Rejected for the hobbies challenge for whatever reason, posting here

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A friend of mine put me on to My Fitness Pal, lots of good articles, pasting (hopefully correctly) in case others find it useful too

[url]https://blog.myfitnesspal.com/8-at-home-self-care-strategies-that-can-help-you-lose-weight/?utm_source=mfp&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MFP_DAILY_3_20200514_TEST_A&utm_content=mindset[/url]

It's even more important now to be kind to yourself

https://blog.myfitnesspal.com/small-ways-to-be-kind-to-yourself-right-now/

If you made a New Year's resolution to lose weight, I'm with you in fighting the good fight. Remember that there is no immediate way to get to where you want to be. It took time to put weight on, and it will take time, lifestyle changes, and work to lose it. You CAN do it! Allow yourself to be human. There are times you're going to slip, but don't get trapped in a guilt cycle about those slips. Small changes add up. Eat less, eat better, move more. I'm telling myself this too. I've plateaued since September and was up 6-7 pounds when I went on the scale in December. I think of where I've been versus where I am now, and that I am much more than a number on a scale. I feel way better, and that is my focus. The pounds will take care of themselves.

If I can offer any words, share experiences, things I did to work on getting healthier, post here, PM me, post on my page, whatever. Good luck!

How to Recover from Romantic Heartbreak

Use “negative reappraisal,” and understand you have work to do—time alone may not be enough

By Guy Winch on August 7, 2018

How to Recover from Romantic Heartbreak

Melissa and J.J. met on the finish line of an obstacle course race. “We were both winded and covered in mud yet we still managed to flirt. It felt weirdly authentic,” Melissa told me in our first psychotherapy session. “He was into triathlons and obstacle courses like I was. We had very similar lifestyles.” Melissa and J.J. moved in together after eight months. A year and a half into the relationship, Melissa began raising the issue of marriage. J.J. didn’t feel ready. Soon thereafter, he broke up with her.

Melissa was a wreck. She cried for days and could barely function at work, “I’ll never find a better match for me. It was the best relationship I ever had.” Melissa came to see me after several months had passed and J.J. was still all she could think about. “Aren’t my feeling supposed to fade?” She asked me. “Why does it still feel so painful?”

We’ve been experiencing heartbreak for millennia and yet most of us still use the same coping and recovery mechanisms we did thousands of years ago, time, social support, and unfortunately, substances (e.g., alcohol, drugs, food). Despite recent advances in our scientific understanding of how we are impacted by heartbreak, little has changed in how we go about recovering from this emotionally devastating experience. As I describe in my book How to Fix a Broken Heart, the biggest mistake we make is that we go on “autopilot” and assume the only thing we can do to recover is give it time. Yes, time helps, as does social support, but new studies are verifying that there are all kinds of other steps we can and should take to soothe the emotional pain we feel and expedite our recovery.

A recent study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology examined cognitive and behavioral strategies for recovering from heartbreak. The premise of the study was that to recover from heartbreak we need to diminish our feelings of love for our ex-partner. While that might seem terribly obvious, consider that heartbreak often makes most of us do the opposite: We enact thoughts and behaviors that actually reinforce our love feelings (e.g., stalking our ex on social media, reliving our best moments, pouring over old images and video of happy times). The goal of the study was to examine three kinds of emotional regulation strategies to see which of them would help heartbroken subjects reduce their love feelings.

In the first condition, subjects focused on negative reappraisals of their ex-partner (e.g., by responding to prompts about their ex’s annoying habits). In the second condition they were asked to reframe their loving feelings as less problematic (e.g., by endorsing prompts such as ‘It’s okay to love someone I’m no longer with’. The last condition used distraction (e.g., questions about the subjects’ favorite food) to get the participants’ mind off their heartbreak. The researchers found that only negative reappraisals were truly effective in reducing love feelings. However, doing so did increase feelings of unpleasantness.

Unfortunately, it is those very feelings of “unpleasantness” that make it challenging to use negative reappraisals as a way to recover from heartbreak. We might accept, on an intellectual level, that by focusing on our ex’s faults we’re doing something important but it can still feel wrong (unpleasant), unbalanced, unfair, and even disloyal.

As a clinician, I’ve found that there are two things we can do to minimize these feelings of unpleasantness and thus feel freer to practice negative reappraisals of our ex. First, we need to frame the task differently. Specifically, we need to consider that when we are heartbroken, our mind is likely to bombard us with highly idealized snapshots, memories and thoughts both about our ex and about our relationship. We tend to remember only the best times and our ex’s best qualities. In other words, our mind is already creating unbalanced and inaccurate perceptions that are highly skewed to the positive. Therefore, our introduction of negative reappraisals does not create an imbalance, it corrects an existing one.

Second, negative reappraisals should include not just our perceptions and memories of our ex but of the relationship as well. We tend to idealize the relationship just as much as we do the person and think almost exclusively of the good times and the happy moments. We are far less likely to consider the compromises we had to make, the fights that hurt our feelings or frustrated us, or our unmet emotional needs. People often grieve both the person and the relationship itself—the experience of being a couple, having a significant other, the companionship and partnering. Therefore, it is necessary to address idealized perceptions of the relationship by introducing negative reappraisals of our couplehood, as well as of our ex as a person, in order to more effectively reduce feelings of attachment and love.
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If you are trying to get over heartbreak, make a list of the person’s faults as well as of the shortcomings of the actual relationship and to keep that list on their phone. Whenever you find yourself having idealized thoughts and memoires, whip out your phone and read a few reminders in order to balance your perceptions and remind yourself that your ex was not perfect and neither was the relationship.

One crucial aspect of recovery from heartbreak that was not covered in the current study is that breakups leave all kinds of voids in our lives. Our social circle gets diminished, our activities change, our physical space changes (e.g., their ‘stuff’ is no longer there), some of the things we did as couples we no longer do, and the list goes on. A significant part of the emotional pain we feel after a breakup is related to these other losses, the ripple effects that go beyond the loss of the actual person. Finding ways to recognize these voids and fill them is an important task of recovery from heartbreak and one that is often neglected.

Heartbreak is a form of grief and loss that can cause insomnia, changes in appetite, depression, anxiety, and even suicidal thoughts and behavior and as such it should be taken very seriously, as should our efforts to recover. However, to do so, we have to assert control and consciously and willfully prevent ourselves from making mistakes that will set us back (like staying in touch or trying to be friends while we’re still heartbroken) and encourage ourselves to take steps that might feel unpleasant or counter-intuitive, but that will ultimately diminish our emotional pain and expedite our recovery.

On mainstream social media dating sites (to actually date), not getting anywhere. Is there something wrong with "Hi, how are you?" as an icebreaker?

On attraction, love, etc.

I'm talking about actual relationships... the physical attraction is easy enough (I'm a guy, after all).

None of the women I've dated since my coworker have really lit me up, made me excited to date them. With her, I think I may have been falling for her before we started dating, because we talked so much. Once we started dating, she was the one I wanted to talk to first in the morning, and last at night. I want that feeling again. I have a friend now that I've thought about dating before. I was buzzed texting her Friday night (not in a booty call way), and we went to lunch yesterday. Nice time, we'll do it again, even if it's platonic. But I don't have that feeling, at least yet, of wanting to talk to her first and last in a day.

My debate with myself, I think in general, is that kind of attraction real? Is it more infatuation? I know relationships take work, that it's not always good times, that it isn't all lovey-dovey and Hollywood all the time. Is it different for me, do I need that kind of instant click to feel like I can open up? Something one woman said to me has stuck in my head, that she wished I was more comfortable with her. I think that was more of a statement on her specifically, than me in general. I wasn't into her. I will say it's possible that maybe I was guarded, and still could be, not wanting to be hurt again.

I could also just be looking for an ego boost. I'm not in a hurry to rush into bed, but I miss kissing, deep kisses, necking like teenagers (ok, a lot more skilled than that) kind of kissing, and hugging, and laying groundwork for more. Of course, it's nice to be found attractive, and maybe that's the thing, wanting that, that boost of being wanted.

This is my brain dump, as I try to sort out the dating world at almost 51, as I get healthier weight wise, which is helping me get healthier mentally. I know the future I want has a woman in it, if I can find her.

Open to thoughts and general comments. What worked for you in your relationships? Was it an instant attraction? Friends turning into something more? Is the spark still there if you've been together a long time?

I was disappointed this week, when I weighed in for the colonoscopy, that the scale number wasn't down where I wanted it, from where it was the last time I stepped on a scale in December. It was disheartening. I am working hard, thought it would at least be down a few pounds. This is a good article I found, and I think it applies to a lot of things in life.

Katie is on a weight-loss journey, much like many of you. And she has an important message to share that will help you stay strong. In a recent Instagram post, Katie said, "Today was a hard day. I broke down in tears, the kind that makes your whole body shake. Weight loss is hard." She went on, "It is a mental mind game and it's exhausting when you don't see what you want as fast as you want." Have you been there before?

We know there are no magic pills or shortcuts to help us lose weight easily or instantly. It took time to put the weight on, and it'll take time (sometimes years) to shed it. No one really talks about how to deal with the emotional side of how difficult weight loss can be. Katie said, "Giving up seems so much easier right? It isn't. Because at one point I so badly wanted to be where I am now. And I seem to forget that on days like today where I look at my body and don't feel comfortable in it."

On the hard days, when you feel like giving up, stop and look back and think about how far you've come. And remember the important reasons you're doing it, whether it's for you and your happiness, your health, or your kids.

Katie reminded us that "trying to be healthy is never wrong. Being a good role model for your kid is never wrong. I have to remember these things when I'm sitting there feeling helpless. Because it passes . . . the tears stopped." It's OK to feel depressed or defeated or crushed. We all have those moments. It's what you do once the moment passes that matters. Katie ended her post with a quote, which she told POPSUGAR she's had "saved in my phone forever." It said, "Don't forget that you're human. It's OK to have a meltdown. Just don't unpack and live there. Cry it out and refocus on where you're headed."