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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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When you're just starting? Mostly just make sure you're not eating total garbage, honestly. Both lifting and eating requires lots of little improvements over a long time. It's way too easy to get frustrated if you feel like you need to dive in and get 100,000 things exactly right otherwise all your gainz will be for naught. Most of the advice/debate out there is focused on how to take a 1% elite athlete and turn them into a 0.1% elite athlete, and you'll hear tons of people spouting their very particular system for trying to do such. You can probably ignore most of it.

Just start with the little things, which is probably just cutting out some garbage. Don't eat piles of dessert food. Don't drink alcohol to excess. Try to get decently regular sleep. Just keep going to the gym, even if you "don't wanna". If you don't have this base, biting off a bigger to-do list is just a recipe for frustration and failure.

If you have this good base and have consistently had this good base for a few months, then, the next typical recommendations are to try to get enough protein and get a decent approximation for how many total calories you're eating. Even this is kind of hard, takes some effort, and is slow-going. Finding a calorie tracker (or making your own) that isn't so frustrating that you quit is a task. Don't expect to settle it on day one.

Man, improving my diet has helped WAY more than I expected. Just eat lots of lean meats and vegetables and losing weight becomes both quick and painless. At least that's how it has been for me so far.