SelfHigh5

I live in the city center of a small Northern European city. I walk about 6-8 minutes to my job at a bakery. I like that I don’t pollute the air and I can get my body moving. I can get a feel for how busy the day will be based on what types and how many people are out and about, how the weather feels (if it is nice weather!) and such. I dislike when it rains AND is very windy. Or when the rain has frozen overnight and the cobblestones are extremely slippery.

If you move to a rainy city, invest in rain pants, rain resistant or waterproof shoes. and a high quality umbrella as part of your rain gear.

This will be over soon.

I’m sorry Sir Kevin did you say ten years? How many do you have that they don’t wear out well before then? This is alarming and/or amazing. We do this too but it’s more like every year or maaaaaybe two if we are stretching it. I’m stuck on ten years, it’s wild, I’m sorry.

May improve Texas

Seems to be working!!

This is so true and so sad. It is like eating disorders really truly clicked for me with this statement.

While I now live outside the US and have curbed my eating habits drastically and I am now no longer obese, just on the cusp of overweight/healthy weight, I struggle every day not to indulge in over-eating, as that has been a stress-response my entire life I’m pretty sure. Living abroad has made it easier to fight it because they don’t have aisles upon aisles of ready made crap. And the boxes/bags they come in are pretty small so you can’t eat say, an entire family size box of cheez-its or little Debbie’s because neither of those are even sold here. There is some junk food but variety is extremely limited, so that definitely helps.

Seriously this. I lived in the US for most of my life until 2020 when I moved to Norway. If Americans paid what we pay here for the portion sizes given, they would absolutely riot. It’s so expensive to eat out here and the portion sizes are like, a third of what you’d get in any US restaurant. And that’s okay because…

I lost like 60lbs the first year we were here by simply eating a sensible portion size and not having a shitload of ready to eat mindless consumption snacks in the house. (also walked everywhere. Everywhere.)

Now I can tell who is a tourist just by size alone like 80% of the time (I live in a very touristy city). Brand new sneakers and look to be over 300lbs? Almost always walk by me speaking American English. It’s honestly quite surprising to see a very obese person here and then hear them speaking fluent Norwegian.

God, how is there not more daily murder there.

No one ever mentions to you as a young girl going through puberty that there’s another one coming in your late 20s-early 30s that will cause you to subconsciously stroke your neck/chin upwards and make smirky faces in your mirror to catch all these hateful manly hairs.

I do this and I see women at stoplights doing this all the time now. But no one clued me in to it as a preteen that it was coming, and that’s rude.

My passport

We moved here from the US 3 years ago because my husband is considered a skilled worker and he got his visa that way. (Programmer) I was an RN in the US and was happy to cease doing that at the time of the move and don’t miss it one bit. However, I would say to anyone dreaming of a wonderful life in Norway - learn the language like, for real. It is so hard to find meaningful work here without being fluent, even though everyone under like 60yo speaks it very well. It’s required for basically every job, even those non-customer facing. But it is amazing here and I don’t miss the rat race capitalist consumerism society in the US at all. It’s safe and peaceful here.

Put that thing back where it came from or so help me