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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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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The purpose of this point is to mostly share in my body horror.
So, I recently picked up a hunting camera. You know, to place it in spots I think I might find game in and come back later to review the video and see if it's worth getting up at 3am to watch the sunrise in that spot later while clutching a rifle.
To test the camera out, I set it up in my house and let it run overnight.
Annoyingly it produced .AVI files that
ffmpeg(viampv) can't view. But I installed VLC and that plays it fine. Whew.Anyway, I watched the overnight footage and mostly caught myself on camera while not expecting to. Unposed, from unflattering angles.
Yikes. Nothing like watching yourself amble about in your underwear in the middle of the night, on grainy surveillance camera quality video, to give you a mini crisis about how your diet, exercise and posture is going.
I do have fairly large mirrors in my house so I can't escape a glimpse of myself if I'm getting too obese, and that's helpful, but surveillance camera style footage is next level. Seeing yourself from the back, looking around confused,how often you totter around limp-wristed, how your butt moves and what your gait looks like is quite a wake-up call. Especially when you're not expecting it.
I suppose actors and other professional look-gooders-on-camera eat, breathe and sleep in this desert of the real. But for average mopes like me it's crisis-fuel.
Annoyingly, I do exercise regularly, both lifting and running, and do intermittent fasting. I don't look terrible but I definitely don't match my residual self-image + whatever not-posed-but-still-actually-posed mirror shots show.
To spin this positively(?), I do wonder if my physical appearance would be improved overall if I was regularly seeing videos of myself like this?
I don’t hunt and I don’t record hours if footage in my house during the night, but all the rest of this resonates with me massively. I don’t have an answer to your ultimate question but a few things that seem to have worked for me for several years (with intermittent falls off the wagon which underlined how much they were working):
I also run, which does at least as much and possibly more for my psychology as it does for my physiology. Periods of solid running always coincide periods of better body self image and better mental health. None of it is cracked though. Every day the clock resets and the challenge starts again.
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