Thehungryone:
Solid point. Getting fat can be very expensive, expecially if you start hitting fast food & restaurants daily. I be been doing a brief gaining push & put on rought 20lbs in a month & I was eating fast food 2x a day. Luckily my wife & I are well off & have no kids, but I’m certain I spent about $1000 this month on eating out

GrowingLoveHandles:
I found the following interesting and wanted to share:

Recently, in a large city in France, a poster featuring a young, thin, and tan woman appeared in the window of a gym.

It read: “This summer, do you want to be a mermaid or a whale?”
A middle-aged woman, whose physical characteristics did not match those of the woman pictured on the poster, responded publicly to the question posed by the gym. She had a whale of a lot to say:

“To Whom It May Concern,
Whales are always surrounded by friends: dolphins, sea lions, and curious humans. They have an active s_e_x life, get pregnant, and have adorable baby whales. They enjoy stuffing themselves with shrimp, playing and swimming in the sea, and visiting wonderful places like Patagonia, the Bering Sea, and the coral reefs of Polynesia.

Whales are wonderful singers and have even recorded CDs. They are incredible creatures and virtually have no predators other than humans.

They are loved, protected, and admired by almost everyone in the world. Mermaids don’t exist.

If they did exist, they would be lining up outside the offices of psychoanalysts due to their identity crisis. Fish or human would prove quite a quandary for even the most skilled of therapists.
They don’t have a s_e_x life because they kill men who get close to them—not to mention, how could they have s_e_x? Just look at them… where is IT?

Therefore, they don’t have kids either. Not to mention, who wants to get close to a girl who smells like a fish store?

P.S. We are in an age when the media attempts to convince us that only skinny people are beautiful. I prefer to enjoy ice cream with my kids, a good dinner with a man who makes me shiver, and good chocolate with my friends.
With time, we gain weight because we accumulate so much information and wisdom in our heads that when there is no more room, it distributes out to the rest of our bodies. So we aren’t heavy, we are enormously cultured, educated, and happy.

By ASolo Traveler on FB

MarkSeanDavis17:
can confirm on the lifestyle change. what worked for me was cutting junk food and significantly reducing carbs and a complete cut off of sugar. it was really hard the first couple of weeks but I managed. I lost a lot of weight and was able to get to a point where I could go on long walks, go for intermediate level hikes. think i may get back on that journey again because i did gain it all back.

Munchies:
Weight loss is a weird subject in this community. And I get it. We don't want to hear about it after everyone and their mama nagging and shaming us for either being fat or liking fat people.

But you gotta have balance. And sometimes, you get too fat to enjoy the life you wish to lead. And that's okay. Weight loss doesn't mean being a size 2 with abs. (Although if you want that, more power to you.) Weight loss can be going from fat to chubby or losing 20lbs. It's not all or nothing.

MarkSeanDavis17:
aye, and when I did lose enough weight to go on said hikes/walks I still had some heft to me of course. i may never get rid of this belly lol and I've come to terms with that. the added mobility was nice. and you're right, talking about weight loss in this community may not be our favorite topic, but if health is a concern sometimes it's the right call. That's where I'm at, it's becoming a health issue and it's up to me to change that.

MarkSeanDavis17:
can confirm on the lifestyle change. what worked for me was cutting junk food and significantly reducing carbs and a complete cut off of sugar. it was really hard the first couple of weeks but I managed. I lost a lot of weight and was able to get to a point where I could go on long walks, go for intermediate level hikes. think i may get back on that journey again because i did gain it all back.

Enas:
The chat has still leak problems, although admitedly since some months now, they're not as bad.

Hiccupx:
I realise that sometimes it can be hard see that this website is being updated, because so much of the work we do is on the back end. As admins, we probably don't shout enough about website updates, but then, if it's on the back end it's probably not of that much interest to members. Anyway here goes:


Registration/Account Blocking:

We have spend a temendous amount of time this year on improving the registration validation process, to stop bots and spammers creating accounts. We have over 20 validation checks, written by AI, that automatically block the majority of them.

For those that do manage to create accounts, we have new scripts that check the uploaded content to highlight spammers which we then immediately ban.

We're never going to be able to keep out all spammers on a site like this because we want to make it easy to sign up for genuine members and also protect your privacy. Therefore we haven't gone down the phone verification route. We've also learnt that most of the spammers we get are not bots, but people sat in data centers in the far east who do this for a living.


Member Blocking Feature:

This stops blocked members from contacting you but it doesn't stop them viewing your content. The maxmium number of blocks is 100, which we believe should be plenty on a 'community' website. After all, what would be the point in joining a community site, and then blocking hundreds of members?


Chat:

Chat was completely re-written this year as part of the streaming feature (still in beta), however the visible functionality hasn't changed, so it would be difficult to tell as a user. However, with nice clean chat code we're now in a good position to do a major overhaul of the front end at some point. There's a number of possibilities here, including perhaps building the video streaming into the chat?

Thickid:
In terms of most calories per dollar that I have found, while still being palatable, has been premade frosting. At times I would eat it out tif the container. I have also tried coffee creamer, and Nutella and peanut butter sandwiches

Urchie:
The big packs of oatmeal cream pies have a lot of calories, 990 for just 3 of them and they go down easy

Biggzv987:
Still seems like it isn't fattening enough