had no positive effect on his mental state.

In modern pop psychology parlance, I believe this would be known as a “lose-lose situation”.

Things Go From Bad to Worse

In early November, Adriano received a harsh financial blow, resulting from a wholly unfair decision that was completely beyond his control. Adriano had done nothing wrong, but a highly overpaid employee of the evil, callous enterprise known as the State of South Australia clearly didn’t give a brass razoo. When you’re in a position of power, you get to screw with people’s lives while remaining free of any personal consequences.

For someone who was really struggling to see the positives in life, this was a disastrous development. Adriano had come to view the world as an eminently unpredictable and unfair place, where nothing ever seemed to work in his favour. His family and friends were doing all they could to convince him otherwise, but this latest development didn’t exactly help their case.

Adriano proceeded to completely lose his shit. As in, he had a certified meltdown. Luckily, one of the people he messaged that night with the bad news was his doctor, who promptly jumped in his car, picked Adriano up, and took him to a café where they sat and talked. And talked. And talked some more.

Very wisely, he only let Adriano drink decaffeinated that night.

Get a Job, Go Crazy

At the same time this harsh financial decision occurred, Adriano began a new job.

Ever started a new job while your life is in turmoil and your sanity is being pushed to the brink?

It’s no fun, as Adriano will tell you.

Indeed, Adriano’s life was about to enter a whole new level of drama. And fluvoxamine would play a starring role.

Social Anxiety: When Introducing Yourself Becomes a Nightmare

Some people think terms like “social anxiety” are just wanky pop-psychology buzzwords used to describe pseudo conditions that don’t really exist. To those folks, I say this: Pull your heads out of your assholes. Social anxiety is real as jock itch, and in November 2018 Adriano suffered a massive dose of it (social anxiety that is, not jock itch).

His new job entailed six weeks of training, after which he and his colleagues were to begin taking live calls in a call centre. The morning of the very first day of training, the lecturer asked everyone in the class to introduce themselves and to tell a bit about themselves. As soon as the lecturer said this, Adriano’s heart began racing. By the time it was his turn to speak, his heart was pounding like a bass drum.  

“What in bejesus is happening to me?”, Adriano thought to himself.

The muscular Adriano has faced down and fought guys twice his size without batting an eyelid, but here he was, absolutely terrified at the thought of simply having to introduce himself to his new classmates. 

“It was just fucked,” recalls Adriano.

And it would get a lot worse before it got better.

A lot of people, when they are being kicked around by life, become emotional, mouthy and confrontational, and take out their frustrations on others. Adriano tends to do the exact opposite. He battens down the hatches, withdraws into his shell and goes all quiet while he struggles to deal with his inner turmoil. This process of withdrawal is known as “numbing,” a subconscious attempt to quell the emotional pain that is part and parcel of depression.

Those who know Adriano will readily confirm he is a friendly, polite and empathetic guy. Those who don’t, and who encounter him when he’s in numbing mode, can quickly get the wrong impression. They simply assume he’s aloof and unfriendly, even stuck-up and arrogant. The poker-faced, ice cold demeanour Adriano employs when things are really getting to him doesn’t exactly help matters.

And so at a time where Adriano needed to be mixing and ingratiating himself with his new colleagues, he was instead walking around with the demeanour of a CIA agent. Thankfully, some of his new colleagues weren’t so easily deterred and made the effort to talk to him anyway – something for which Adriano was truly grateful.

Traumatic Flashbacks

One morning, Adriano’s group was given a presentation on domestic violence. As the guest lecturers began their presentation, they said that if the subject hit too close to home for anyone, they were welcome to bow out of the session.

Guess who was the first to crack?

Yep, the Calabrian Iceman: Adriano.

It happened during a short 4-minute video re-enactment of a domestic violence scene. The re-enactment featured an abusive asshole terrorising his wife and kids. The bit that really triggered Adriano off was a scene in which the beleaguered wife served her prick of a husband a meal. This meal, it turns out, was not to the husband’s liking. And so to express his displeasure, and confirm what an utter turd of a human being he was, he held out the plate of food in front of her and their kids for dramatic effect - and then let it drop to the floor.

I won’t go into the details of just why this particular scene unlocked Adriano’s adrenalin pool. Nor will I elaborate on just why domestic violence so easily presses his hot button. Let’s just say Adriano is only too familiar with the behaviour of abusive pricks, and the long term scars these maggots leave on their partners and children.

What I will share is that when Adriano saw that scene, he immediately wanted to leap into the screen and gauge the abusive husband’s eyes out. Yes, Adriano knows, it was just a re-enactment and the folks in that scene were all paid actors. At that moment in time, however, that scene was as real to Adriano as it gets.

It left him trembling.

Life Loves Kicking You When You’re Down

Adriano has a dog whom he loves dearly and treats like a king. A couple of weeks into his training, Adriano had to take his pampered pooch to the vet for a routine dental procedure. He dropped his dog off at the veterinarian surgery early in the morning, then headed off to work. During lunch, he turned his phone on and promptly received a call from the vet.

“How is he?”, asked Adriano, fully expecting the vet to confirm everything went well.

The news was not good. While removing some calcium build-up from his dog’s jaw (a common phenomenon in older dogs), the vet had noticed a suspicious-looking growth in his dog’s lower jaw. The vet had seen these growths before, and the prognosis was almost always bad.

It looked like Adriano’s dog had cancer.

The news sent Adriano reeling; he felt like he’d just been smashed in the head with a baseball bat. His stomach started churning. In a state of semi-shock and struggling to gather his thoughts, he immediately packed away his half-eaten lunch, grabbed the rest of his gear, and headed for his car.

“All this other bullshit, and now my dog?!”, Adriano kept thinking as he drove home. “C’mon, not my dog!?!”

Thankfully, this was one shitty situation that would eventually have a positive outcome: One week, a series of tests, and $2,500 later, it was confirmed that the suspicious-looking tumour was in fact benign. But during that week while he waited for the pathology results to come back, Adriano was sick with worry.

A Disastrous Decision is Made

Clearly, Adriano was going through a rough time. And he was struggling to cope. He wanted to connect and interact with his classmates, most of whom seemed like really nice folks, but he simultaneously felt consumed by a need to withdraw. And his nervous system now seemed to constantly be on tenterhooks. This was a definite problem, because in several weeks’ time he would be live on the phone, taking difficult calls. He could expect to field calls from people in severe financial hardship, people with substance abuse problems and victims of domestic violence. To handle these calls calmly and confidently, Adriano would need to bring his A-Game.

But at that point, he felt a long, long way from being A-grade.

And so Adriano went back to his doctor and told him about his increasing anxiety. The 50mg of fluvoxamine he’d been taking each day was clearly doing absolutely nothing to help him.

His doctor promptly made the same suggestion a lot of other doctors would reflexively make: Increase the SSRI dosage.

”Adriano,” said his doctor, “you need to up the dosage of fluvoxamine. The starting adult dose is 100mg. You’re only taking 50mg, which is a pediatric dose.”

And so then Adriano agreed to do something he will forever regret: He agreed to increase the dosage to 100mg. He vowed to fight the nausea, and doggedly persist with the 100mg dose until it started helping him.

And so began Adriano’s frighteningly rapid slide into suicidal territory.

The Short Dark Road into Hell

One of the defining characteristics of depression is relentless negativity. Destructive, self-defeating negative thoughts become your constant companion. And they just won’t go away. They are with you when you wake up in the morning, they are eating at you all day, and they’re still there when you’re trying to get to sleep at night.

When you’re depressed, you don’t reflect on the good things in your life: Your excellent physical health, your supportive family, your awesome friends, your beautiful pets. None of that stuff even seems to register. Instead, you start dwelling on every real or perceived failure, shortcoming and disappointment that has ever afflicted your life.

An illuminating example of this soul-disintegrating mindset can be found in the recent and terribly sad death of celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain. On the surface, Bourdain seemed to be living the dream. "He had everything. Success beyond his wildest dreams. Money beyond his wildest dreams," said Bourdain's mother, Gladys. He was a celebrity, by virtue of hosting a popular TV series which involved travelling around the world, meeting interesting people and sampling delicious local foods. He seemed a talented, likeable guy. He was dating an Italian actress, Asia Argento, almost 20 years his junior.

But then on June 8, 2018, came the shocking news. Bourdain was found dead in his hotel room; he had hung himself in the bathroom. Bourdain reportedly “had been in a dark mood” the couple of days prior to his death. Pictures then emerged, taken prior to Bourdain’s death, of Argento cavorting with a French journalist.

Bourdain, I’m guessing, died with a broken heart.

The late Anthony Bourdain.

I’m sure Bourdain, with his celebrity status and his global travel, would have had little difficulty finding an attractive – and infinitely more worthy – replacement for Argento. But in his last days, that’s not how Bourdain would’ve seen it. When you’re depressed, you become engulfed by a suffocating sense of hopelessness and despair. Nothing ever seems to go right. You start wondering what the heck the point of your life is, and you start wondering why the hell you are even here. You remember all the hopes and dreams you had when you were younger, and you look at where your life is now. You start to wish that you could go to bed at night, and never have to wake up.

No more frustrations, no more disappointments, no more betrayals, no more hassles, no more bills, no more bullshit.

You start ideating about suicide.

And this is where anti-depressant drugs become a very, very dangerous proposition.

SSRIs Increase Suicide Risk

Despite all the lavish bullshit that doctors, drug companies and the medical-industrial complex have fed us over the years, the reality about anti-depressants, and SSRI drugs especially, is that they increase suicide risk.

Let me state that again:

Taking so-called ‘anti-depressants’ increases the risk of suicide. People on these drugs are more likely to try and kill themselves than similarly depressed people who take a placebo.

The drug companies who produce SSRI drugs know full well they increase suicide risk. For example, the “Warnings and Precautions” sections of the package insert for fluvoxamine warns:

"Clinical Worsening/Suicide Risk: Monitor for clinical worsening of suicidal thoughts/behaviors especially during the initial months of therapy and at times of dose changes."

“All patients being treated with antidepressants for any indication should be monitored appropriately and observed closely for clinical worsening, suicidality, and unusual changes in behavior, especially during the initial few months of a course of drug therapy, or at times of dose changes, either increases or decreases.”

The insert provides no research data to show by just how much fluvoxamine increases suicide risk (don’t worry, I will), and these warnings are hidden away in the insert’s mass of fine print that most patients and, I’m confident, most doctors never read (Adriano’s doctor didn’t).

So we have a class of drugs that are relentlessly promoted and prescribed as a panacea for depression and anxiety, but in fact increase your suicide risk.

I’d say that is a major problem.

But the overriding priority of the Big Pharma drug cartel is making money, not doing the right thing by sick and vulnerable people. As such, there has been a monumental effort over the years to downplay the very real increased suicide risk imparted by anti-depressants such as SSRIs. This effort has gone far beyond using compliant researchers to write favourable SSRI reviews loaded with idiotic rationalizations; it has involved outright fraud. Unfavourable studies have been suppressed and withheld from publication, and much of the SSRI data that has been ‘peer-reviewed’ and published has been manipulated and fabricated.

The increased suicide risk from SSRI use among teens and young adults is so pronounced, that even drug companies and the morally bankrupt researchers they fund have not been able to massage the data enough to hide it. As such, the current official party line is that SSRIs may increase suicide risk in this demographic, but they exert no increased risk in middle aged folks and actually reduce suicide risk in those over 65.

Bullshit.

I’m here to tell you that they increase the suicide risk across all age groups. Rest assured, I’ll be discussing the research confirming this shortly.

The more I look into anti-depressant drugs, the more I realize they are just like statin drugs: Useless, toxic crap dressed up as “wonder drugs.”

Wonder Drugs: You Take Them, and then Wonder What the Fuck Happened

Suicidal ideation is common among people with depression. However, when people are depressed, they are often too despondent and lack the motivation to act upon their suicidal thoughts.

However, when these patients begin taking an anti-depressant drug, things can quickly take a turn for the worse. That’s because anti-depressants – contrary to their common image as drugs that leave you placid and dopey – actually have a stimulating effect in many people. Rather than reduce their anxiety, these drugs can make people jittery, agitated and even cause mania.

As the package insert for fluvoxamine notes:

"The following symptoms, anxiety, agitation, panic attacks, insomnia, irritability, hostility, aggressiveness, impulsivity, akathisia (psychomotor restlessness), hypomania, and mania, have been reported in adult and pediatric patients being treated with antidepressants for major depressive disorder as well as for other indications, both psychiatric and nonpsychiatric. Although a causal link between the emergence of such symptoms and either the worsening of depression and/or the emergence of suicidal impulses has not been established, there is concern that such symptoms may represent precursors to emerging suicidality." 

You see all those symptoms I’ve highlighted in bold? Adriano suffered each and every one while taking fluvoxamine and/or during the rollercoaster hell ride that ensued when he stopped taking it.

And so when you give a SSRI to someone ideating about suicide, and they are now in a “wired”, agitated, impulsive and maybe even manic state, you have essentially thrown fuel onto the fire.

That person is now much more likely to act upon their suicidal impulses.

Thursday the 13th

13 December 2018, was the second-last day of training at Adriano’s new job; the following week, he and his colleagues would be going live on the phones. He was a bit nervous, as he didn’t feel the training had adequately prepared him for what was about to come. Several of Adriano’s classmates felt the same way (and as subsequent events would confirm, they were right). They all wanted to do a good job, but were apprehensive about whether the training they had been given was sufficient.

Adriano’s emotional state had been erratic. One day he felt okay, the next he was down in the dumps. Thursday was one of those days. The day started off innocuously enough, but as Adriano began driving home, he could feel his mood sinking - quickly. He went home and rapidly descended into what he now describes as the darkest six or so hours of his life.

“It was ferocious,” says Adriano, “and it pretty much came out of nowhere. The intensity of my despair, the vividness with which I recounted all my major frustrations and disappointments, the overwhelming and crushing feeling of loneliness and isolation, was like nothing I’d experienced before. I completely gave up all hope that night, and have no doubt that if I had a gun handy, I wouldn’t be here today. That evening, burying a piece of lead in my brain seemed a far easier and much more attractive option than continuing on.”

Thankfully, Adriano didn’t have a gun handy.

He even thought about hanging himself, but again, he didn’t have the requisite length of rope, and Bunnings had long since closed for the evening.

And thank goodness for that.

Miraculously, Adriano somehow managed to get to sleep without much difficulty that night. Maybe he was just too emotionally drained and exhausted to stay awake.

When Adriano woke up the next morning, he felt better. Significantly better. However, the previous night’s chilling experience had left him absolutely stunned, and he was shaking. In a matter of hours, he had gone from 0 to 100 – no, make that 300. The very next morning, he was almost back to zero again.

Adriano was absolutely rocked by how quickly he went from relatively OK, to earnestly wanting to check out of life.

That morning, Adriano got to work and as soon as his team leader arrived, Adriano asked if they could go talk somewhere private. Adriano explained what happened the night before, and his team leader could see Adriano was still shaking. This team leader proved what an outstanding, non-judgemental individual he was by listening, talking with, and reassuring Adriano. He said something that immediately lifted Adriano’s spirits: He said Adriano was one of a handful of class members that he’d tagged as future floorwalkers. These are the folks who walk around the call room, armed with a tablet and providing assistance to those stuck on especially difficult calls. “You have the ability to break down complicated information and present it in a way people can easily understand,” said the team leader. “I’ve watched the class when you talk; everyone stops and listens to what you have to say. You’d make a great floorwalker.”

Wow, positive reinforcement! Adriano hadn’t tasted that for a while.

This actually lifted Adriano’s spirits, and he felt pretty good the rest of Friday and all that weekend.

Despite the positive boost provided by his team leader, that night and over the weekend Adriano still felt jittery and his heart was racing. On Saturday evening, he got caught up with chores and went to bed having forgotten to take his daily fluvoxamine dose. When the shakes and jitters continued throughout Sunday, he took 200mg in the evening to compensate for the missed Saturday dose.

Then came the big day; Monday, the first day that Adriano and his colleagues began taking live calls. It was a tough day, to be sure. But at the same time, it wasn’t as bad as Adriano thought. With floorwalker help, he was able to answer and process the calls without issue.

All of which made Adriano’s concomitant physical symptoms a real mystery. All day, he was shaking and his heart was racing furiously. It felt like his throttle was stuck on. During the tea and lunch breaks, Adriano had to hide his shaking hands from his colleagues. Needless to say, these physical symptoms were out of all proportion to how he was feeling mentally. His mind seemed relatively at ease with what was transpiring in the call room, but his body was acting as if he’d just been confronted by a pack of sabre-toothed tigers.

And so Monday night, Adriano took 200 to 300mg of fluvoxamine. He can’t tell you which dosage for sure; he meant to take 200mg, but when he went to take the second tablet, he earnestly couldn’t remember if he’d already taken 1 or 2 tablets. This was another worrying effect of fluvoxamine; after he started taking it, the mentally acute Adriano began experiencing strange episodes of forgetfulness and absentmindedness.

Judging by the way he felt Tuesday, Adriano most likely took 300mg. His eyes were puffy when he got up that morning, and the lymph glands in his throat were swollen. His hands continued to shake and his heart raced all throughout the day. And he had the strongest feeling of nausea yet, which persisted all day.

It was at this point Adriano finally wised up to just what fluvoxamine was doing to him. He didn’t have any of these symptoms prior to taking it, and all these symptoms worsened in step with his dosage increases. At this point, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to detect the cause and effect relationship.

In disgust, Adriano quit fluvoxamine. Cold Turkey. Tuesday night, he didn’t take his scheduled dose, and he hasn’t taken any fluvoxamine since.

Instead, when he got up on Wednesday morning, he filled his bath with hot water and poured in some Epsom salts and green tea. Boy, did it feel good to lie back in that hot bath and just relax and let his mind wander. With such a relaxing start, Wednesday actually turned out to be a pretty good day for Adriano; the shakes and racing heart symptoms had almost entirely disappeared.

Adriano thought his SSRI-induced troubles had finally been laid to rest.

Boy, was he mistaken.

Quitting SSRIs: The Rollercoaster Ride from Hell

Anyone who knows anything about anti-depressants knows you shouldn’t just quit them cold turkey. But that is exactly what Adriano did. He was so disgusted by what fluvoxamine had done to him, so rattled by the side effects, and so angry he’d let his doctor convince him to take it, that he just wanted it out of his body and out of his life ASAP.

SSRIs and other anti-depressants are being sold on the fanciful theory that when you suffer depression, you are suffering from a chemical imbalance. It’s a nonsensical theory with no scientific foundation, but a theory that has nonetheless come to be accepted as fact by the medical profession.

I’ll tell you what does cause a chemical imbalance: Suddenly quitting anti-depressants.

Doing so leaves you susceptible to sudden changes in your brain chemistry, which then leaves you prone to all sorts of unpredictable and dangerous side effects.

The first one to manifest in Adriano was aggression. Gone was his trademark suffer-in-silence stoicism; he was now starting to develop the demeanour of an agitated pit bull. The first and most dangerous arena in which his new anti-social attitude manifested itself was on the road. “I started doing stupid, risky stuff on the road,” recounts Adriano.

What kind of risky stuff?

“One morning I was driving to work, and got stuck behind some crawling idiot in the right hand lane. [Here in Australia, slow-moving traffic is supposed to stay in the left hand lane]. Whether this guy was still half asleep or just an inconsiderate jerk, I don’t know. What I do know is that he would take off slowly from the lights, then leisurely work his way up to only 50 km/h, despite the 60 km/h posted limit. The other two lanes were full of traffic, and I couldn’t find an opening to change lanes and get around him.”

Normally, Adriano would just mutter under his breath, and wait for a safe opportunity to pass the offending driver. But Adriano, who had just quit fluvoxamine, was in anything but a normal state of mind. He was fuming.

Then came the eruption. While Adriano remained stuck behind Captain Dipshit, the traffic in the right hand lane came to a complete halt thanks to a car ahead that had decided to turn right.

Adriano lost it. He quickly glanced over his left shoulder and saw that the middle lane was now free. He swung to the left, maneuvered around the cars in the right lane, then stomped his right foot to the floor.

And left it there.

Adriano’s car shot forward, pushing him back into his seat. As the turbo on Adriano’s car kicked in with an almighty thunder-clap, it spat out a thick black cloud of carbon that engulfed the traffic behind him. Now back in the right hand lane, Adriano’s car quickly obliterated the posted speed limit, tearing past a long line of cars in the middle lane. They were doing 60 km/h – Adriano must have been doing at least 100 km/h.

Quitting SSRIs needs to be done gradually and under supervision.

“If one of those cars had pulled into my lane,” recalls Adriano, “we would have made the evening news.”

“I cleared the cars, and when I was way down the road I suddenly checked myself,” says Adriano. “’Che cazzo fai???’ [Italian for ‘What the fuck are you doing?’] I asked myself. That’d be a bit hard to defend in court!”

“I had a lot of those ‘what the fuck are you doing?’ moments during that post-SSRI period,” says Adriano. “That fluvoxamine filth made me shockingly impulsive. Normally, when you get the first inklings of a stupid idea in your head, there’s that counter voice that quickly crushes the idea with reason and commonsense. But when I was taking fluvoxamine, and especially after coming off it, that rational voice didn’t kick in until well after I did something dumb. I’d do something idiotic and irrational, then afterwards I’d snap to my senses and think ‘what the hell just happened??? What the fuck are you doing???’”

“It was scary. That fluvoxamine shit turned me into a different person. And not a good one.”

SSRIs: Making Flabby Women Seem Beautiful

When Adriano began his new job, he was assigned to one of four training groups. All four groups spent that first six weeks being trained in adjacent classrooms. One of those classrooms had a ceiling-to-floor glass frontage, and every time Adriano walked past it he noticed an olive-skinned girl flirting heavily with him.

“Every time I walked past,” recalls Adriano, “she was looking at me intently and smiling.”

“These weren’t ‘hey there, I’d like to get to know you’ smiles,” recalls Adriano, “these were more ‘I’d love to get you alone, undo your zipper and …’ smiles”.

For the purposes of this article, let’s call this girl Tahini.

From what Adriano had seen and overheard of Tahini, she wasn’t looking for Mr Right; she was a good time girl out for some casual fun. Here in uncouth and highly unromantic Australia, where the hook-up culture reigns supreme, that is hardly unusual. When this girl scanned Adriano and took in his chiselled facial features and his lean muscular build, marriage and kids were clearly the last things on her mind.

The problem for Tahini is that Adriano was way out of her league.

I’ve seen Tahini, and can readily confirm: She ain’t no Penélope Cruz. To give credit where credit is due, Tahini has nice olive skin and a pretty face. But that’s pretty much where the physical positives end. Perhaps the kindest way I could describe Tahini is that she could be quite an attractive girl if only she’d get off her ass and do some exercise. Tahini’s butt is big. Not sexy Latina-style “bubble butt” big, but rather “I sit down all day and do very little physical activity” big.

One day, Adriano caught a rare side view of the gap between Tahini’s top and the waistline on her pants. What filled that gap was a considerable belly.

“Gesù Cristo,” Adriano thought to himself, “she’s got a paunch on her!” No wonder Tahini always wore a jacket; she wasn’t trying to look professional – she was trying to create the illusion of slimness by giving an artificial taper to her waist.

As a guy of above-average fitness who takes pride in his physical appearance, Tahini was clearly not Adriano’s physical type.

Nor was she his personality type. Tahini belongs to an ethnic grouping whose women, in my experience, are easily among the most eager participants of Australia’s shitty hook-up culture. Ironically, men from this ethnic grouping have often been vocal in expressing their disdain for the purported loose sexual mores of Anglo-Australian women, but a lot of girls from this ethnic grouping absolutely thrive on casual hook-ups. When I was in my twenties, hanging around with idiots and frequenting those human zoos known as nightclubs, I had occasion to get intimate with a number of girls from this ethnic background. Without exception, I was amazed at what these girls would let you do to them – and how soon they would let you do it.

And from what Adriano had seen and heard of Tahini, there was no reason to believe she was any different.

When we were younger and all balls and no brains, we used to think these kinds of girls were great news. But then some of us in our social circle began to mature, and we began reflecting on all the drama and headaches these girls would typically bring into our lives. When a girl will let you do stuff to her that would make a farm animal blush, all within minutes of meeting her, the chances of her falling into the “crazy bitch” category are extremely high.

Nowadays, the hook-up culture makes us sick. As do the people who still take part in it.

Needless to say, Tahini wasn’t Adriano’s cup of tea. As a result, he paid her very little attention.

But then things got weird.

Really, really fucking weird.

Shortly after Adriano upped the dose of fluvoxamine, he suddenly decided he had to have Tahini.

No, I’m not shitting you.

Make no mistake: Adriano has high standards when it comes to women. He keeps himself in above-average shape, maintains a high level of dress and grooming, and can talk effortlessly and in depth on a wide variety of topics.

And he expects the same from potential romantic partners. If you’re not in good shape, or you struggle with conversation that ventures beyond guys, clubbing, hair extensions and bitching about work, forget about Adriano.

And yet here he was, suddenly developing a keen interest in a girl that, only weeks earlier, he’d already dismissed as just another flabby club/Tinder troll.

“I absolutely cringe just thinking about it,” says Adriano. “I wouldn’t touch this girl with a barge pole. But after I upped my dose of fluvoxashit, all of a sudden I had to make her mine!”

What followed was a rather stunted and awkward interaction that started out on friendly enough terms, but eventually culminated with Adriano and Tahini completely ignoring each other.

13 December 2018 may have been Adriano’s darkest SSRI event, but his newfound interest in Tahini was definitely the most bizarre.

As it turns out, Adriano is hardly the only person whose mating radar was completely thrown out of whack by SSRI usage. I happen to know Adriano’s doctor very well, and after Adriano came off “fluvoxashit”, I’ve been relaying my findings about SSRIs and suicide risk to him. And to his credit, he’s been taking these findings on board, as he is extremely unsettled about what happened with Adriano.

When we broached the topic of impulsivity and Adriano’s bizarre attraction to the tubby Tahini, he relayed a story about a girl treated by one of the other doctors at his practice (note to the AMA: Relax, neither this patient’s name nor any other identifying features were revealed). Prior to being prescribed a SSRI, she had been a quiet, shy girl. After starting the SSRI drug, however, she promptly relocated to Planet Skank and began screwing every guy she could get her hands on.

As Adriano and this girl discovered, SSRI drugs can rapidly transform you into a completely different person. They can remove your inhibitions, impair your better judgement, and cause you to make very poor mating choices.

Despite what our sleazy mass media and skanky hook-up culture would have you believe, that’s not a good thing.

“Hi, Welcome to [Famous Australian Government Department]. How Can We Screw You Around Today?”

While all this was going on, Adriano was trying to come to grips with his new job. Adriano has a strong perfectionist streak, but he was now answering calls on behalf of a Commonwealth government agency whose reputation for inefficiency is the stuff of legend.

It drove him nuts.

Calls that should, by all rights, have taken 5-10 minutes to get sorted instead took 2 hours. The database from which the Customer Service Representatives (Adriano’s official job title) were supposed to get their information from was a massive, convoluted and conflicting mess. Often, the information was just plain wrong. Adriano was now starting to understand why, if you rang this department and spoke to five different operators, you would typically get 5 different answers.

Adriano would routinely receive calls from people who had already spoken to another CSR and received information that was totally incorrect. “They told this poor girl what???,” Adriano would think to himself.

Along with misleading information, remedies that should have been actioned instead lay dormant in the system’s Neverland because the CSR in question had not forwarded the case to the appropriate department.

Adriano became truly embarrassed to work for an organization whose processes were such a mess. Initially, he had rationalized that he would do his best to make a difference, but it soon became apparent little was going to change. Much of the software platform the CSRs were required to use dated back to the 1970s, and hence used cumbersome, antiquated coding. This platform was confusing, poorly integrated and drastically slowed down the processing of calls.

To update the system would likely require billions of dollars, and it was made clear to Adriano that no such update would be occurring anytime soon. Here in Australia, taxpayer money is instead busily diverted to all manner of bullshit rorts (former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s half-a-billion-dollar gift to his buddies at the farcical Great Barrier Reef Foundation is a an especially egregious example).

In true half-assed “she’ll be right mate” Aussie fashion, the department in question has instead committed itself to propping up the current dilapidated platform for as long as it possibly can. As Adriano puts it, this approach is like stubbornly injecting an old, decrepit horse with large amounts of anabolic steroids, long after the horse should have been mercifully put down.

Then there were the customers. It wasn’t the abusive ones that got to Adriano; after having exchanged ‘pleasantries’ face-to-face with all manner of assholes over the years, some guy swearing over the phone was hardly going to rattle him. Nope; it was the clients who broke down and started crying because said government department had unfairly cut off their payments, failed to restore them, and then left them struggling to pay for food and rent. “What the hell are we doing to these people?”, Adriano frequently asked himself.

His increasing frustration started to take its toll. In the last week of December 2018, he experienced two particularly difficult evenings where he felt like he was having a nervous breakdown. The second was on a Friday night, a few days before New Years’ Eve. And it was unbearable, says Adriano: “I was ideating about suicide again. Nothing quite as intense as December 13, but still … I felt sick in my stomach, and my head felt like it was about to explode.”

The pain seemed inescapable. But then a light bulb went on inside Adriano’s head. The following day, he called a close friend in Melbourne. “Dude, you don’t sound good. Get over here,” admonished his friend. And so on Sunday morning, Adriano put his bike, dog and a bunch of clothes in his car, and began the 9-hour drive to Melbourne.

That Sunday night, after he arrived in Melbourne, Adriano sent his team leader an apologetic SMS explaining where he was and why, and that he would be back at work the following week. “It was the only thing I could think of to try and get a grip,” wrote Adriano, “again, my apologies.”

Once again, Adriano’s team leader was eminently accommodating and understanding.

Adriano stayed on a farm over an hour from the Melbourne CBD. It was just what he needed. Within days, he felt like a whole new person. As his close friend remarked with much relief, “you sound like a totally different guy to the one I spoke to on Saturday.”

As his break in Melbourne drew to a close, Adriano was confident he was now ready to return to work the following week and take on whatever his job threw at him. However, on the Saturday night before he was due to drive back to Adelaide, he started getting agitated and had difficulty falling asleep. He tossed and turned and did not get to sleep until around 1.30 am.

Not a good sign.

Nor was the sombre feeling he got as he crossed the border back into South Australia. Or the negative thoughts that started crowding his mind as he exited the South Eastern Freeway and began driving down Portrush Road to his Adelaide abode.

Upon returning to work the following day, Adriano again started experiencing anxiety symptoms. Once again, he started getting jittery and nervy. This frustrated him to no end: “I thought I was over all that,” recounts Adriano. 

Then came the final straw. The morning of Wednesday 9 January 2019 had been a rough one. Late in the morning, Adriano began working on a particularly difficult call. It was a textbook classic case of something that should’ve taken no more than 10 minutes to remedy, but instead deteriorated into yet another exasperating marathon exchange thanks to the department’s hopelessly outdated software platform.

As Adriano tried to make sense of the extra-confusing procedures required to solve the issue at hand, he felt something he’d never felt before.

His mind froze.

His brain felt like it had seized up.

“I was just totally overwhelmed,” he said, “and just couldn't think. Normally, when I get flustered by a problem, I take a deep breath, or a few minutes to gather my thoughts, and then go back to the start and go back through the problem step by step. But I just couldn't do it, my brain just couldn't kick into gear.”

Adriano’s mind had completely stalled.

Adriano locked his computer, went over to his team leader and asked to speak to him in private. They walked to a private room, and after shutting the door behind them, Adriano’s team leader asked, “What’s up?”

“I'm quitting,” announced Adriano, “I can’t handle this anymore.”

Adriano’s team leader tried to talk him out of resigning as best he could. “I’m not here to talk you into doing something you don’t want to do,” said Adriano’s team leader, “but I don't want to see you go because you are a good CSR.”

During his first month on the job, Adriano was part of a small group who had achieved 100% accuracy on all their quality-checked work. Adriano has an old school work ethic; he firmly believes that, irrespective of whether or not it is your dream vocation, if you take on a job then you do it to the best of your abilities.

“I’m not blowing smoke up your ass,” reiterated Adriano’s team leader, “you’re definitely one of the better workers in the call room.”

Again, Adriano was flattered to hear such complimentary talk from someone of the calibre of his team leader.

But ultimately, Adriano stood by his original decision. Thanks to fluvoxamine, the challenges of his new job, and some shitty life circumstances, the last two months had been a nightmare. For the sake of his physical and mental health, Adriano wanted to make a clean break and start anew.

Life After SSRIs

Adriano says it wasn’t until around two weeks after quitting his job that he started to feel like he was finally thinking straight and regaining control of his situation. At that point, he’d been off fluvoxamine for just over a month.

“I’ll tell you what really pisses me off about that junk,” says Adriano, “I hate illicit recreational drugs, and I’ve never used them. I hate what they do to people, and I don’t understand why people take them.

But when I took fluvoxamine, it was like I was on drugs. And when I came off, it was like I was in the throes of drug withdrawal. My mood was erratic and I was irrational, impulsive, aggressive … I just wasn’t thinking straight at all.

I was suicidal, I was chasing some empty-headed floozy, and I was driving like I had a death wish. Looking back, the whole thing seems surreal, like a bad dream.

Aggression and impulsive behaviour are common SSRI side effects.

If I went to a music festival and got caught selling pills that did to people what that fluvoxashit does, I’d be in big trouble. Yet doctors are free to write scripts for this junk on a daily basis, and drug companies make squillions in the process.”

At this point, apologists for anti-depressants might argue that Adriano simply had an unusual reaction to SSRI use, or that fluvoxamine was the wrong SSRI for him.

Wrong.

Anti-depressants are, by and large, a garbage class of drugs, and I’ll explain why in coming instalments. First, there is something very important that we need to address.

If You are Feeling Suicidal

If you are feeling suicidal, please read the following.

Please fight the impulse. You are simply not in the right state of mind to be making such a monumental life choice. And if you are taking an anti-depressant, realize that it is very likely exacerbating your dark feelings.

I can’t think of a more immense or permanent decision than to end one’s life. Trouble is, by the time you’ve arrived at that point, you’re simply not in a good state of mind. That might be stating the obvious, but think about it: Would you recommend to someone else that they make a monumentally important life decision while in such a state?  

To quote author Bev Aisbett (a former sufferer of anxiety and depression) from her excellent book Taming the Black Dog: A Guide to Overcoming Depression:

“If you are still considering this decision, then know that you are not WELL ENOUGH to make such a big DECISION!

You’re not yourself, are you?

You’re not thinking straight, are you?

You’re not really in the best position to make a SENSIBLE CHOICE, are you?

If you were to make any other MONUMENTAL decision in your life, you’d seek EXPERT ADVICE, wouldn’t you?

Well, there are few more monumental decisions than this one. You need a SECOND OPINION.”

On the evening of 13 December 2018, Adriano earnestly wanted to check out of life. He has no doubt that if he had the means that night, he would have killed himself.

But when he woke up the next morning, his suicidal impulses had disappeared. Instead, he was absolutely rocked by what he had been thinking the night before.

This reminds me of someone I knew in my twenties; he was the son of an electrical contractor my parents routinely hired. Let’s call him Ronaldo. A nice guy, Ronaldo accompanied his father to electrical jobs, but had been looking for full-time work in his own right. His job-seeking efforts were not bearing fruit, and when he and his girlfriend split up, Ronaldo sunk to that awful, horrible dark place where everything seems completely hopeless.

And so he hung himself.

Now here’s the extra-sad part: During the week following his death, two employers rang his parents' house, wanting to speak with him.

Both wanted to offer him a job.

If Ronaldo had held out for just one more week, he’d probably still be here today. He’d probably be running his own electrical contracting company, he’d be married, and he’d have kids in their twenties. 

But instead, he prematurely gave up all hope and left behind nothing but heartbroken parents and devastated friends.

If you are feeling suicidal, then this is one of those times in life when you really need some assistance.

Don’t suffer in silence: Call someone.

To quote Bev Aisbett again:

“TELL SOMEONE! ASK FOR HELP!

Call TELEPHONE COUNSELLING

Call a FRIEND

Call a FAMILY MEMBER

Call a TEACHER, MINISTER, COUNSELLOR.

When choosing your confidante, keep in mind that not everyone’s good at it! Don’t be disheartened if someone can’t handle it; the important thing is that you have reached out! Keep reaching out until you get the help you need.”

If you’re suicidal, there’s another reason I don’t want you to act upon your impulses:

You’re probably a nice person.

Seriously, of all the people I know who committed suicide, none were assholes. Most were really nice folks. And it seems that way with most of the suicides I read about in the media. The world can be a c*nt of a place, and this seems to affect nice people to a greater degree. If it was the world’s assholes that were prematurely checking out of life, then maybe we could view suicide as some kind of Darwinian gene pool-cleansing phenomenon. But the exact opposite seems to be true.

So again: DON’T. DO. IT.

Get help. There’s no shame in that. In fact, it’s the smart thing to do.

Anyways…

In Part 2, I’ll start dismantling the monumental wall of bullshit that drug companies, the medical profession and immoral researchers have built around their lucrative anti-depressant drugs.

Stay tuned.

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Anthony Colpo is an independent researcher, physical conditioning specialist, and author of the groundbreaking books The Fat Loss Bible, The Great Cholesterol Con and Whole Grains, Empty Promises.

For more information on Anthony's books, click here.

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The Mandatory “I Ain’t Your Mama, So Think For Yourself and Take Responsibility for Your Own Actions” Disclaimer: All content on this web site is provided for information and education purposes only. Individuals wishing to make changes to their dietary, lifestyle, exercise or medication regimens should do so in conjunction with a competent, knowledgeable and empathetic medical professional. Anyone who chooses to apply the information on this web site does so of their own volition and their own risk. The owner and contributors to this site accept no responsibility or liability whatsoever for any harm, real or imagined, from the use or dissemination of information contained on this site. If these conditions are not agreeable to the reader, he/she is advised to leave this site immediately.

Source: http://anthonycolpo.com/the-great-ssri-scam-how-taking-anti-depressant-drugs-can-kill-you-part-1/

[emerygoat26-blog]

College rower dies at 23 of unusual bacterial infection after thinking it was tonsillitis

© GoFundMe Samantha Scott A 23-year-old college rower died suddenly of a rare bacterial infection, after brushing off her symptoms as tonsillitis.

Samantha Scott was an accomplished coxswain for the women’s rowing team at Kansas State University, when she started feeling pain and swelling in her throat two weeks ago.

Scott didn’t think too much of her symptoms, and by the time she went to the hospital it was too late to help. There, doctors diagnosed her with Lemierre’s syndrome, an extremely rare infection that starts with a sore throat and fever, and turns into swelling and pus that moves through the body. It’s not fully understood how the disease develops, but antibiotics are needed as soon as possible.

The college student, who was pursuing a degree in architectural engineering, died on Saturday.

“Samantha was a great leader for our program and more importantly a great person,” her rowing coach Patrick Sweeney said in a statement. “She was so well-liked by all of her teammates and had such a big impact on our program both on and off the water.”

Scott’s longtime friend from her hometown of Fort Morgan, Colorado, said that the athlete would always brighten her day.

“She could cheer you up if you were having a bad day, and just going to practice was like being with your family and being with someone who was always upbeat and happy,” Kennidi Cobbley told Fox 31 in Denver.

RELATED VIDEO: Minnesota Mom Dies from Same E. Coli Infection That Killed Her Young Daughter 4 Years Ago

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Cobbley set up a GoFundMe page to help Scott’s parents with medical and funeral bills, and to set up a scholarship fund in her name.

“They’re struggling to deal with what’s happening, and now they have this huge financial burden, and if there’s anything I can do to help, it’s just really to get the message out there,” Cobbley said.

Source: http://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/college-rower-dies-at-23-of-unusual-bacterial-infection-after-thinking-it-was-tonsillitis/ar-BBPenqI?srcref=rss