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Wellness Wednesday for June 26, 2024

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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haven't noticed any sharp increase in appetite

This is what exercise seems to get for me. Yeah, burning an extra 300 calories means spending a whole hour on light exercise or half an hour on more vigorous exercise, but after I've done that I somehow don't feel like I'm missing 300 calories. I can initially drop 300 calories more easily (infinitely more easily! negative effort!) by skipping snacks or eating a lighter meal, but if I do that with real food or even junk food then I'm acutely aware of the absence until I make up for it (possibly with interest, eating too fast because I'm hungrier...). I think for most people the easiest low-hanging fruit is dietary, avoiding liquid calories, but once that's done exercise starts to look like a good deal very soon afterwards.

(this is just talking about weight loss - obviously if you're more directly worried about health and fitness then things like "replace junk food with healthier food" and muscle-building exercise are more beneficial sooner)