Resource Weights, cardio, diet, sleep, meditation

[BeansOfRequirement]

I've had a lot of time to experiment with the various things commonly used to counter a shitty life (what's labelled "clinical depression" in everyday speech). I've talked about my own situation so much that I'll skip it this time; what's important is that I have tried these copes to deal with "dEpReSsIoN", and can describe which work for me (and by extension, people similar enough to the relevant aspects of the specific cope in question). I have also made some mistakes along the way that I'll warn about.


Weights

Doing what feels good/natural/safe. Listening to the body. Erring on the side of rest/caution rather than optimizing fast strength increases. Not doing exercises that feel weird (for me, I don't squat and choose neutral grip pull-ups). Keeping it enjoyable (I don't like doing cardio with a barbell, so I do low reps), setting goals that motivate you (I don't get motivated by adding a repetition, so I set 1RPMs as goals).


Cardio

Just about starting to crack this one. Never liked cardio, but I now have seemed to find a way to start out. Instead of jumping into standard cardio (run 30 min, etc), HIIT, or just barely doing anything and claiming to take "baby steps", I'm now doing medium-intensity intervals. Still work the heart and make you sweat, just no blood taste or feeling like you've just drunk SN. I prefer rowing, it's supposed to be a safe but efficient form of cardio.


Diet

Go by amount of protein per calorie, not protein per weight unit. I made this mistake and have therefore had something that I'm not sure is gyno or not. Would also sometimes be there and sometimes not. Get into a hot shower? Some small amount of gyno/manboobs. Cold shower/after exercise? Nothing. Like my penis; the fat around the nipple-area would sometimes be small, and at other times be... very small.

Eat healthily and not too much or too little. Think everyone knows more or less what healthy foods are by now. Or at least what to avoid. I do think it's better to focus on eating the healthy stuff than to avoid the unhealthy stuff, however.


Sleep

Wake up at the same time every day (and leave bed instantly). That's it. Then (obviously) don't stay up despite being sleepy. Not taking insomnia and stuff like that into account, obviously. Limit coffee to the morning and/or replace it with green tea or stop completely. Depends on the person with the caffeine, think I'm sensitive.


Meditation

I seem unable to have a steady practice going. But, I am able to strategically deploy mindfulness meditation to avoid the worst (the majority, even), of my emotional pain when I get flooded by it. So no three-hour-long crying marathons for a while now.



When I have all of these on-point, I enjoy a slightly worse than neutral existence. I am trying to hold out for a bit longer, so it makes sense to grab some easy stuff I can use to shield myself.

You'll notice a lot of things are missing here. That's because I don't have employment/studies/friends/romantic relationships; so all of the remaining time is just for killing. As in "killing time", that sounded weird.


Yeah, no real trailblazing going on here, was mostly just happy about now being able to do cardio in an enjoyable way for the first time in my life (for me enjoyable means neutral). Maybe others can add stuff about these topics or bring in completely new areas. We have gone into depth about the diet already in other threads, but specific weight/cardio/meditation/sleep stuff I haven't seen much of (but I don't browse recovery super much).

 

[Ethereal Knight]

I have a lot of things in common with you. I'm also a NEET, no income, zero friends, zero sex, zero romantic relationships, and I also use fitness to cope with some things. I don't do meditation, but the rest yea they're great.

I even created a thread [link here] about Stephen Ilardi's work on how to treat depression naturally (with just lifestyle invertentions).

holistic health is interesting. I think if everyone would focus on:
real food
social contact
sunlight
avoiding seed oils
sleep quality
no refined carbs
nature
active relaxation
exercise
financial education
then we could shutdown at least 90% of the healthcare system!

I think sunlight is essential. for many reasons. it's especially useful at the beginning of the day, a couple of moments after you wake up, cause it sets you circadian clock, improves your mood, makes you more alert during the day and sets you up for good sleep at night. you shouldn't look at it directly obviously, but its bright light should come into your eyes early in the morning first thing after you wake up (learned it with Andrew Huberman, by the way) and it's one of the most important things one could do for their health (and so simple!)
one should also check their vitamin D levels. that's another reason to take sunlight. unfortunately, the labs come with extremely bad reference levels, they say you're only lacking vitamin D if your result is <20, which is ridiculous. the doctors I follow have their vitamin D >50, one of them has their at 75 (naturally, no supplements, he just takes a lot of sunlight).
vitamin D is antidepressant, improves mood, increases testosterone, reduces inflammation(!) etc etc

contact with nature is something I'd add too. as a cyclist and a guy who walks a lot with their dog in woods and forest, I find extremely weird to even think about doing cardio in a machine inside an urban gym with loud noises around you, bad music, weird strangers walking around etc. it's just weird. aerobics, be it long-distance cardio, HIIT or sprinting, is obviously good for your health, but one is missing on a lot if they're doing it in a place other than nature. bottom line: cardio in nature is amazing. if you're not a runner or you don't have a bike, you can just walk in nature and this is already incredibly therapeutic. nature literally is therapy.

after being a cyclist for so long (5+ years), doing some years of calisthenics and some months at the gym, I personally find cycling in the woods the most antidepressant exercise I can do. it always "fixes" me, it always puts me in a good mood, tames my loneliness and makes me more relaxed to sleep. I couldn't get these results (not even close) with any type of strength training.
but strength training is better for you aesthetics, insulin sensitivity, body-fat control etc, so in the ideal scenario I'd combine both, but focusing on the activity that I enjoy most (cycling) and that makes me feel better.

plus resistance-type exercises (calisthenics, gym etc) basically force you to change your diet to get results. if you don't eat enough protein and calories, you don't gain muscle, that's just how it is. depending on how much protein and calories you ate, you may even lose muscle. doesn't matter if your diet is healthy, cause "healthy" is not enough to get results in hypertrophy, one also needs enough protein and enough calories. a guy like me would need to eat a lot of food (basically stuff myself with food) to get good results.
although there is some debate and some people argue that a calorie surplus is not necessary, the truth is that it's way harder to gain muscle without it, so having a calorie surplus is still the easiest way.
and I definitely do not feel well stuffing myself with food. my sleep gets disrupted, I feel terrible. I'd even rather under-eat a little bit than do that. my sleep is amazing while I'm under-eating or eating at maintainance. it's the opposite when I try to bulk up and gain muscle.
if I was really focusing my fitness life on hypertrophy, I'd use an approach like Ted Naiman's or Jeff Cavaliere's, more like "gaintainance" - getting enough protein and not worrying too much about non-protein energy (fats and carbs).

one has to be lean to not be inflammed. there's no way around it. regardless of being muscular like a bodybuilder or thin like a cyclist, being lean is a must, because being overfat causes inflammation in the body. we don't want inflammation. depression is a recurring theme here, and a depressed brain is an inflammed brain. inflammation makes everything worse, including depression. it's no wonder that obese individuals have so much higher chance of being depressed and that one of the techniques used to treat depression is to remove seed oils from the diet and start supplementing fish oil (EPA and DHA), it's because it reduces inflammation.
there's nothing positive about being over-weight, despite what the magazines tell (they tell you what you wanna hear). reframing obesity as healthy and positive is intrinsically evil because it stands in contrast to the apparent wish of doing something against it. obesity, like cancer, type 2 diabetes, or any other disease, makes everything worse. you don't celebrate cancer either. instead, you try to find the best option to get rid of it as soon as possible. a time of adversity like that can be a great option to grow as a personality, of course, but getting through it won't be easy.
if you're interested in knowing the mechanisms that make adipose tissue inflammatory, see Benjamin Bikamn's IG accout [link], he's a scientist that helps people understand more about metabolism and metabolic health.

I don't really think that everyone knows what unhealthy food is. yes ultraprocessed garbage-junk food, sugar, flour, refined carbs etc are very well-known for being shitty, but there are things that pose as healthy that are actually almost poison.
and for me one of those is seed oils. things like canola oil, soybean oil, corn oil, cottonseed oil, grapeseed oil, safflower oil, sunflower oil, palm oil, rice bran oil, peanut oil, walnut oil, hemp oil, margarine, butter substitutes etc...
I really think everyone should thrown these on the trash and switch to healthy fats - things like coconut oil, avocado oil, lard, tallow, butter, olive oil etc...
(from these list, coconut oil, lard and tallow are the best for cooking in very high temperatures or for a long time. avocado oil, butter and olive oil are not so good for very high temperatures but could be used if you're gonna cook something very quickly)
obviously most restaurants use seed oils, as they're very cheap, so eating outside is not a good idea if one really wants to avoid them, but if you're gonna eat outside then at least don't buy these oils and don't bring them home.

I know there are people who think the exact opposite and that's ok, that's how nutrition works, there are all kinds of view-points and arguments out there, but I beg people: please, get rid of seed oils. and please, don't believe me or anyone else, do your own research instead!

examples of simple dietary changes:
cereal -> eggs
margarine -> butter
bread -> vegetables
candy -> berries
seed oils -> coconut oil or lard
pasta -> steak
again, I know not everyone agrees. this is just my opinion.

if a food didn't exist before 1865, it's ultra-processed, don't eat it!
("Processed foods and their derivatives depend on the industrial production of white flour, refined sugar, seed oils, etc., and processes like hydrogenation to synthesize, e.g., margarine. Before that, producing unnatural calorie-dense and nutrient-deprived products would require exponential physical energy input. Large quantities of these products led to an exponential increasement in all mainstream diseases like obesity, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, metabolic syndrome, etc. Breaking that trend and focusing your nutrition, on the whole, unprocessed foods will already make you healthier than 99% of the population.")

in the world of supplements, I think magnesium is a good one.

modern medicine is absurd. if you go to a veterinarian saying your dog has stomach pain, he will tell you "stomach pain is typically caused by malnutrition. what are you feeding him?". if you go to a human doctor, he'll tell you: "your diet? no! take antiacids, antibiotics, and I'll do a gastroscospy!"
it's really crazy!

there's some obvious things like, don't watch the news. don't spend too much time on the social media. don't buy into the negativity.

there's also a controversial topic that I like to address, it's just my personal experience:
my life got 100 times better after I stopped all psychiatric drugs and stayed 100% drug-free.
some time ago I heard the phrase "Your drug may be your problem". there's a book with this title, I didn't read the book, but I read the title and I know who the author is (Peter Breggin), so that phrase stuck in my head, but I didn't believe it for a second. I made all the excuses, like "I tried before, to sleep without drugs, it just doesn't work, I become a zombie, my life becomes a nightmare. if I tried so many times, it's because I'm supposed to keep using drugs, this is just the way it is" and "10 years of insomnia. it's too much. if it was supposed to get better, It'd have got better already. I'll probably have to use drugs forever" - all BS, all excuses, cause at the end of the day I discovered that not only I can sleep amazingly well without any drug (completely drug-free), but I also feel hundred or thousand times better being sober (drug-free). I could sleep 8 hours or more with drugs and still be miserable the next day, now I can sleep 6 hours naturally and feel amazing, refreshed, with good-mood, good motivation to exercise, good motivation to do everything, more energetic, less hungy etc etc... and it also made me lose body fat more easily. everything got better. even close family prefers the new me, I'm even a more nice person to have around.
after all of this, I remember Breggin's book title "Your drug may be your problem" - it definitely was! it was not the only problem, but it was certainly one of the biggest and most critical problems I had (even if I didn't know it)!

I know not everyone can go drug-free. there are these people with conditions like schizophrenia, that this is not an option for them. there are others who can but they'd have to go through a very difficulty period, like a thick firewall, and not everyone is ready to go through these difficulty times of painful abstinence and slowly transition to a drug-free natural healthy life. and I'm obviously not telling anyone to stop their drugs. talk to your doctor. talk to your therapist. do your own research if you want. there's a documentary called "Medicating Normal" that's a nice watch about this subject (you can find it on torrent websites).

if you're interested in learning more about how to live a natural lifestyle, please check the thread I created which I mentioned at the beginning of the post: https://sanctioned-suicide.net/thre...ption-therapeutic-lifestyle-change-tlc.84528/