Improve your relationship with food. This can be done gradually. I imagine you eat

emotionally; alleviating bad feeling with crap food is the most basic definition of a toxic

relationship with food I can think of. When you eat to antidote negative emotion, you are

digging the hole doubly deeper - you're adding a new problem, junk food, while the original

unhealthy emotional state remains unresolved. By cultivating an understanding and feeling

for your food, which happens naturally when you start preparing your own meals from

scratch, you can begin to heal this toxic relationship. It will not happen quickly. Do not

be discouraged if you backslide, but never use a backslide as an excuse to do even worse.

If you keep trying, and put in the work preparing your own meals from scratch from whole

food ingredients, you will see results. I can guarentee this - if you are making meals from

whole foods and doing anything short of deep-frying racks of ribs on top of potatoes

gratin, you will lose weight. The caloric content to satiety rate in processed food is

terrible - plain terms, you have to eat more crap food to feel full, crap food that is

already more dense calorically than home-cooked meals. Once again, you're doubling up on

the negatives. Very few meals you cook from scratch CAN even possibly match the caloric

density of modern processed food. Swtitching over to a heavily plant-based whole food diet

has so many benefits I can't even begin to get into them here, but be sure if you only take

away one thing from this post, it's this.

There's a tendency on this board to view motivation and discipline as character traits
whose set levels just vary from individual to individual, and whatever your personal traits
are end up being what you have to work with. This is false. This is a fallacy. Repeat:
discipline and motivation, like every other aspect of fitness, must be trained. Very very
few people have no problems with this whatsoever. If you are not one of these lucky
individuals, and if you are obese you are almost certainly not of them, must grow a greater level of discipline over time. If you have ever wondered why so many people buy a gym membership and quit after six weeks, or why less than ten percent of obese individuals who lose weight end up keeping it off long term, it is because they bought into the fallacy.
You cannot expect to turn into a hard-headed iron pumping beast with level 100 stoicism
overnight, but, again, make the right choices over and over again, and progress will come.

Clean your space every day until it becomes automatic, under your awareness. This is eventually how an excercise regimen can feel.You will feel resistant at first, cleaning
for an hour will seem like way too long, and you will think of 100 reasons to quit early
because the job is already done. This is the poisonous part of your brain, the part that
got you obese in the first place. Do not continue to rent it space in your skull. Every
day, do the work, real work, for the whole hour. Go more if you can, but you don't have to.
Make sure to count this hour seperate from any chores you already have in a routine

already, if you start bullshitting your timekeeping you will fail. Remember when you are tempted to skimp or count some time extra, you are feeding that toxic homunculus, you are hurting only yourself, and the only way to succeed at this is to be totally honest with
your mistakes and yourself while putting in the work.

You may be thinking right now that all this sounds like a "one easy trick" sidebar ad to solve all your problems, and you may not be wrong. The difference is is that this process will not be easy. You will start and stop and fail and stall if you are anything like a human. This is normal. Success is the sum of many, many right answers to the small choices in life. It is important not to think to heavily in terms of black and white - this is the other big way that people get discouraged when starting out at making healthy choices. You've probably heard the story, and if you are obese you may have lived it; fatty decides to get healthy, fatty eats one salad a day for a week while running on the treadmill, after a week they miss one workout or eat one wrong thing, declare the whole thing bust, and binge on five pounds of fudge. That is what black-and-white thinking looks like, this is what letting one setback lead to another looks like, this is letting the greedy homonculus in your frontal lobe call the shots.If you make a mistake, accept it, try to understand it, but, fairly quickly, move on. Beating yourself up for your mistakes, especially if like many obese individuals you have depressive tendencies, is something that can very quickly lead to a spiral of guilt and shame that leads only down. Probably the no. 1 waste of productive energy in my life has been this pit, and if I could tell my past self any one thing, it would be learn to let it go and cultivate equanimity. SO yeah, avoid black and white thinking. Success is not a perfect batting average, success is having an average that's always going up. I really don't know much about baseball, but the point of the metaphor is that one screwup is not the end of the world, unless you let it change your mind and influence you toward bad choices. A fuckup can only hurt you if you let it. It is incredibly empowering to know that only you have the ultimate control in this.

So, bringing it back, the cleaning thing, you gotta keep doing it. When you keep doing it, you'll notice over time that your space has never been cleaner, and, indeed, a clean room does feel better to be in. Guests and strangers who see the inside of your area will be surprised at the neatness and tidyness of things, and you in turn will be afforded more respect. As things progress, you will find you have less to clean, as messes are popping up slower that you clean them. Now, with your alloted time, you can rearrange (or obtain) your furniture and wall decorations to look more aesthetically pleasing. You can organize your closet and drawers (or again if you are very bad you can get an organizational system going on at all) to be more efficient, move things you don't use often to long-term storage in the basement or whatever, and have the stuff you do use often well-sorted and stored for easy use. As your space and possessions become more efficiently ordered, you will find moving through it and getting things done much easier.

Now apply this model to your body and fitness. As you keep making the right choices and putting the work in, your body will change accordingly. You cannot bullshit the metabolism, and it will show a record of what you have done one way or another (note that in no way am I saying do the cleaning thing metaphorically. Literally, actually clean an hour a day). A cleaner, more organized room is more pleasant to be in; a fitter, more diciplined person will generally get more respect. A cluttered storage system makes finding things difficult, a clean one lets you get shit done quicker; a fat, lazy body makes every task more difficult, while one in better shape can be a joy to move around in. And, at the end of the day, joy is what we are talking about here. That's the end goal in all this, remember. If you start moving around, keeping your space clean, and cooking, you will eventually, after you put in the work, find happiness you didn't think was possible. Learn to find joy in the tasks of life, cleaning, lifting, or whatever, rather than approaching them as chores. Celebrate making the right choice each time you do it, rather than enduring the chores as hardships now for rewards later. Accept with gratitude each task you do, and you can find happiness like that you thought was going to be gone forever. This is the hardest task, and one you will probably spend your life trying to achieve, but once you start, rewards will come with the work.

This being 4chimp and all I really don't want to discuss or push my beliefs on anyone, but after saying that a little spirituality and a lot of gratitude goes a long way, I will drop the subject.

I think the discussion on joy needs to be hashed out a little further, because it is on of the trickier, more philosophical points. I believe the rest of this is a pretty good basic sketch for some mental fitness, and if you try and follow the advice you will start seeing results. This part is more my own experience and path, and I encourage you all reading this to try it out and make up your own mind about it. Disclaimers aside, the idea of trying to find joy in shaping one's own perspective is not my idea or a new idea. Buddhism has got a lot of good stuff here on disengaging the negative emotional cycles that can happen in life. A secular term for this could be equanimity, and a colloquial term letting it go. Equanimity is the ability to observe with evaluation - to try to see things simply as they are. Rather than saying, "Oh, look, money, this makes me happy!" or "there goes a handsome alpha with a qt3.14, guess I better kill myself," one can say simply "there is money," or "there goes a good-looking man with his handsome lady." The emotional reactions are not necessarily real or accurrate, they are just emotions. If you look inward with an equanimous eye, you can observe your own emotions, and strangely, this seems to work on fixing a lot of them. Look inside, sense how an emotion can have a physical feeling, acknowledge and accept the emotion, and let it go, and often, the emotion really will go. Rather than trying to fill in a negative emotion with consumer goods, drugs, and junk food, with the power of you own mind, you can solve them. What sounds better, continuing to poison yourself in an attempt to avoid bad feelings, or training your mind to be able to confront them head on and win?

Essentially, what the end goal of equanimity can do for you is remove totally all contingency from your happiness, meaning that you and you alone can decide what causes you joy and despair (When you are level 20 monk mode at least. Also, if you don't have a stable housing/living/money/food/etc. situation, get that shit sorted out first. Ennui comes after, nothing you do will help much if you don't have the basics sorted. Maslow's Hierarchy is real. The process by which one trains the mind to do this is generally in the western scientific community known as CBT or cognitive behavioural therapy.) With this sort of mindset, it is easier to form good habits - when I talk about finding joy in routine, the ability of the mind to shape itself is key - try to find pleasure in doing a task and doing it well, and the task won't be a burden. If your happiness was not contingent on external factors, on possessions, on the approval of others, imagine what you could do. Accepting respect and admiration is good, but it is better when you do not need it. Oddly enough, not needing praise earns you more of it. Go figure. If you want to talk more results-oriented, not needing the pleasures of life for happiness will allow you to get more pleasure from them, which will then increase your happiness. If this seems paradoxical, it is because you have assumed a false axiom.

I justify this lengthy digression into the mind and contemplation thereof for two main reasons. The first, as stated before, is that it is my own belief (and experience) that obesity is often a manifestation of a untrained or troubled mind, and I personally could never have lost the weight I did without working on my mental state, side-by-side. The body-mind seperation is such a false dichotomy, even basic common sense can prove this (ex: eating food makes the mind feel pleasure, the effort of the mind can make the body endure more pain.) If body and mind are so closely linked then it makes sense to train both for the most effective weight-loss intervention. Here I focused more strictly on the mental side of things, but everything here is leagues more effective in tandem with a good exercise regimen. This brings me to the second point; of /fit/ I see a lot of advice on the level of tough it out, suck it up, whatever. Keeping motivation by sheer force of will can work, and that's how I got started, but for my dime, this frame of mind works quite a bit better. Why not take the same care you take in figuring out your lifting and stretching routines when approaching your mental health? I guess my message is that shaping your own mind is within closer reach than most people think, and that many of the same tools you use in training your body can apply to the other side here too. My goal here is to hopefully get someone who otherwise would have quit to stick with it by offering an alternate method to "grit your teeth and sweat it out fatty." More broadly, I want as many people to succeed as possible, and have tried to express what worked best for me.


tl;dr SS+GOMAD

FURTHER READING: DON'T TAKE MY WORD FOR ALL THIS

STARTING STREGTH 3RD EDITON by MARK RIPPETOE

JOY OF COOKING
- Though I get most of my recipes online, having a copy of this book in the kitchen is an extremely handy tool. If you're newer to cooking and an online recipe is vague (i.e. Step 3: Shape the dough into a dumpling, which you have no clue about) you can open the index, find what you're looking for ("dumplings") and flip there, you'll get an often illustrated rundown of the basic process, and this book is so fat that except for the weirdest of weird foriegn foods your gonna find something good for what you are looking for. The copy I got is from the early 1970s and it still has instructions on how to make your own tofu, and it's only gotten better since then. That's the other thing too, this book has had so many editions and has been in print so long that you can pick them up for nothing, I got my copies for $1 and fifty cents respectively at garage sales. It really doesn't matter a ton how old or new they are (there's not been a big revolution how you make tomato sauce or bake bread in the last 15 years), so just go with the cheapest one you can find. I can't stress enough how much better this book is than eHow or whatever beginner cooking shit you find on the web, being written by experienced, quality chefs makes this book a much better resource, as well as it's comprehensiveness and resistance to spills. One caveat is that a lot of the recipes in the book call for a lot more oil/lard/butter and carbohydrates than might be ideal, but reducing those numbers on your own ain't hard, and the internet is the better reasource for recipes anyways. Treat this book like SS for cooking - if you are a complete noob idiot, it will help you greatly, and even the more experienced can review it for form tips.

INTRO SCRUB TIER PHILOSOPHICAL TYPE STUFF
Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace - a good exploration of addiction and pleasure, relevant to almost all modern lifestyles

Loving Kindness, by Sharon Salzberg - Intro to metta meditation, which focuses on relieving suffering and loneliness through compassionate meditation

The Feeling Good Handbook, by David Burns - a good intro text to CBT and DIY mental therapy

The Myth of Sisyphus, by Albert Camus - a piece written on themes which resemble those I have tried to explain.

BIO
I am currently 6'6" and 250, at my heaviest I was pushing 400. It is a rainy afternoon, and after a little too much tea, I spent two hours typing up my thoughts for /fit/. What I have written is a basic summation/sketch of my own process of losing the weight and coming to some sort of understanding. Housekeeping and cooking may sound like silly ways to fix your life and mind, but for those who are extremely overweight, you sometimes have to start at the very bottom. Personally, exploring in the kitchen has been a real delight,and has opened up my social life termendously. Getting a reputation as a good cook is easy when most people these days can barely flip an egg, and I've started a backyard produce garden that has brought a bunch of quality people into my life through gardening associations etc. Basically, my point is this - if you are fat, miserable, and don't do anything but vidya, cooking and cleaning will never hurt anything - it could probably stand to be cleaned, and just getting up and getting around helps if you're depressed. You might even find some new hobbies, and good cooking is always a skill people admire. I lift, but am no kind of expert to be giving advice there. This area is a little more in my wheelhouse, So I wrote this to contribute and maybe help some people out the only way I could.


P.S. If you are depressed, hang in there. I have suffered from depression since I was twelve goddamn years old. With CBT and TDCS research that's been going on for the last ten years, breakthroughs are on the horizon. Seeing a professional therapist regularly is a good idea. I found one who really helped me, so have some hope, they are not literally ALL garbage people after your money. Remember that suicide is no answer, and that you can manage and beat this.

shit folks i know that's a lot of reading but I think discussing it would be worthwhile

uh ok