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:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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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.
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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.
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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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I can no longer stand catching the reflection of my beer belly when I walk past a window in the street, so promised my better half I'd commence a diet the Monday after I returned from our holiday. Since Monday the 13th my regimen has consisted of the following:
I grant myself one cheat day a week. The two bagels I ate on Saturday morning may have been the subjectively most delicious things I've ever eaten.
If my bathroom scale is accurate, I've lost 3.5kg so far. Will post here every week to keep myself honest until I've met my target weight or something approximating it.
That's a pretty good amount of weight! I posted my beer belly in other avenues and was told that I actually didn't need to diet, just exercise, especially resistance training would help shed the ~10 lbs I want to lose. Thus commenced my effort to do 100 kettlebell swings every day, plus push-ups and bent rows for A days, pull-ups and push-ups for B days, plus half an hour of walking every day (at least), plus the complete cessation of the 2-4 hour naps I was taking all the time, plus no coffee after 2 PM (generally drinking about 32 fluid ounces of standard strength black coffee before then), plus eating fruits, vegetables, and (not so highly processed) meat.
I honestly think that the sleep was the best outcome from all this. The naps really were wasting a lot of time and not actually improving my restfulness, and now I feel awake all day until it's bed time. I should have known that would happen; the times I give up eating at lunch, I stop getting hungry at lunchtime. But the regular exercise is pretty great, too. I used to feel like a block of wood on some days, or earlier this year I felt like I couldn't use all of my lung capacity to breathe, but now I feel pretty mobile and my pulse was even under 60 the other day when I measured it. If my left knee didn't hurt after a couple miles, I'd try jogging even longer. I'm wondering if I should increase the kettlebell size, since doing 5 sets of 10 bent rows with 16 kilograms is kind of easy. Overhead pressing 16 kilograms is a bit more difficult, but generally I get a couple sets of 8 in before dipping down to 7 for the remaining 3. I guess swings with 20 kilograms would be better cardio than with 16 kilograms.
Fair play to you!
The frustrating thing is that I do shitloads of cardio, but apparently not enough to offset my poor diet. So diet it is.
I'm just starting to add consistent cardio, so it might have a decent effect on me in combination with the other stuff I'm doing. But be proud of your shitloads of cardio! I donated blood the other day and my blood pressure was 114/68, which is slightly better than it usually is. Do it for slightly better blood pressure!!
Now I'm curious what my blood pressure is. Must check the next time I go to give blood.
Funnily enough, one time I went to give blood and they checked my iron levels beforehand, and told me they were too low. The nurse explained that this can sometimes happen owing to recent intense exercise. I texted my brother "tfw pumping so much iron that I don't have enough in me :("
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