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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For me, the motivation was just to be able to function without great discomfort, since I'd been overweight/obese for about 5ish years when I started losing weight. By BMI, I was right around the overweight/obese boundary (30), which was making simple acts like sitting on a chair without discomfort from fat rolls or walking up one flight of stairs very difficult and arduous. It was probably a bad decision given my weight at the time, but I started running, and as I ran more and more, I found that I enjoyed the experience of tracking my stats and pushing myself to get faster or keep up longer streaks or to go on longer runs and such. Being in my early-mid 20s helped my body tolerate the punishment, I think. As I discovered the fun of athletic activities, I pivoted to other ones, and I landed on ultimate Frisbee as a dependable go-to exercise that I partake in throughout most of the year.
As you allude to, I think this is the kind of thing that can only come from an internal motivation. But one thing that I think I took away from this experience is that finding a sport or other activity that you find fun or engaging is a big BIG help for making exercise stick. I don't run anymore, partly because of my knees, but mostly because I don't enjoy the actual moment-to-moment experience of running. The runner's high was pleasant, and the act of transforming my body both in terms of its physical composition and in terms of actions the body is capable of performing was fun, but at the end of the day, if I could get all those benefits without running, I would. I wouldn't say the same for ultimate Frisbee. For that, the activity is the benefit, and the exercise is a side-effect. Running for 30 minutes is a chore, but playing ultimate for 90 minutes is fun the whole time and burns more calories while also likely hitting a higher max HR. I've been able to manage my weight and general fitness level pretty well for the past decade or so without putting much effort at all into fitting regular exercise into my schedule - I just have fun playing a game that also happens to require me to exercise.
So I think, from a 3rd person perspective, to get someone else to pick up exercising, one path I would try to follow is to find some activity that they find fun that also enforces exercise. There are plenty of fairly low-level, low-commitment activities that can be tried out, including ultimate, but also other pickup sports like soccer or basketball, or biking or hiking or indoor rock climbing or even something like MMA or BJJ (though usually those take more commitment). I'd actually invite them to partake in these various activities with me, since 99.99% of the time, when the conversation goes "X is cool, you should try it," "Oh thanks for the recommendation, I'll give it a shot!" the 2nd person won't even remember what X is 30 seconds later, much less actually try it (that 99.99% probably drops to around 90% if you actually invite someone, but that's still a 1000-fold increase in success rate!). And if you have some social status in this environment, certainly attaching yourself to this activity will make them more likely to genuinely enjoy the activity in itself.
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