Fake weights for my sham friends, champagne for my real friends

Lizzo, who seems to experience a wave of criticism every time she speaks of eating or moving around, clarified this week that “she doesn’t want to be thin" just because she exercises, eats a certain way, or, yes, lost weight. I’m all too aware of the potential for double-talk in these realms, and will always believe "weight loss" is a blunt instrument. But I don’t think we are going to get anywhere if we don’t start to try and accept that not everything everyone does is about capitulating to the constantly moving goalposts of health or beauty (or both!), at any personal cost. You cannot with your one hand want Lizzo to perform hours-long shows on national tours, put out albums, and be in any kind of good mood without letting her do basic body maintenance, and then with the other hand accuse her of secretly only doing that maintenance out of wanting to be thin.

Let Lizzo Lizzo; the reasoning for it, above or under the surface, is never going to pass a purity test.[1] This is the conflation of body size/appearance and health rearing its ugly head; the fact that we only make two extremes available to women (“weight loss to conform at any cost” and “radical rejection of everything that could ever possibly be interpreted as a Rule”) is, you guessed it, part of the problem.

Eat

~Discord Pick of the Week: A metal song called "Do Something Good For Yourself" (includes the lyric "journal your thoughts") ~

If you have ever struggled with squat depth: Rest assured, that has been most of us. Don’t dismay! Few people can just do a good squat right out of the box after 20+ years of mostly sitting at school and work. The LIFTOFF book has some good recommendations, but I also like this sequence of mobility exercises from @thephysiofix.

Eustress: She’s not just a schoolmarm on the frontier in the 1860s; she’s stress that “has a positive and lasting impact on our sense of growth, resilience and fulfillment” which “arises from challenging yet manageable situations”.

MSG might be the key to eating less sodium (if that is, indeed, the problem, which it might not be; salt is an electrolyte, and less is not always better!). To riff on an old favorite meme:

There are two kinds of farmers’ markets: “sells fruits and vegetables; nicely cordoned off from traffic; clear beginning, middle, and end,” and

“ ‘Fruits’ and ‘vegetables’ are so limiting—here is a truck that sells only shin bones from mighty upstate cows!! Bee pollen, bee pollen, glass jars of bee pollen, my fine friend! Tickets to Pleasure Island in Honest John’s fine coach! Who will buy my sweet red roses? Two blooms for a penny! Hot lunch! Hot lunch! Big plastic quart full of hot lunch from us! Half a duck—half a duck here! Why not buy half a duck from Hillcourt Half-Duck Farms! Goat’s cheese bracelets from Two Guys and a Goat! Raise your own maple syrup, start your own snail farm, grow mushrooms on an egg carton! LAVENDER SOAP LAVENDER SOAP LAVENDER ROOM SPRAY LAVENDER TOOTHPASTE LAVENDER SYRUP… If you get lost and try to reorient yourself by going back to the table that sells lavender and lavender products? Good fucking luck, pal! That is a different table from a separate lavender farm!!! You have been dealt zero aces!”

I did not know that literally everything in everyone’s professional wrestling personalities was lifted wholesale from Billy Graham.

Drink

GQ wrote about the phenomenon of people using fake weights. You see this around every once in a while, and usually it’s quite obvious; if you just watch enough people squat, you know what it looks like when they are wobbling with 400 pounds vs. 40 pounds on their back. You might wonder why fake weights even exist, and the answer is: photo shoots, movies, TV shows, situations where the lifting is not the point except to augment the scene or character or, I guess, the plot, if you are making the first-ever movie centered around lifting weights. It’s just hard to do more than one take trying to, for instance, actually bench 185 pounds.

But when the point of the weights is “an Instagram post to show how strong you are?”… Mate: What are you doing? (Bonus tip: sometimes you can spot them via the branding on the sides, which will usually be generic non-branding that looks like branding, and instead it just says, like, the word “barbell.”)

The guy who trained Ryan Reynolds for Deadpool, Don Saladino, is now selling a 9-week “Deadpool program” for one hundred dollars. (Why now, and not… when any of the Deadpool movies came out?) If there is enough interest, I will buy this program and scrutinize it very thoroughly.

Old Newspaper Yells at Cloud, “Whatever Happened to Just Drinking Water?”

Rest

A Harper’s banger: The Incredible Disappearing Doomsday. I submit that the mood around climate change feels like it has shifted from “running around with our hair on fire” to “calmly, resolutely, steadfastly taking our seats in the rickety bleachers of Jupiter’s Claim in Nope, knowing that a very unhinged man is about to try to show us a terrifying alien with powers unknown, which should send us screaming for the hills except for that the plot dictates we just kind of go along with it.”

I'm still reading this but also trying to savor it, as an unapologetic Dave Matthews stan: The Dave Matthews Guide to Living and Dying.

I'm deeply stressed out by the idea of Gen Z'ers nodding and respecting each other's TikTok hustles.

That’s all for this week! I love you for reading, thank you, let’s go—

[F1] Did Lizzo once do, and defend, a 10-day juice cleanse? Yes, yes she did. Is this just laying the groundwork for a sudden Ozempic weight loss? It wouldn’t be the first time, so I’m putting this here just in case, you know, it is. But even if it is, that would be reflective of the problem with pinning our values on individual famous people’s bodies, not with Lizzo herself.