Rocky

To paraphrase Simon Sinek, start with WHY. Why should we care about any of that?

I took a road trip last month. On the trip, I saw Billions and Billions and BILLIONS of trees... for which I am very thankful. I bet there are lots of trees near where you live in the UK, Twinky. I hope so. When I think about trees, I don't think about twi.

Because you overgeneralize, exaggerate, and make easily debunked claims. YOU can alleviate that problem by being specific and linking to verifiable sources. YOU can count the number of members of such FB groups (they generally say how many members there are) and list the names of the groups. That was too easy of a question, Mike.

And has been so from the start.

Well... I'm of the understanding that there were never more than 100k who took the PFLAP class... and for YEARS (decades), twi strongly discouraged their minions from accessing the evil internet. I can't imagine there are... Especially so many who still give two hoots about the class. How many people go to twigs... er, home fellowships?

That's a figure of speech, right? Exaggerando?

"The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche."

Btw, since you seem to believe I have an ax to grind, what might that be, exactly?

What that sounds like to me is that you don't necessarily have any specific insight but you seem to expect me to read your mind. As you wish, but I pose questions seeking clarification, no other reason.

I just read a sentence in a book by Jon Ronson (among his writings is a book titled The Psychopath Test): "The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche."

Male cult leaders sometimes claim droit du seigneur over female followers or use physical violence to sexually exploit them. But, on the whole, they find it more efficient to dress up the exploitation as some sort of gift or therapy: an opportunity to serve God, an exorcism of “hangups,” a fast track to spiritual enlightenment. One stratagem favored by Keith Raniere, the leader of the New York-based self-help cult NXIVM, was to tell the female disciples in his inner circle that they had been high-ranking Nazis in their former lives, and that having yogic sex with him was a way to shift the residual bad energy lurking in their systems. According to Sarah Berman, whose book “Don’t Call It a Cult” (Steerforth) focusses on the experiences of NXIVM’s women members, Raniere was especially alert to the manipulative uses of shame and guilt.

Such as these questions...

How many individuals are there in the United States? How are individuals responsible for public health crises that they have no individual power to mitigate? Cop out? Did you cop out and not answer the salient questions I posted for you earlier in this thread that, if you had addressed them, might have given you some insight on what is or is not a societal cop out?

THAT is a demonstration that you lack self-awareness.

Quite a bit of that comment, Mike, is complete BS. Attempts to make an argument, but no way that can be construed as anywhere close to being a valid argument.

Too obvious to YOU perhaps.

Who is we? To what is money allocated? How do "we" (those who make such decisions) know that funding is being directed to actually address the root causes of the problem(s)?

Perhaps that's all a good thing. I've heard of Noom. But I've also, for the last 15+ years, worked with nutritional professionals in the Veterans Affairs medical system to incorporate similar lifestyle changes.

Michael Pollan, author of Food Rules, suggests those "cheap tasty foods" are more properly described as "edible food like substances." They provide little to no genuine nutritional value other than carbs, fats and calories. Another way to look at it is each of us would do well to know how to choose nutrient-dense food rather than energy-dense food(like substances).

What's your frame of reference for any of those points? Observations of public policies and news about them per se do not measure personal stress. You'll have to go to medical literature to find the data that will address that question. That's why I provided the link to explain cortisol.

Are you saying that your analysis of a public health crisis is based entirely on looking back at your own life and how/when you remember taking on (eating) more calories than you burned? Have you inquired at all into medical literature about (among the items I mentioned in previous comments to this thread) natural changes to metabolism as humans age?

Has it occurred to you that pervasive advertising on increasingly intrusive media (broadcast radio and tv, print, internet) has induced a sense of hunger when and where and for whom they wouldn't otherwise feel hungry? Or perhaps that personal stresses from economic factors and the various ways that changes the internal chemistry for millions has had detrimental impacts on individuals and families ... and might be something outside of what so many people can control? Did you come here to GSC to pontificate before doing any research on the causes of the current public health crisis?

Totally.

I think it's a good bet that much of it has been wrong.