John Scalzi said something very insightful today.

But if you understand yourself and you can assess yourself well, then ego can be a good way to backstop yourself when others are pummeling you with negativity, or when you feel uncertain or unsure. I think it’s good to have an ego, if you know yourself and your talents.

Ego is what allowed me to survive my experiences in North Florida. The entire time that all those people — including many in my own family — were telling me how terrible and worthless I was, I knew it just wasn’t true. Every time I bowed to them, was beat down by them, I knew one day I’d rise above them and leave them so far behind that if they ever thought about me at all it’d be to wonder why a loser like me could’ve done so much better than they did.

That’s exactly what I did, too. And it was because of ego. I knew what I was good at. I knew how good at my various talents and abilities I was (very). And I knew that if I lived, one day I’d use those talents to be a far better version of a person and of myself than they could even imagine.

Thank you, ego, for helping me live through those terrible years.

Wow, this is all just false or limitedly true in a very, very small set of circumstances.

Human bodies just don’t work like that. They simply do not. Muscles don’t even start being broken down until at least 24 hours into a complete fast, not the moment you get hungry. Frankly, that whole post is fucking moronic.

Then, about 2-3 days after the body begins taking nutrients from muscle, it slows this down and goes into ketosis.

By the way, your body primarily breaks down muscle to obtain glucose, so if you drink something with glucose even if fasting otherwise, your body won’t go after muscle all that much and will instead tend to continue to burn fat.

In addition (and I am going to link to a summary here, though I have read many of the studies) there is pretty good evidence that intermittent fasting is beneficial to your health, likely because it mimics the evolutionary environment of most of human history.

Why do Tumblr people believe that if you are hungry for more than a few minutes, you go into starvation mode (which isn’t even really a thing), and that if you don’t eat to absolute capacity at every meal you are at risk of the dreaded starvation mode?

There is literally nothing correct in that Tumblr bit I linked. Also, you do not have to starve yourself to lose weight (unless you are using the Tumblr definition, I guess). This going to the extremes is why I think a lot of Americans have issues losing and keeping off weight.

A minor calorie deficit a few hundred calories a day means you’ll lose 30+ pounds in a year.