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Wellness Wednesday for May 8, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Hi everyone, I recently joined the forum upon a good friend's recommendation. I have been told I will find people with overlapping interests here. So here I go with a fitness and lifestyle related question. I am a 19, and a type 1 diabetic. I have never followed a serious fitness program in my life, and the summer is around the corner so I want to plan something and stick to it this time. My goals might sound a little too ambitious, or maybe not. I want to get consistent at gym, having a steady progress and also prepare myself for running a marathon. With the added complexity of me being a T1D, as the doctors around do not acknowledge my personal goals and just do the bare minimum to get my sugar levels right. But usually when I am on a diet, and workout actively, it becomes easy to deal with. As I have very little experience, I can't ask specific questions yet. But I shall keep this forum posted on my progress. To start with, what is your advice to approach this most efficiently? While also managing my work (I have a remote software engineering job and run a startup on the side).

Three things to achieve the goals you've listed: Exercise, sleep, diet. For a beginner like you, consistency is the most important thing when it comes to working out. For example, tell yourself you will hit the gym 3 times a week and stick to it no matter what. Even if you half ass at the gym (but hopefully you won't), you will still see progress simply from staying consistent (especially with those beginner gains). After around 1 month, it will be second nature for you to hit the gym so it won't be as difficult. In terms of sleep, just make sure you get 7+ hrs every day and you will be golden. I've had lots of issues with this, I'd go to sleep late then sleep through my alarms, wake up at random times, etc. Only way I could fix this was make it so I wanna take a shit in the morning. Now I'm awake at 8-10am without any alarms no matter what because my body gotta do its thing. Maybe you won't have that issue since you got a job that probably makes you wake up at the same time every day. For diet, this is my weakest part. I don't have the willpower to track what I eat nor actually eat as much I need, so it's hurting my progress a lot. At my age/weight/height, I have to eat 2.7k calories a day minimum, but I'm probably eating around 2.2k at most and it already feels like I'm stuffing my face. If you think you're like me and foresee having same issues with diet, I suggest taking it slow and just focusing on your protein intake only.

Oh, and last suggestion, take well lit body pics for reference, you will want to see how much you've progressed in the future.