Maaan, I read The Cuckoo’s Egg by Cliff Stoll recently and was more than a little jealous of what y’all got to experience. Sounds like it was a blast : )

Sheesh, your self talk sounds just like mine, sorry for that and the upbringing that molded it : (. Check out ThePlantSlant on tiktok/YT, Liam has a lot of shorts about improving your relationship with food and that might be a good avenue to explore. If you are in the US and your family is in a position to be able to arrange liposuction treatment, the involvement & conversations with medical professionals would probably help more than anything. I suspect that would be less true outside the US and western Europe though.

Yeeeah, I have an autoimmune disease (in the rheumatoid arthritis family, currently diagnosed as psoriasis) where steroids are the first-line treatment, and medical professionals don’t even recommend using topical steroids every day (which have localized effects like an inhaler), let alone oral steroids affecting your entire system.

I get the frustration, I freaking hate applying topical meds and would gladly take a pill once or twice a day instead, but the side effects would be way worse than my current symptoms if I did : (