Yup, calorie counting is where it’s at. I lost something like… 60? Pounds in the year leading up to my wedding by just counting calories, as I was too busy between working full time and going to college full time to go to the gym consistently enough to rely on that. People underestimate caloric intake and overestimate the impact of physical activity in my experience. Not to say that physical activity is not important, more so that you can overeat calories much more quickly than you can burn them off.

I have a family member who is constantly posting on social media about their weight and appearance, and has been doing so for easily a good 10+ years at this point. I am sympathetic to their struggle, and I feel bad that it affects their self esteem and whatnot, but on the other hand, if they had been putting in enough effort to lose even just 1 pound per month over the decade+ this has been happening, then they would have been able to stop posting about it by now. They are one of the most active social media users I know, so I know that they have plenty of time that they could divert towards being more active, they just simply choose not to. I can only feel so bad about that after so long.

Thanks, I appreciate your perspective, and I’m glad to hear that I’ve been handling the communication aspect of it properly - I’ve never used my suspicion as an excuse or justification of anything, so far I have just told a few trusted people that I suspect I have it, basically like I said here.

I have experienced several financial rough patches in the past year (job loss due to my employer shutting down, for example), but now that things have seemingly stabilized, I hope to begin pursuing a formal diagnosis soon, and I look forward to doing so! Thanks again.

This has been me the majority of the time since about 2020, which I chalk up to depression and more recently suspecting that I have ADHD (I know self-diagnosing isn’t cool, I intend to explore this more formally eventually, but I have many reasons for suspecting it in general). Sometimes it’s bad enough that if something doesn’t grab me in 5-15 minutes, I’ll bounce off to something else and probably repeat the cycle a few more times before giving up and doing something else instead.

I find that I can’t really play modern games at all anymore. They just feel like work and are more concerned with monetization rather than being enjoyable to play. Modern experiences feel so hollow to me now. I miss when the main draw of a multiplayer game was feeling your skills improve rather than spending 100+ hours to get some skin from grinding out a battlepass. It feels like a chore. I fell off of TOTK in May and apparently haven’t been too eager to return to it. I’ve been doing a decent job sticking with Mass Effect lately though. Helps that it runs perfectly on Steam Deck so I don’t always have to be on my PC. It’s my first time playing ME1, which helps. We’ll see if I can stick with it through 2 and 3, which I played many years ago.

This has also led to me drifting apart from many of the people who I previously considered to be my friends. Most of them barely leave the house anymore and only hang out and communicate on Discord, which I am barely on anymore due to my general lack of interest in games lately, my general disinterest in modern games specifically (which is all they play), and my disinterest in participating in more voice calls after being in Teams calls during the workday beforehand. They also have significantly more free time than I do due to almost all of them being single, so the rare times I have tried to play anything progress-based with them has been a bust because I inevitably fall behind. It’s unfortunate to drift apart like that, but it took longer than it should have for me to realize that we probably weren’t actually that close if me losing interest in games is all it took for them to cut me out. Oh well.