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PaperclipPerfector  22hr ago (text post)   486 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for February 4, 2026

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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New year's resolutions check-in (nice that I can actually start crossing off resolutions I've completed):

  • Went to the gym three times last week, again yesterday evening, planning to go at lunchtime today. Can deadlift 1.78x my bodyweight for 4 reps, squat .93x for 10 reps and bench press .75x for 9 reps.
  • Managed to go the entirety of January without consuming any alcohol, fast food or fizzy drinks, though I was back at it like a demon from midnight on February 1st.
  • Have not consumed any pornography since waking up on January 1st.
  • Have completed 7/11 modules in the SQL course.
  • Practised guitar for roughly an hour every day in January.

How goes it, @thejdizzler and @oats_son?

  • I don't know if it's the diet or what, but lifting weights is suffering. I HATE doing squats and don't look forward to them at all. Squatting to parallel made them a lot harder and it feels like I am working the hell out of my abs to get back up, and towards the end of the sets it feels like I'm rounding my upper back to not use abs as much. I only managed to work out once last week and I haven't worked out yet this week. However, I have done cardio 3 days in a row. I discovered that apparently if you can't jog slowly without your heart rate climbing up past 180, the stupid reddit zone 2 cardio advice isn't for you.
  • Still going strong on the diet. I ate a like, 600 calorie donut yesterday because the damn sales guy brought in donuts and one looked really good and it WASN'T really good. I ended up staying to the diet anyway, but I was pretty hungry going to bed last night. I weighed either 180.1 lbs or 180.8 lbs this morning, I don't remember. I finally ran out of potato chips and oatmeal, so now I'm gonna eat rice for a while. Need more chicken tho.
  • I could probably finish the Anki backlog tonight, if I focused for a while. I think there's like 100 card reviews left now. Still reading every day but it's slowed down a little. I got a bit busy at work, which hurts my reading.
  • I finished Undead Settlement after beating some tree boss, I guess. I almost missed the pyromancer guy.
  • No tennis yet. Dude, the tennis club is outrageous. It's $200 a year, but you don't get free court time or anything with it, you just get cheaper court rates, from like $47 per hour as a nonmember to between $31 and $37. If I just show up, would there be anyone to play with? How the hell do you start to play tennis? And why is renting a lane at a range to shoot guns cheaper? What?

There's a whiskey tasting tonight at a bar for "Whiskey and Wings Wednesday". Is that something you can go to by yourself? In a couple weeks there's trivia night at the local brewpub, pretty sure you can go to something like that by yourself...

I HATE doing squats and don't look forward to them at all. Squatting to parallel made them a lot harder and it feels like I am working the hell out of my abs to get back up, and towards the end of the sets it feels like I'm rounding my upper back to not use abs as much.

I hate squats with the fire of many thousands of suns. Between having very long legs for my height and extremely tight hips, squats are always suffering. I'm always in danger of turning a squat into a good morning when I'm getting to parallel (never mind going below parallel, never happening with my proportions and hips).

But I still do them. The weights I'm doing are just embarrassingly low.

I've found that front squats are much preferable.

Thanks to a wellness thread here, I discovered cyclist squats, which I've been finding less awful.

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