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Wellness Wednesday for February 8, 2023

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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Download a calorie tracker (I recommend Macros but MyFitnessPal is the most popular). Estimate TDEE*. You want TDEE - 500 worth of calories for losing fat** ("cut") or TDEE + 300 for building muscle ("bulk"). The other big thing is getting enough protein, which your tracker will calculate. Here's how many grams/day you're looking for.

Everything else like nutrient timing is an advanced lifter's concern.

* You should expect to to gain/lose a pound of weight for every 3500kcal of surplus/deficit. If this doesn't go as expected after your initial water weight changes in the first week, adjust your TDEE estimation.

** If you're obese, make it 500 times how many BMI classifications you're overweight by

EDIT: If you want the math behind it, the rule of thumb is to have 30kcal~ of deficit for each pound of fat in your body. But that's a little complicated and it's hard to know the exact amount without an advanced body scan anyway.

Thank you!