The oldest church was built around 1200, on the remains of an older church from the 7th century and you can go below ground to view those. We also have some Roman ruins from a castellum build around the year 47 you can also go and view.

Edit: The castellum is gone, but there are just some walls and stones.

My research is so specific that I would doxx myself if I explained what I do.

I am sorry to hear that. I think your mother ignoring autism can be as harmful as her telling you have it while you don’t. In both cases, you are not seen and accepted for who you are.

I have an official document stating that if I am incapable of making decisions, my parents are not allowed to make decisions for me and they cannot be with me in the room by themselves or touch me. I feel quite guilty about that, but I just cannot deal with what will happen otherwise.

Yes, definitely. I did have a lot of symptoms of trauma as a child, in hindsight. This provided an explanation for that in which my parents weren’t blamed for it and it was just all on me again.

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.

Are you still in that situation or do you mean that that happened in the past? For me it got better once I left home. Although I was still in contact with her. Now it is much better, because I only occasionally have contact with her and only via text. It took me years to get there, but I did. I hope you do too if you have not already.

The same thing happened to me. I did not know it is a common thing! I was told I am autistic, but it turns out I have CPTSD. I think telling me I was autistic it was just an easy was to blame the ways in which I responded to being traumatised on me again.

I thought I was the only one! I really did not know that this is something that happens more often.

My mother managed to convince her psychiatrist to diagnose me with autism when I was 13. He told me that I had autism and that if I did not get treated, I would be alone forever and I would never be able to make friends. He also called it a handicap. No treatment was started, there was no help or anything after that. The psychiatrist told me and I never saw him again. My mother told everyone around her I was autistic and they all felt very bad for her, including me. I felt really sad she had me for a daughter and I hated myself for being who I was. I also was bullied in school and I thought it was my own fault because I was autistic and therefore I did stuff that made others bully me. I was the one in the wrong and it was just a response to that, I felt.

Turns out I am not autistic at all. Like, I had it checked out thoroughly and there was no doubt about it. I actually an able to emphasise with others better than average etc. I also have some really close friends, which I made once I was able to leave home. I do have CPTSD though from severe emotional neglect and psychological abuse.

It is so weird to see similar stories here. I know my social skills are fine, but I still feel insecure about my social functioning. I am always looking for stuff I might do wrong that confirms that I am autistic after all. I also still feel like something is fundamentally wrong with me and as if my existence is somehow an enormous burden for others. (This is not how I feel about autistic people, but it is how I was made to feel about myself by that diagnosis.) It is a feeling that is very difficult to change.

It is not. I am not saying people should not eat healthy or should not try to lose weight. I am just saying that pushing the oversimplification that for everyone it is just calories in vs calories out and that it is only about willpower is not correct. People should get the right help with losing weight and the factors that cause the weight gain or makes people not losing the weight should be addressed.

There is lots of scientific work on this. I copied some links from another comment I made.

For example, this is an article in Journal of Obesity. It discusses the role of willpower and provides an overview of some of the research on other factors that affect whether people lose weight, such as metabolic compensation.

This is another interesting paper in the Irish Journal of Medical Science on patient’s view on obesity as a disease. I think the conclusion of this study aligns well with some of my claims:

The presence of beliefs and perceptions to support the narrative that obesity is a choice, that choosing to eat less and move more effectively treats the disease and willpower is a principle determinant of weight loss maintenance may negatively impact long-term treatment. A belief that obesity is a choice will see prevention and treatment strategies continually focus on education regarding eating less and moving more, which may be suboptimal. Therefore, the narrative must change and align with the science regarding the biology of obesity as a disease.

[This] (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0953620521000029) paper on weight regain also claims that it is not just about compliance with a diet, but that, amongst others, metabolic adaptation and changed appetite play an important role as well.

If you disagree, please provide some substantiation. I would be interested in reading it.

Thanks for saying this. I think the idea that it is just willpower causes so much unnecessary suffering. As someone suffering from an eating disorder and thyroid disease, I was getting a bit down reading all the “it’s just calories in vs calories out” remarks. It is so much more complicated than that.

It is not as simple as just calories in vs calories out. Your body has a setting point for what weight it thinks it should be. Once you are overweight, your setting point will be higher and your body wants to get back to that higher weight. It will start working actively against you. This might mean your appetite will increase and your metabolism will slow down. I think that is what you are describing here.

Trying to push yourself to lose more weight despite your body working against you can cause rebound weight gain if you are not able to keep the diet (which might become increasingly difficult due to increasing appetite). The most important thing is to keep a healthy diet that does not reduce your quality of life too much and is doable on the long term, I think. If you are struggling everyday, then it might be better to eat a little bit more and stay on a higher weight a bit longer to ensure that you will maintain the weight loss.

Maybe this is already what you meant. But the phrase “calories in vs calories out” and stating that nothing else matters made me want to respond. I think it is a popular oversimplification that causes a lot of unnecessary suffering for people trying to lose weight.

Sorry to hear that. I have PTSD as well (but from other causes). For me EMDR, imagery rescripting and psychosomatic physiotherapy helped. It did not completely solve it, but it made it much better. Maybe some things to try if you have not done so, and you want to.

That is just really sad. Evil is defined by a lack of empathy and this way of thinking clearly shows a lack of empathy.

Yes, I can completely respect that people do not want to have an abortion themselves or maybe even have difficulty with it. But I think it is not right to impose this believe on others. It is very good to meet people like that sometimes and see the other side. My christian friend is the same.

Even if you are against abortion and feel your opinion is so important you need to force it upon others, it makes no sense to block this medication. There are many medical reasons for needing it. I needed it twice myself because I was pregnant, but the pregnancy was not vital and my body did not miscarry on its own. I would love to have children, but in those cases there was no unborn life to protect as it would have never become a baby. I was very happy to have access to this medication, because being pregnant for months while wanting a baby and knowing that you will not have a baby is very difficult and confusing psychologically. Taking the medication was difficult as well, but in the end I was glad I did.

(I am not against abortion, I just cannot see why it would be logical to ban this medication even if you are.)

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.

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.