Honestly, i've got this habit of opening a paper at 5:40am before the ovens go on, reading three paragraphs, then spending the rest of the day pretending I absorbed it. Last week I made it halfway through something about appetite signaling and could not tell you what the control group ate.
What actually shifted my read: I stopped trying to win arguments with the research and started watching my own two-week averages. At week fourteen, the plate I pack at the counter went from a mond of rice to about a cup and a half, and I'm not white-knuckling it.
That's more persuasive to me than any abstract. So I'm curious — do you all read the papers for fun, or have you made peace with just tracking your own numbers and letting the studies be background noise?