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Wellness Wednesday for January 4, 2023

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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My main motivations for working out are to improve my mood, and vanity. I'm not interested in getting "huge" or "shredded", but I would really like to get rid of my beer belly and look generally leaner and more toned. I'm also planning on running a marathon at the end of this year, so any exercises which would assist with that are also welcome.

If that's your goal, getting to the gym will increase your cardiovascular health but won't do much for that beer belly. To tackle excess fat and weight it's all about calorie intake. I find these steps are great for starting weight loss:

  1. don't eat out

  2. don't drink alcohol

  3. all food is made from scratch - minimize prepared frozen meals/pizzas, etc.

  4. when you make food, portion it out into meals

  5. switch grains for veggies

Thanks. The infuriating thing is that I've lost a load of weight over the last few years via diet, exercise etc., but can't shake the last bit of belly flab.