I would strongly recommend trying Couch to 5k. There are a bunch of free apps for it. It’s a program that can get basically anyone from doing zero exercise, to being able to run 5km. I literally never ran until my 30s and now I do 5km 3 times a week, and even did a 10km race.

It’s very gentle and achievable but all of a sudden you’ll realise you’ve finished the program and you’re a runner haha.

Basic cardio. Walk 30 minutes at a 12 degree incline, 2.5 - 3.0 MPH, 5x a week.

Legit, if you do ONLY this, you will lose weight.

After two weeks of doing this, add on 30 minutes of weight lifting 3-4x a week. Nothing crazy, just get your muscles working.

Do that for two weeks. Congrats - you’ve been exercising for a month. Keep scaling up but listen to your body. Stay hydrated through the day, and 1lb of protein per lb of body weight that you’re supposed to weigh.

Swimming works for me. I joined a gym at a hotel that has a pool, reasonable price and usually fairly few people. I like to swim lengths, thinking of nothing at all, for half an hour to an hour. Good for general fitness, stamina.

1. pull-paradigm, &
2. combined-arms.

One. pull-paradigm: don’t do what you hate: you’ll stop returning to it!!

Find exercise you LOVE doing, & then MAKE it have regular-place in your life, see?

Two. combined-arms: combine the same pull-paradigm in your diet, your fitness-practices, your friendships, you HEALING, see, and make there be sooo-many dimensions in your pulling-your-life-into-healing, that you can’t help but be healing/becoming more!

( :

For the depression, get outside-in-daylight for at-least 30-mins every day, if you can ( or use a SAD light, when it’s gloomy ).

I had to live “in a lightbox”, with 500-watts of fluorescent daylight lighting, in my room, to keep me functioning at all, after I ditched the anti-depressants…

but it worked.

Make your waking-up alarms be lights, which are silent, instead of noisemakers:

warm-white, 1st, then a 2nd timer, 5+mins later, with daylight: it alters your melatonin balance ( the researchers who discovered that yes, in fact, light does alter melatonin, in spite of them not having accepted that as true…

shone lights in behind people’s knees, & even without “light receptors” in the skin there, the effect kept being measured.

Light is THE wakeup-input that people SHOULD be using, not noise! )

The details that you put on those 2 principles, are your details, but getting those-2-principles right massively improves your odds of holding-to-it for the entire-season it takes to gain usable-momentum.

Wishing you well,

_ /\ _

At one point I was 275 pounds, type 2 diabetic, and it was hard just walking upstairs. I was perfectly content to let my diverticulitis slowly kill me and let my ex-wife reap the benefits. That’s how miserable I was. That was about twelve years ago.

When she decided that she would rather start fucking other people, it was my time to gather some self-esteem and slowly work my way out of my problems. I bought a trailer with a piece of land using a secret 401(k) account that I’d had, and that began the long journey to where I am now at 63.

I quit smoking a pack to two packs of cigarettes a day and started dieting and exercising. It was excruciatingly hard. There were stretches where I quit and gained back some of the weight. What I started with was walking. There’s a greenway where I live, and the first time I walked it I thought I was going to die. It’s mostly flat, but it was July, and there I was. It’s four miles from one end to the other and then back to my truck. I didn’t make it all four miles the first time. I turned around almost near the end and walked back very slowly. It turned out to be about seven miles round trip.

Through that health plan I started using my gym membership, using the exercise bike a few days a week, and continuing to walk. Then I started adding in hikes. There was a point where I got down to 196 pounds. I’d really like to be 180, but time will tell.

It has been a long, long, long struggle because I was a schoolteacher and a bus monitor. I would get up at 4:00 a.m., and during wrestling season I would get home at 7:00 or 8:00 at night, go straight to bed, and do it all again every day during the school year. The weight would come back slowly because I wasn’t exercising as much. Then I’d have the summer off, bust my ass losing weight, and continue the cycle.

Here I am now, 63 years old, and stuck around 203 pounds, taking 1 mg of Ozempic a week on top of Metformin. I still have type 2 diabetes, but I’ve learned to control my diet much better. I cut out all sodas, which was a big one, and other processed sugars and foods. Will I occasionally go to Village Inn and have a buffet? Yes, sure, once every three or four months. Will I occasionally stop at Bojangles and get a biscuit and Bo’Rounds before I go hike? Yes, I will. The thing is, you need to be consistent and push yourself when you want to quit.

Now that same greenway I can run from one end to the other and back. I’m not running fast, but I can. I’m now doing 5Ks and an occasional 10K, and fall is my favorite time to do those. To add into my hiking, I’ve taken up fly fishing, which I’m almost as bad at as golf. But the bottom line is that I’m getting out and doing something every day.

Today I’m going over to Lenoir to run the mountain bike trail, which is preparing me for the Dirty Santa five-mile run in December. Granted, I’m retired and have way more time on my hands than I’m used to, but that’s what I did and still do. It may not work for some people, but it’s working for me. I also have an exercise bike, a mountain bike, and a gravel bike. Sadly, the running is taking a little bit of a toll on my joints, so I’m slowly transitioning to bike riding.

My suggestion to you is be consistent, and when you feel like you want to stop, push yourself a little harder. I always pushed my wrestlers to be in the best physical shape they could be in, with the most endurance they could possibly muster, because to win matches you have to be stronger and faster than your opponent. I didn’t take my own advice very well until about ten years ago when I realized that I was going to die if I didn’t get my shit in one sock. That, and I couldn’t bear to think of the soldiers who had worked under me when I was a military officer seeing me as a weak, body-fat tub of lard.

Now get out there and get to it. It doesn’t matter what you do as long as you’re doing something.

I had this during covid and free home workouts videos helped me out a lot. Started with just a yogamat (or towel) doing easy beginner friendly workouts of only 15-30 minutes. No need to go out, noone sees you and there are apartment/small space/downstairs neighbour friendly options. I used the fitnessblender workouts and the sense of accomplishment at the “workout complete” screen is magical.

Have you ever heard of frisbee golf, or disc golf? It’s popular in places. Perhaps there could be a course somewhere near you? Then just talk a friend into coming and soon you won’t even notice the exercise you’re getting on accident because you’re looking for a throw that kinda went wrong and now you’re having to find the damn disc because youre definitely not going to give up on finding your best one.

But also when you succeed, it’s fun.

I’m baffled by the amount of people who recommend to take drugs to exercise.

Walking is a very good start, yes. And start slow.

When you get high at night, go for a walk. Night walk is lovely.

Also whenever you think about it, stand on one foot, sounds odd but it’s good for your body. Little exercise breaks, go up the stairs and back down a couple of times.

Mostly I want to say - building a habit takes six weeks. Force yourself every day for six weeks. After that it gets easier because you will feel better on a day you exercise, than a day you don’t, and because you will have found the time of day that works. Habit works a lot better than willpower, but you have to power your way through those first few weeks. Commit to six weeks of daily something. Push ups, walking, whatever.

I’d agree with all of these. But most importantly: LISTEN TO YOUR BODY

This can sound confusing, but the more you do it, the more it feels right. It’s the whole idea behind “sports” like yoga and the key to athletic performance, even if only done for fitness.

It’s gonna be difficult at first, but your body will tell you. If you’re done, you’re done. There’s no point in doing more. Get rest, even if it is a week, which can happen in the beginning. Especially during skeletal adaptation, which I’ve actually had happen recently after I changed from normal running shoes to minimal. If you feel any soreness that lasts too long, stop, rest. If you feel winded, stop, rest. Anything sus? Act on it. If you don’t have an unhealthy level of paranoia then you need to listen to your body’s pain signals. Sometimes pain signals even tell you to go into the pain. Be careful, but do that. If you’re freaking out because you don’t know what you should do about a feeling that’s new, take some time and see how it develops. It may just go away and not come back without effort that feels appropriate. It may come back the moment you go into activity. Just take your time, and I mean reeeaally taje your time, and try to listen.

And whatever you do, do not trust what your head feels about you bodily fitness. Trust what your body feels.

When we grow up sports get more of a focus about how to not injure yourself, which will make sure you maximize your potentential or minimize time spent, which is in contrast to it being mainly play for younglings. The play part never disappear of course. :)

A tip on the overweight/depression part: You become healthy once you act like a healthy person. Doesn’t mean you are, just means you become. Also doesn’t mean you should crash diet down to a perfect bmi. A healthy person cares about themselves deeply. They want to eat the right things, which is different for everybody, they want to have a healthy gut, be able to run around in joy, even though they may be 45. If you don’t then you have other issues to fix too. In parallel. Mind and body are often described as separate, but the truth is, that the are inseparable. It’s totally fine to be depressed, just as it is fine to have a high body fat percentage. But I do not wish it on anyone for an extended period of time.

This is based on a life full of exercise and biomechanical optimisation. I have recovered from a partial meniscus tear (weird mix of bucket handle and flap), a partial patellar tendon tear and smaller ouchies. The big ones are not gone, of course, but hardly noticeable. I have also come to know that physical wellness is nothing without mental wellness and vice-versa.

If you want further details, hit me up. I don’t cost, I’m not a coach. I also don’t have the technical knowledge of one, so I guess that’s the reason I don’t cost.

Daily walks. From there I’d recommend getting a bicycle.

Pick a time of day and just step outside and do a lap around the block or two

I know you said no gyms, but a few sessions with a personal trainer at a gym isn’t a terrible idea. The PT will give you a realistic plan to get started. Some goals to keep you on track, and they’ll be that important role of the person checking in on your progress, and appointments you need to keep. Yeah, it’s all a bit of self-delusion… you can get most of this from the web for free, but sometimes having another person to push you is hugely helpful.

Also, pick up basketball, hockey, soccer/football, and rugby are fantastic exercise that feel like the chore of exercising because they’re a game. If you like cycling, there’s likely a local group or two you can join for long weekend rides.

I can’t speak to the anxiety and depression, so my advice might not be good advice for you.

Just walking around or going for a short hike is a good start. But, spoken from my own experience: the best first step is to stop getting high. Usually helps with depression and anxiety as well. It did so for me. It’s not easy, but it should be the first thing.

I always say, get a dog. Youll walk every day, you play in the park or backyard. Plus dogs are just awesome companions and help with positive attitudes.

Its a commitment, but i couldnt imagine not having a dog with me. Humans and dogs belong together.