Thank you for the kind message. It is good to hear that it is possible to have it great even after a miscarriage. I have had two miscarriages and two biochemical pregnancies. I did not really have time tomprocess this yet, as I had to continue treatment as my fertility is further declining due to my age. I think that might be part of the emotions as well.

It is difficult for me to not wager my personal happiness on it. I have a small nephew and when I take care of him, it just makes me very happy. It makes me feel like I would be as happy or even happier with my own child. Also, I was abused as a child and I feel that I did not have parents that really loved me. It feel unfair that I am not able to experience the mother/child bond from the perspectives of a child as well as that of a motger.

I also tried to take care of my younger siblings when I was a child. I was able to provide them with some of the emotional support my parents failed to provide, but because I was too young myself I always felt like I was not able to give them what they need. I am an adult now and I feel like I am capable now of providing children with a safe and warm environment. And I feel like I have all this love to give, but there is no child to give it to. I do not know where to put it.

I don’t know. Having a child will not fix all of this and a child does not exist to fix this or to make me happy. However, it could have been an area of my life that could have been beautiful and where I might have been able to give something and be valuable. And instead, this also does not work out and is another thing that goes on the pile of things that have failed in my life.

I agree that staking my life’s success on it is not a good idea. But I am not sure what else I have left. I am trying to become a writer and I am writing down all my experiences from my youth and with my sister who passed away and my fertility treatments, and so on. Maybe it can help some people who experience the same things. I think that might be fulfilling maybe and a way to create something positive out of the things that feel negative now.

Sad and empty. I love kids. I had fertility treatments for years, but that did not work out. I will start IVF again in a couple of days. Hopefully it will work this time. It is one of my last chances.

I would like to adopt or have foster kids. However, I suffer from PTSD and in my country it is very difficult to adopt or foster if you have a background with mental illness. Even though my psychologist and the people in my environment all say that they think I would be able to do it and my partner does not have any mental illness, my chances are very low.

To be honest, looking any further than the next IVF makes me panic. I do not know how to live with not having kids and how to deal with that. I had a lot of bad stuff happen to me. Having children would be something I believe would have made me very happy. It feels like I failed at life. However, I just turned 40, so I know I need to give up at some point.

No apologies necessary, in my opinion. You did not mean anything negative and you did not know. I just wanted to explain the other side.

I can see that you did not mean anything offensive by it. However, I have had similar things happening to me (misdiagnosis of autism so my parents did not have to take responsibility for tramuatising me) and I might have responded similarly.

When someone imposes a diagnosis on you that is wrong and does it for selfish reasons, when you are a child, it is very harmful. It hurts your feeling of self worth to the core and makes you constantly question yourself and who you are. It takes a lot of strength to stop the selfdoubt and finally conclude that you do not have autism and that what you feel and think is correct and not what you have been told all your life by the people you were supposed to be able to trust. That is really a very difficult thing to do, because the anxiety that something is “wrong” with you after all is always there. It takes courage.

If you have been struggling with questioning yourself in this way and if you state that you are not autistic after all, then it is difficult to deal with a response suggesting that you might be wrong. That is almost painful.

I know that you did not mean it that way. There is no way you could have known if this is something you have no experience with. Also, I cannot say something about why someone else responds in a certain way. I might be wrong about that. However, when I read your question, I immediately got quite triggered as well. I guess I just wanted to explain where a response like this can come from in some cases.

Interesting. Thanks!

Oh, I did not know that. I have been doing it wrong all these years then. Could have been drinking cocktails on the beach instead of reading all these papers.

I am sorry, but what is wrong with your professor? You were doing exactly what you are supposed to do in a peer review. You should go look for things that are wrong or should be improved and only if the paper can withstand that process, it should be published. Only providing positive comments is really harmful to the scientific process and, in the end, to society.

To be honest, I think I reject more than half of the papers that I review. The rest require major or minor revision. It is not that I have a target or anything for how many I need to reject, it is just that most papers are of such low quality that I cannot do anything else. I think the number of papers I reject is quite normal in my field.

So, not all your comments need to be positive. If there is reason to be positive, you should mention it. And your comments should be constructive and respectful, but definitely not always positive.

In the case you are describing where the authors seem to only have read the titles of the papers, I would definitely reject. This is fraud. You are saying you did a literature study and you did not. So, I would be quite clear about that. I would also be a bit angry that they wasted my time. So, in my opinion, that is how a reviewer should respond in this situation, not with only positive comments.

To be honest, I was thinking about the man who was trying to show me his penis when I was hiking in the woods a couple of weeks ago, when I heard this question. He was white. Actually all men that harassed me were white, thinking about it now.

Racist stereotypes are a real issue and I am not trying to deny that. And if women needed to imagine some hypothetical situation when thinking about dangerous men, you might be right. However, I think you might be underestimating the number of women who have been harassed, or worse. Most women do not need to imagine, they can just remember.

Yes, that is an interesting question as well. I am wondering what the people with near death experiences could still experience from their bodies, because that would make a big difference as well.

The article by the Guardian that is linked is very interesting! I can really recommend reading it to people interested in this stuff.

I think the person who thought I was an AI explained it quite well. Thet said they just got jaded. However, they believed me when I told who I was and apologised. I appreciate it when people are able to revise their idea and it shows they did not have bad intentions.

I would not say people are crazy, there is a lot of manipulation going on on the internet by businesses and some governments. I think a lot of people fall for bots all the time. For example, Twitter and Reddit is full of them. So, I do not think it is that weird that people sometimes are not sure whether they are talking to AI.

What happened to you when you even showed pictures of yourself and they still were convinced you were AI is quite extreme. I hope that that does not happen too often, because that seems like the other person is either a troll or paranoid.

Thank you, I appreciate that very much. I try to be accepting of other ideas and to be understanding. But sometimes it is difficult for me too. Especially if I get many negative reactions and I do not completely understand why (I do not mean you, but some of the other people that responded to me). Then I get defensive as well, even though I try not to be.

Your work sounds nice and very useful! As a researcher, I know a lot about a very small set of subjects. Sometimes, I am wondering whether I am actually contributing enough and whether what I am doing is actually useful. When you are building homes, at least it is very clear who you are helping and how they benefit from it. I would not be able to do it. I have two left hands, as we say in my language. I am not good with the practical stuff, I am only good with theory.

In any case, thank you for the discussion. I checked the gut microbiome out a little bit already and there is a lot of scientific work on it. Very complex and very interesting! I am looking forward to delving into that. I hope you have a nice day (or evening depending on the time where you are).

I am not an AI. I am not sure how to prove that, but I am not. I am a scientific researcher, but in another field than the medical field. Maybe my scientific background shows in the way I communicate? Also, English is not my native language, so that might be why I sound different as well.

The reason I checked out so much research on obesity (as well as on being underweight) is that many of my family members suffer from eating disorders. I lost my little sister to anorexia a couple of years ago and my mother had it. However, some of my family members are obese as well, also due to eating disorders. I think trying to understand why people eat in a certain way and to help them instead of just judging them, might change things. And for me, scientific work and data is the best way to understand things. Maybe that gives you a bit of understanding where I am coming from and why I am interested in this subject.

If something is the result of research, it cannot just be called bullshit and set aside. It is not just another opinion that you can just decide to disagree with, considering the care that usually has been taken to reduce bias and ensure validity. Of course, research can be wrong and it is important to have a scientific debate. However, such a debate should be based on clear reasoning and arguments and other research results.

I was not pitying you. I was being compassionate. There is a difference between the two. I tried to be kind and understanding. That’s all.

Edit: I also wanted to mention that the study I linked refers to a study on women who were pregnant during the famine in WWII in the Netherlands. Maybe that is what you meant.

Thanks for the name. I will check out Rhonda Patrick and see what research I can find on the topic. I thought you were calling the different theories bullshit, but maybe I misunderstood you and you only meant to say that they sound like that. If that is the case, I apologize. I got so much negativity just for mentioning the research that I might have responded too harshly.

I am sorry to hear that you are struggling with weight so much. I think obesity has to do with eating habits. However, there is a reason for why you have this eating habits. One reason for that could be gut microbiome.

What often happens is that people just get angry with themselves for eating too much. And that anger might help in the short term to force yourself to eat less, but in the long term it will not work and it will just make you feel bad about yourself. However, if you look at the actual underlying causes, such as gut microbiome or setpoint theory, this might provide the insight needed for long term weight loss without the extent of suffering that most obese people have to endure.

It is the only study I know about this. I checked it out, because I have a lot of people with anorexia in my family as well as some people with eating disorders causing obesity. I thought maybe being anorexic and pregnant is similar for your body as being in famine and pregnant. So, that is why I know about this study.

That something sounds like bullshit does not mean that it is bullshit. I mean, I believe we should look at the data and the research. I did hear something about the role of gut bacteria but it was more about issues like depression. Might be interesting to check out further. Thank you.

I am not saying people should not fight their cravings. But the cravings of someone who is obese might be very different from someone who has a normal weight. Like I said, if you get below the setpoint often appetite will go up. Considering that most obese people are not able to lose significant weight in the long term, these cravings seem to be too strong and it seems to make people unable to “just eat less”. So, we need a solution for that.

I am not sure whether this is what you are referring to, but I know about this study that says that prenatal exposure to famine in early gestation increases the risk of obesity.

The fat storage cells definitely play a role as well. One of the ways in which the mechanism I discussed works is via leptin, as leptons regulate energy expenditure. Leptin is primarily produced by adipocytes. So, I believe that is where the connection is. This paper says some interesting stuff about it: https://doi.org/10.1242/dmm.008698.

The issue that I was discussing is that most people do not succeed with keeping the weight off. Most obese people do not manage to lose significant weight in the long term as they tend to regain the weight. We need to look at why that is to solve it. The research on setpoints offers at least a partial explanation. However, if you know about research that further explains this, I would be very interested. (Some sources if you are interested: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17469900/, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11684524/, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19175510/)

No being obese is not healthy. It is clearly associated with many health risks. I have no idea why you would infer that I would think it is healthy from what I have said. Obesity is clearly a problem. However, to solve it, I think we should look at the mechanisms behind it and try to understand it. So, that is what I am trying to do.

Saying that something is “just fat people bullshit” is also not a good argument. Maybe we can leave the emotions and especially the anger out of it and just look at the research. You seem angry and I have no idea what I have done to you to make you angry. I just tried to discuss some research on this subject.

No, it is not junk science. Research about it is published in many serious scientific journals. Just check out Scopus or something. You cannot say that it is junk science just because you do not like the results.

You also seem to not understand it. It does not say that you can escape the law of physics. It also does not say that in my explanation. It says that you energy expenditure goes down if you get below the setpoint. So, eating less becomes less effective. At the same time, you appetite will go up. This makes it very difficult to maintain the weight loss and this is why many people fail to keep the weight off in the long term.

Criticism of any research is possible, of course. However, just saying it is junk and misrepresenting what the theory actually says are not good arguments.

If you disagree, then what is your explanation of why most obese people tend to not keep more than 10% weight off over time without medication or surgery? What scientific evidence is there for that? I would be very interested in hearing about alternative research on this topic.

When you are overweight, it is not a case of just eating less. Eating less has very different physical and psychological effects for someone who is overweight than for someone who is not.

If you are interested in learning something about this, you can check out the setpoint theory of body weight. In short, the body has a setpoint for which weight it should be. If you are overweight, this setpoint is at a higher weight than if you are not. If your weight gets below the setpoint, your metabolism will slow down and your appetite will go up and the body starts to try and do everything to go back to this higher weight. That is why most people are not able to lose more than 10% of their weight in the long term. Often, when they gain the weight back, they gain back even more than they lost and the setpoint might even go up further. It is a neverending struggle for most people. Medication like Ozempic affect this mechanism so it becomes possible to lose weight.

If you want, you can find a lot of scientific papers about this. There is quite a lot of research on this and the setpoint theory is well accepted within the medical field specialised in dealing with weight problems, I believe.

In addition, Ozempic is not only a fat loss medicine. It is also used by people with diabetes to lower their glucose.

That definitely plays a role. I think the independent doctor also should not have any relationship to the person who has requested assisted death at all. If I am correct, one reason for that is that they can then truly come to a fresh, objective conclusion based on facts. I think another reason is that some people might become quite close with their own doctor over the years and therefore it might be difficult for this doctor to tell them no, or yes. They might be too involved.