Gotta leave you all behind and face the truth
Hello, just popping in for another moment to share a few tips I personally find really helpful. Edit: quietrhythm has dispensed a few pearls of wisdom that I feel need to be added.
1) Don't freak out if you put on weight. A lot of the intro posts I read are about losing weight. This is fine. The main thing I want to drive home here is the fact that doing this will put on muscle. Muscle weighs more than fat. Therefore, it's perfectly reasonable to put on some pounds before they start going away. Just don't quit when you've been playing DDR and you're suddenly up a few pounds.
2) Diet is just as important as exercise. There's a reason why all those diets never seem to work. Diet without exercise is essentially starving off the pounds and putting them back on when you come off the diet. Similarly, you can exercise and really burn off those calories, but if you follow it up with five cans of coke (and I'm speaking from experience on this one) it's not going to do any good. I've always found dieting harder than exercising, but it's just as important. Edit: To clarify, I mean diet as in eating habits, not those magical 'eat all you want and don't gain weight' programs. quietrhythm mentions that if you have a sweet tooth, fruits contain natural sugars and will curb almost any sweet tooth. As someone with a voracious sweet tooth, I can't recommend this enough.
3) Routine, routine, routine! I cannot stress this enough, it seems. If diet is hard, routine is equally hard, if not harder. In some cases, I think this is a moot point, as one is more compelled to play a game daily, even if exercising, than one would be to go to a gym or go running, etcetera. Even so, it's leading directly into my next point. Once you get into that routine, it's crucial to not break it. Ever hear that saying that it takes twenty-one days to break a bad habit? Well...
4) It takes four times as long to get back in shape as it took to get out. It's exceedingly easy to just stop, no matter what the reason. Finals, papers, far too tired, didn't get enough sleep, it doesn't matter. If you've not been doing your thing for a week, it'll take a month to get back where you were. What's worse is that once you break your routine even once, it'll be harder to get back in. It'll be so much simpler to say, "Ohh, I'll start against next week." And next week I can guarantee that you'll find some other excuse not to do it again. Don't let this happen to you. Edit: Again to clarify, it's not that the body isn't capable of it (or else it would take years upon years to see improvement) but more the mental blocks that inevitably come up.
5) Finally, reasonable mid-term goals are key. My overreaching goal is to get back into shape at my playing weight. This means dropping about thirty to forty pounds to reach 140 (63.5 kg, 10 stone) again. However, general knowledge also dictates that the first ten pounds to go are the easiest; the plateau afterwards makes that much harder to reach than it initially seems. Setting reachable goals as benchmarks keeps you from thinking how far away you are from your main goal (and thus getting discouraged) and instead focusing on the smaller steps.
Hope this has helped at least one person.
1) Don't freak out if you put on weight. A lot of the intro posts I read are about losing weight. This is fine. The main thing I want to drive home here is the fact that doing this will put on muscle. Muscle weighs more than fat. Therefore, it's perfectly reasonable to put on some pounds before they start going away. Just don't quit when you've been playing DDR and you're suddenly up a few pounds.
2) Diet is just as important as exercise. There's a reason why all those diets never seem to work. Diet without exercise is essentially starving off the pounds and putting them back on when you come off the diet. Similarly, you can exercise and really burn off those calories, but if you follow it up with five cans of coke (and I'm speaking from experience on this one) it's not going to do any good. I've always found dieting harder than exercising, but it's just as important. Edit: To clarify, I mean diet as in eating habits, not those magical 'eat all you want and don't gain weight' programs. quietrhythm mentions that if you have a sweet tooth, fruits contain natural sugars and will curb almost any sweet tooth. As someone with a voracious sweet tooth, I can't recommend this enough.
3) Routine, routine, routine! I cannot stress this enough, it seems. If diet is hard, routine is equally hard, if not harder. In some cases, I think this is a moot point, as one is more compelled to play a game daily, even if exercising, than one would be to go to a gym or go running, etcetera. Even so, it's leading directly into my next point. Once you get into that routine, it's crucial to not break it. Ever hear that saying that it takes twenty-one days to break a bad habit? Well...
4) It takes four times as long to get back in shape as it took to get out. It's exceedingly easy to just stop, no matter what the reason. Finals, papers, far too tired, didn't get enough sleep, it doesn't matter. If you've not been doing your thing for a week, it'll take a month to get back where you were. What's worse is that once you break your routine even once, it'll be harder to get back in. It'll be so much simpler to say, "Ohh, I'll start against next week." And next week I can guarantee that you'll find some other excuse not to do it again. Don't let this happen to you. Edit: Again to clarify, it's not that the body isn't capable of it (or else it would take years upon years to see improvement) but more the mental blocks that inevitably come up.
5) Finally, reasonable mid-term goals are key. My overreaching goal is to get back into shape at my playing weight. This means dropping about thirty to forty pounds to reach 140 (63.5 kg, 10 stone) again. However, general knowledge also dictates that the first ten pounds to go are the easiest; the plateau afterwards makes that much harder to reach than it initially seems. Setting reachable goals as benchmarks keeps you from thinking how far away you are from your main goal (and thus getting discouraged) and instead focusing on the smaller steps.
Hope this has helped at least one person.