I’ve gone for runs with my wife, I’ve done swimming, I would tend to gravitate to the bikes when I went to the gym, never had this endorphin rush I have heard so much about.
Congratulations. It took me over 30 years to find a form of exercise that doesn’t make me murderous (I’m substracting childhood years). I do believe you when you say you enjoy exercise, please believe us when we say we do not.
I’m not sure what to tell you…
It can be subtle, and maybe it’s overridden by the pressure you feel to keep up with your wife?
For me, I never really felt it until I was exercising on my own, for myself.
Being frank here, this bit makes it seem like your avoidance partly stems from resentment that others like to do something you can’t make yourself do, but would like to. You need to forget about that. Focus on you. The couch-to-5K idea mentioned above is a good idea. Some places have free classes at the local hospitals to help you. Be around like minded folks.
Also, any change in diet (eating habits) will take about 6 weeks to become satisfying. Anything short of that and your body will still crave what you are currently used to. Don’t buy what you don’t need and stick with it for a while.
It’s not like we’ve never exercised before. I’ve never felt better after exercise, not even after doing something I truly enjoy like playing bball. Pain and tiredness are alway the only results.
I couldn’t agree more. I got a big dog to make sure I was forced to take at least one decent walk if nothing else. Recently, I found an app that tracks how far we’ve gone and gives me little charts to show our trends – how far we’ve walked on each day, average miles per day for the week or the month, etc. I am a big fan of charts and graphs for that immediate gratification. Part of this app also tells you how many calories you’ve burned. I was disheartened to discover that a 2-mile walk with the dog (at a pace of about a 24-minute mile) only burns less than 150 calories. That’s not even one whole cupcake! 
Really strenuous cardio – like a Zumba class – maybe burns 250-300 calories an hour and that is hard work. That’s not very many calories burned – maybe one beer.)
One of my Paleo/CrossFit friends (Kool Aid Drinker ;)) posted that 80% of how you look is what you eat. I agree with this based on my personal experience.
Try focusing on your food. I highly recommend a food journal. You write down (or use an app, whatev) everything that goes into your mouth for a week. Then go research and add up exactly how many calories you consumed. Chances are, you could lop off a couple hundred calories just by not sweetening your tea, or skipping the cheese or sour cream, that sort of thing. Fruit for dessert instead of cookies, pie or cake. Make small, incremental changes slowly and just focus on making better choices. Read ingredients on processed foods to find hidden calories in sweeteners and added fat.
I never recommend giving up an entire food group because I think it’s just not sustainable. Anyone I’ve known who did low-carb or low-fat isn’t still doing it. If you’re going to eat something that’s less than nutritious, at least try to eat less of that thing. One cookie instead of four. Half a slice of cake instead of a huge slice plus ice cream.
Also, give this time. You will probably not see obvious results for a few months. It took a minute to build up to being overweight; it will also take some time to take that back off.
Fair enough. Brain chemicals can be elusive little bastards.
Like the OP I hate exercising, but I’ve lost about 25 lbs. in the past year by tracking my calories using an app. (MyFitnessPal, although there are others that are similar.) You enter your current weight and how much weight you want to lose per week, and it will recommend a daily calorie goal for you. Then you enter what you eat after each meal and can see how you’re doing. It has a large database of food with the nutritional information already entered, and you can also enter in the info for things you buy. I don’t worry about being perfect with this, and if I’m eating in a restaurant or eating something cooked by a friend then I just try to find the best match in the database. The important thing is that I track everything I eat.
I’m sure this wouldn’t work for everyone; I worried myself that this would make me feel miserable every time I are something or that it would cause me a lot of stress. But personally I find it doesn’t take up much mental energy and seeing how many calories I have left for the day makes it easier for me to resist the temptation to overeat now because it means I’ll have to eat less than usual later.
Did you have fun? Did you forget about the stress of work? Were you proud to have a fit body that could play bball? Feeling better isn’t just about physical feelings. It’s also about your mental state. Even if your muscles were sore, I’m guessing you were happier and more relaxed after the bball match. That’s the benefit of exercise.
The endorphin rush is real, but it comes after a long period of high exertion. Most people don’t exercise at that level. Regardless, that’s not the reason to exercise. The effort of exercise is not worth the little bit of endorphins you might get. The benefit is the lifetime of improved health, mobility, and mental state.
Up until your 30’s, it doesn’t matter a whole lot if you exercise. But as you get into your 40’s, your body starts to decay. You get tired all the time. Muscles start to atrophy. You pull a muscle in your back getting the groceries out of the car. Things that take effort are hard, so you do them less, and you get weaker, and you become more sedentary, and so on. You may even feel worse about yourself because of your reduced ability. You must take an active role in reversing that decline.
Even a small level of exercise can have significant results. Check out this discussion: “What is the single best thing we can do for our health”. It covers the amazing health benefits of just 30 minutes a day of light exercise.
My ex-wife could have made largely the same comment. She was throwing a good 10 to 12 hours daily into her graduate studies as a result. Her response to family, friends and me telling her to moderate herself had little effect on her manic work rate. And, to be fair, my ex’s sheer insistence that her work and research was the only valuable thing in her life did bring her quite a bit of success–a teaching job at a prestigious university, and a number of published articles and books. Mind you, this all came at the cost of most of her friends and our marriages, but from her own standpoint, she was a great success!
Until health problems both mental and physical forced her to go on indefinite leave from her teaching job and she found herself unable to do the traveling needed to do her research. So for the last eight years or so her life has just sort of wandered in the dark, because after her research and teaching were gone, she really had nothing left in her life.
I suspect you do not want something like this to happen to yourself, and while the previous posters have made some good and interesting comments about exercise, I really don’t think that’s the problem. You’ve concentrated your life onto one very small part of your self-existence, and a perilous one at that. Most books aren’t destined to be bestsellers, and, like my ex-wife, even if you do get books published you may find your name in agate type rather than in klieg lights.
But you say, “The harder I work on my book, the more likely it will be a success!” Stinkin’ thinkin’, as my AA buddy once said. Stepping away from a project so often allows one to make leaps of logic and thoughts that don’t happen at the computer terminal. Think of how often you’ve thought of something for your book while standing at the oven or stepping out of the shower. Similarly getting out of the house helps too. Think of snatches of overheard conversations, seeing an unusually-shaped tree or house down the street, and your mind suddenly clicks onto another tramline. But by the same token, I find that mild exercise allows my mind to clear the slate. So often in my job I am stuck on a project. A 15-minute walk later, and I am ready to attack the project from a fresh start. As I have been able to exercise harder, I’ve been able to clean the slate faster and more powerfully.
I wish you the best–I have known so many people in your situation.
It’s podcasts for me. If I load up a girl on guy and maybe a Wits or a Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, I’ll walk for hours. I’ll circle my apartment block until the podcast ends if I have to. Walk without listening to anything? Forget about it.
The other thing I’ve found that helps keep me moving is the mobile app Ingress. It’s an augmented reality game and uses google maps. You have to be within a certain distance of actual physical locations and you can do stuff. I decided early on that I wasn’t going to drive places specifically for Ingress. If I want to mess with the portal half a kilometer from my apartment, I have to walk there. If I want to bolster stuff around my office, I need to take a 15 minute walk at lunch. If I want to go to the sculpture garden and grind, I better take the bus or else stop off at the museum for a while. It may seem complicated but I’ve really stepped up my activity level as a result.
Get rid of your car. You don’t have to worry about motivation when you are forced to bike to work. Exercise now becomes just a practical form of transportation. Your achievement is getting to your destination.
Life will be inconvenient without a car, but your health is more important than convenience.
^^ username/post combo ^^
Motivation is always the most difficult aspect. For me, as I’ve been at it for so long, it’s because I know that when I don’t, I feel the difference. By that, I mean, I can get by on a fair amount less sleep, my mood is much more stable, I have more energy. It’s been a long time, but when I had an extensive break, it definitely affected all of those things negatively. Even these days, if I don’t exercise for a couple days, I feel it. Beyond that, surprisingly, it’s great for my mind too. Sometimes, if I’m really thinking about heavy topics, it’s nice to do a set, then focus my mind on that topic, sort of like going back and forth. Or sometimes I’m mentally exhausted, perhaps after a difficult day at work, and I can just kind of zone out and focus on the workout, sort of like a meditation.
But motivation is much more difficult for getting started. It sounds like you have a lot of negative associations with exercise and diet, and that’s going to make it harder. To that end, I’d suggest a couple things. First, start out light. Some people seem to feel like they need to get in shape as quickly as possible and they just go too hard. If you’re doing nothing now, going hard will just be more of a turn-off if you’re already unmotivated. So maybe start with a light walk or job for 15 minutes, and once it really starts to click that it’s actually kind of enjoyable, you can go from there. Same with diet. Some people will go right from stuffing their face to skinless chicken breast, brown rice, and broccoli, and feel miserable. For me when I made a few adjustments to diet a few years ago, I just make small easier stuff to start with, like replacing sweets such as ice cream with healthier ones like fruit.
Second, get a partner, or at least an app, to help motivate you and track your progress. It’s a lot easier to make sure you do a work out or eat well when you have a friend you’re accountable to and vice-versa. And if you can track your progress, it’s another way to help motivate you. Sometimes small changes happen to slowly to really notice, but if you can see how far you’ve come, it gets easier. For instance, a lot of lifters will write down how much weight and how many reps they do. You might make a few gains here and there, but it doesn’t seem noticeable until you look back 3-6 months and can see the sum of all those gains. Similar with diet, seeing where you were and where you are now.
Third, find a way to make it interesting. It could be as simple as having a partner to talk with while exercising, which is another benefit to that. It could be just finding some good music, an audio book, or a radio show to listen to. In my case, as I mentioned, I like to approach it like a meditation and usually try to not get too heady, but something, particularly when I exercise on the weekends and I’ve not been really busy, I’ll enjoy picking a topic to think about and work through, or work on lyrics or poetry, or hell, I even sometimes work out math puzzles and such, simple enough to keep in my head but hard enough to make them interesting. Beyond that, that’s where switching up the kind of exercise you do helps to keep it interesting too.
Well, my question is:
Do you want to change this attitude, or not?
I mean, I don’t know you, but from the post it kind of sounds like you’re a little bit attached to this feeling and don’t want it to go away.
Because if you really do want to have a different attitude, you can. I mean, there will always be people just way too into, and way too competitive about, their own little thing, and exercise is no different; they will always be annoying. And your attitude won’t change overnight, either; it’s going to take some conscious effort on your part, telling yourself, “Hey, there’s no reason to get annoyed at this perfectly nice person”. But if you work at it, it can happen.
Of course, admitting that people who exercise aren’t arseholes means admitting that something you’re not currently good at is valuable. But you won’t get better at anything, ever, by saying it’s worthless.
I’ve never ever learned to enjoy exercise - and I’m well past the magic “few weeks” or whatever it is you need. I don’t exactly hate running, but give me a book in bed anytime. I go because I make myself, because I feel better in general when I do, but I never ever want to.
What I did get a lot of mileage out of is portion control. I have managed to get myself used to smaller portions, not eating till I’m stuffed, but only till I’m no longer hungry. To me this is a big win, because I don’t feel like I’m depriving myself of anything at all. I still get a tasty meal, I just don’t cram it in to bursting, at which point the fun part has long gone anyway. I think I’ve lost about 10 kg this way and it doesn’t feel like I’m making any effort for that at this point.
This from Quercus.^
You say you do most of the cooking. Ask your wife to do the shopping and no bringing home random goodies. Make out a weekly menu beforehand. Allow for desserts/snacks (pears, popcorn.) You’ll save money and cut out the temptations.
Don’t diet. Eat anything you want, in moderation.
A long time ago people didn’t exercise, they tried to survive. And they burned off a lot of calories doing it. Plant a garden and weed it, tend to it. You have to get grubby and it takes time and you might even have to squat. You might also discover you like asparagus (at least the way it looks.)
Volunteer at an archeological site. Squatting in the hot sun for hours at a time is bound to burn off some calories. And you might get some background for another book.
Start doing standup comedy under the hot lights because I think you rock.
I agree with a lot of what was said above. Exercise for the sake of exercise is boring and pointless. (I say this as someone who has been, at various points in his life, pretty athletic, and loves to play sports. Sports are fun. Exercise is balls, and you won’t convince me otherwise.)
Dieting is, unfortunately, also balls. I second, however, MyFitnessPal. I have been using it for 6 weeks or so, and have lost 15 pounds. I don’t feel particularly deprived, because I can eat kind of what I want, just not giant amounts of it. I can still eat bacon, just not 12 slices. I can have a burger, just hold the fries and shake. Every food on the earth is in their database, and it is super easy to use. And it is free. And you can use it from every computer and device in your possession.
Try listening to the podcasts of Jonathan Bailor. They are all here on youtube. If nothing else you will learn plenty about how your body works. He recommends eating more, exercising less but in smarter ways and using science to lead the way.