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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There's a certain type of addiction, where the addicting substance is both the cause and solution to your problems, which is particularly dangerous. Maybe you're having money problems, so you drink to forget them, but then once sober your money problems are even worse, and the need for a drink thus also worse. I have realized this was (is?) the case with me and videogames. I would work at my job for a while, get stressed because a programming problem was taking more than a few minutes to solve, then switch tabs and drown out my sorrows in the comforting buzz of Dead By Daylight or League of Legends. Doing so would dull the edge of my stress, but put me further and further behind in my job, rendering me even more panicked and even more desperate for some activity which would distract me from that panic.
Last week marked the one month point for me of not contributing anything meaningful to the project to which I'm currently assigned. It's a new project, in a language I've never worked in before, in a very large and poorly (if at all) documented codebase, but a month is still a long time to accomplish virtually nothing. I'd go in to daily meetings, try and make up a few tasks that I was working on (I was really still just struggling to study the codebase the whole time), then after the meeting slump back in my seat and boot up a videogame. Occasionally I'd make feeble attempts to take another look at the code, then I'd find something else discouraging and return to the videogames. A month passed like so, I began to get somewhat worried I'd lose my job, and I decided I needed to cut myself off once and for all. I deleted all the games and used Cold Turkey to block a few time-wasting sites (such as this one for most of the day) as well.
I've done this before, but never with such resolve to actually move past such mediocre uses of time. Currently I have no restrictions on Cold Turkey--the website blocks exist, yes, but mostly as a reminder and a method to break unconscious bad habits. I can go in and turn the block off whenever I want. In the past, I set strong restrictions on block-editing, and always fought hard to find ways around them. My only explanation for why it's now so much easier is that I have truly accepted that life will be ok if I never play videogames again. There are better things to do with my time.
It's amazing how much better life immediately became. I have so much time and willpower now. I'm getting conservatively 3-4x as much work done at my job now, plus now there seems to be plenty of time for side projects I've wanted to work on for ages. Perhaps most significantly, I'm on a 1000 calorie/day high-protein keto diet and have lost 10 pounds since I started last week, so I'm the slimmest I've been in a couple of years.
We'll see if this keeps up. My weight loss at least will probably slow down, but for once I genuinely expect this new momentum to otherwise continue. The phenomenon described above, where addiction is at once the cause and solution to all troubles, is extremely powerful. I had no idea just how much better life could be without hours each day devoted to mindless (but mentally tiring) stress-relief. I had thought life would be much harder but also much better--turns out it's just straight up better in every way, despite the loss of my favorite hobby. I'm grateful this past month has been so terrible. Wasting time has always been a problem for me, but it took a month of stressful misery to fully hammer into my head that it was a Problem and not just a minor personal failing to work on.
I've tried to do this before, but always refused to fully give up on the Problematic Pastime. This made it impossible to stick with the plan for long. It was also helpful to conceptualize videogames as a stress-causer rather than a stress-reliever. I'll report again in a few weeks and hopefully will have maintained this trajectory.
That's great and I don't want to take anything away from a fantastic accomplishment. I do want to provide some useful info on your diet plan. There is lots of good published studies on which weight loss strategies lead to long-term decreases in fat mass (youtuber jeff nippard covers a lot of the science if interested). In short, you want to aim for an average weekly calorie consumption of about 10% below maintenance, with weekends eating at maintenance, and weekdays consuming 14% below maintenance, with 2-3 times a week resistance training, and protein consumption of 1.8-3g protein per kg bodyweight. Cardio is not strictly necessary. Low impact cardio is recommended. So that is a brief description on how to increase and keep lean body mass gains. I think calorie tracking apps are a good idea for the first few months. Keto is fine for many, but I would bump the calories, take the fat off more slowly, and do something to retain muscle. That way when you're done dieting down, you're most likely to keep the gains you made. Whatever you choose, best of luck and congrats!
3g per kilogram is ridiculously overkill. Untrained individuals probably don't need to worry about losing muscle mass either.
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