Self-Improvement/Health Tips

Can we have a thread for this please? Share your tips, advice, and experiences on living healthier and exercising. Mostly started this thread as someone looking to become more fem for crossdressing purposes, but anyone is free to share as long as the topic stays on track.

>>4180 So far (last 2 months) I have taken to sorting myself out physically. Doing the following has made an appreciable improvement in my health and physique: No more sweets, cakes or super high cal/fat products... None - not one (i was a bastard for cake)! Moving to a more Mediterranean diet, fish olive oils, salads, nice whole grain breads. For snacks I now eat mixed seeds or mixed fruit with yogurt or just munch nice olives... All drinks are fruit juice, no sodas at all. Once or twice a week I have a real fuarrrkin nice piece of stake with broccoli on the side (stake rare, broccoli al dente). Reduced dairy massively - I was drinking 3 pints of milk daily! - replaced with fruit juice. (still might have bit of milk in cereal and tea/coffee). Exercise - every day mon-fri weekend off... 20 step-ups per leg, 10 x per arm, 8kg lift overhead from hanging by side. 10 x per hand, 40kg Grips 10 x push-ups 10 x per arm, 8kg dumbbell curls 15 x situps 10 x per hand, 40kg Grips 10 x 40kg dead lifts, but not allowing to touch floor - so kinda like squats. 30 sec hold out sideways at full arm length 4kg per side simultaneously. 10 x 1 arm twisting planks (per arm) 10 x hanging leg raises x3 rounds - target <30min Then 2/3 times (mon, wed, fri) a week add some heavier stuff e.g. 3 sets of 12 x 30kg full bar curls - 3 times. or/and (depending on how heroic I feel) 3 x 10 pull-ups - although they tend to get very off form by the end... I burn out too fast on pull-ups - but just do as much of a pull up as I can - seeing improvements by the week! And so is my girlfriend :D

1x fullbody(or as best as you can manage) stretch routine 2x5 pushups 2x5 squats 2x5 situps everyday >will never make you sore so you can do it everyday >teaches you discipline if you are able to keep it up >probably makes you more flexible too over time >you do not need to eat more as you're not really stressing the body that much You can do this alongside regularly running or other forms of cardio too but you might need to eat more. I've been adding stuff to this too, but not doing anymore than 2x5 repetitions each. The trick for the exercises is that I do them slowly and try to go for as best form as I can get.

>>4183 This is a really weird routine and diet. Ideally a keto diet would be best. So low carb, high fat. Calories don't really matter, so long as they are from fat, since your body will burn this faster than it will store it. Fruit juice is just as bad, if not worse than soda in terms of sugar. Just because it's natural sugar doesn't mean it's not going to fuarrrk up your insulin response. In regards to working out, you don't want to keep doing the same (base) exercises everyday. 1.) because you need rest for your muscles to recover, 2.) because your body will get used to the same exercises and plateau in terms of benefits. Ideally you want to progress to different forms and weights, so your body isn't used to the same thing. You should also add in cardio/running in.

>>4187 Interesting... my doc said go with a Mediterranean diet... maybe I should cut the juice out! I feel my daily workout is fairly cardio... I try and do this as a base and then bigger stuff every other day... should I cut out Tuesday and Thursday?

Over the past three months I have taken significant steps to be more bold with my gender expression, being more feminine, and generally being more comfortable with myself. Emotionally I have been working on self-reflection, managing stress and anger, learning to deal with myself and be a better partner to the person I love, and just try to be great. It's a long process and you begin to realize a lot about yourself during it. I want to change for myself of course, but I can say with full certainty that a significant part of wanting to be better emotionally, more stable, more loving, compassionate, less angry, comes from me wanting to make my partner happy and be good to them. I fuarrrked up tonight and was a little passive aggressive and it upset them, and I can only hope that I can correct my mistakes next time and continue to get better. Practicing self-care and evaluating your emotions does wonders, folks. Equally as important as physical health.

>>4180 Good for you trying to be proactive with your health. As far as tips and advice goes - Don't Underestimate The Complexity Of The Task. I can't stress that enough, since it's obvious that you're just beginning to get serious about fitness and nutrition (not to give you grief, we were all noobs once). People rarely ever respect the challenge of understanding the process of dieting, the complex nutritional demands of the human body, nor the way those things will interplay with your fitness regimen. Consequently everybody in the whole frickin' world is going to tell you how to diet and exercise, and 99.999% of the time they're going to give you crazy, dead wrong advice that'll end up wasting your time, confusing the heck out of you, or injuring you (injuries usually result from exercise, but potentially from diet as well). My experience has been that you have to take the time to build a technical understanding of your body as a holistic system. Learn from the academic sources and *most importantly* PEOPLE WHO HAVE ALREADY DONE EXACTLY WHAT YOU'RE TRYING TO DO. Don't take advice from armchair fitness/nutrition buffs and random Men's Health subscribers (this includes lainons, sorry peeps). In the end it's about building a methodical practice; and if you do it right it can really, REALLY pay off in the long run. Go and try your best, lain!

>>4193 > Equally as important as physical health Maybe more so.

I guess this is kind of tangential to the rest of this thread but none the less: If you feel you don't have the time to cook fresh stuff every day, prepare one large dish that can feed you for the whole week. Warming up something you prepared in the past is still way better than eating some ready-made stuff because you at least know what went into it. If you have a small fridge (like I do) one efficient way to still be able to fit a weeks meal in there is to prepare the main part of the dish (pasta sauce, curry, stir-fry) on the weekend and prepare the carbs that go with it (noodle, rice, couscous) before every meal. Those only take about 10 minutes and require little to no oversight on your part.

>>4192 I would try and do vastly different things on Tuesday/Thursday. For example, save lifting for Mon/Wed/Fri, then only run on Tusday/Thursday. This way your muscle groups more time to recover. Because building muscle/becoming stronger involves breaking down the muscles that you have and growing new ones. So if you just do the same stuff everyday, you don't give it time to regrow and it's then somewhat detrimental.

>>4182 I've these. they're soykaf just order whoremoans online, take 'em for a few months, and see how you like it. It's not like any of us here have much to lose.

>>4180 journal daily to keep your mental health in check. doesn't have to be art, just brain dump. exercise about 30min daily or every other day. you'll feel better for it. plenty of water. avoid sweets and foods with complex ingredients. get plenty of sunshine. cultivate your relationships.

>>4250 mtf general on /lgbt/ has some solid stuff, but I don't have it on hand. The two infographics posted are soykaf, specifically, because they go out of their way to do what can be more reliably, cheaply, and safely done with HRT. If you're so desperate to be/look like a girl that you'll drink nothing but soy milk out of BPA containers, stop fuarrrking around and just start HRT already.

>>4254 The problem with HRT is many just want to stay cute teen boys with soft lewd skin and avoid getting covered with coarse hair, not to get puffy transsexual nipples and low libido on gender transition pills.

One of the most important things for health, I've learned over the years the hard way, is sleep. Don't neglect sleep. You spend about 1/3 of your life sleeping. Invest in making it comfortable and easy. Buy a foam mattress pad for $20, get some nice pillows, and get enough sleep every day. Pay off your sleep debt. Some people will say, "Sleep debt? You can't catch up on sleep. That's a myth," but the idea that you can't catch up on sleep is a misinterpretation of a study that determined that you can't catch up on sleep by sleeping a lot over one night. In actuality, catching up on sleep by adding an hour or two a day until you've caught up is a valid approach (http://www.health.harvard.edu/womens-health/repaying-your-sleep-debt) >>4180 >Mostly started this thread as someone looking to become more fem for crossdressing purposes Don't let yourself get muscly in your exercising. Feminime bodies have low muscle mass and as a biological male, you're much more prone to building muscle than women. Try to keep your weight low but your body fat percentage a little on the upside (for skinny boys that, is). You won't have a chubby tummy at 15% body fat, but it will hide your abs and other muscles.

Pilates is good for giving you long lean dancer's muscles, like Madonna.

>>4194 So what sources CAN I look for that are reputable online? I avoid those crummy health mags like the plague. I just don't know where to start with nutrition other than books on health.

>>4265 You could probably find a good Intro to Nutrition textbook pdf if you looked around. I can't imagine needing much more for basic dieting needs.

Im losing my hair guys, I know genetics is king but have any of you any advice?

>>4273 Cut them as short as you can and check/fix your nutrition. Should help or at least slow it down.

>>4273 There are weak remedies like hormone supplements (which can lead to chemical castration). But long term, castration is the only way to save your hair current year. Alternatively you could get hair transplants.

>>4273 Go try to get prescription strength hair loss prevention medicine. If you wait until it all falls out, you can get surgery to fix it. They'll cut out a line of skin from the back off your head and move the hair from it to where you've lost hair, then stitch the back of your head together. It's important to wait until it all falls out if you want to go this route because the removal of the skin and stitching will tighten your scalp so they generally can only do it once. After that, you'll have to find a hair donor.

You can fake a bust by changing your posture and building up your pecs, like Geoffery Gann. He wasn't any kind of transsexual, never got implants or took hormones, but he had cleavage that disappeared when he was barechested as a man. I think he was pulling some yoga trick with his posture, he could also fake hips when he was naked as a woman, but I think he was pulling model tricks with camera angles. He could appear as a regular looking guy, but as Karen Dior, he was famous for being able to pass. He did advertisements for Braun and Superbowl, appeared on Xena... There's also a near-forgotten old Hollywood trick of using makeup to paint on a cleavage, like they do with Keira Knightley.

>>4273 Probably not what you want to hear, but the best advice is probably to shave it before it gets to a point where you look as though you're doing anything you can to hold onto it.

>>4273 have you tried rogaine or any of those?

>>4296 >>4294 >>4287 >>4279 >>4278 Lots of advice, thanks guys. I've never considered prescriptions because I like having a functional penis. I guess I'll end up doing what some have suggested and just shave. Maybe get buff and accept the bad along with the good. Thank you all once more.

Read a book every day. It doesn't have to be non-fiction, it just has to be a book. Preferably of the dead tree sort, but for some people (including me) the convenience of a Kindle plus pirated e-books is hard to beat.

>>4319 A whole book?

>>4320 Learn how to speed read. It's amazing when you've mastered it. Basically how it works is you stop 'saying' what you read in your mind. You see the words and load the meaning into memory, but not the sound (which takes time to create). I learned to do this in college where we had to read about 50 pages per day. I'd read that soykaf about half an hour before class.

>>4320 However! This is where I learned that not all information is created equal. I can speed read a novel, no problems, I can speed read light philosophy, but can't speed read Aristotle or a maths book. Reading is one thing and understanding is another.

>>4329 I don't believe this. There might be material for which this is efficient but some writing is best digested slowly, contemplatively. I used to always read with a notebook so I could stop and write down lines or whole paragraphs from time to time. It's better to absorb one book thouroughly than to just burn through five in one sitting so you can strike more marks on a tally. The human brain doesn't take in knowledge the way your computer downloads data. Increasing the bitrate shouldn't be the goal.

>>4331 I just like getting a cup of coffee or something nice before bed and taking an hour or so to read. It's very comfy.

Oh no, it doesn't have to be a whole book! Just as long as you spend about an hour or so reading before bed each day. I couldn't complete a whole novel in a single day. >>4344 How do you sleep if you drink coffee an hour before bed?

>>4331 Read this >>4330 You should try to experience the power before denying it. It's another tool if you want it.

>>4384 I just close my eyes and fall asleep like normal. Sure, it makes me a little hyper and awake, but I don't have grogginess in the morning when I take it.

>>4399 To be fair Lain, I did say it might be useful for some material.

>>4331 >>4330 for intricate books it works great if you don't stop at that, like reading a chapter once fast to get an idea and then coming back to take notes

>>4672 Oh, good idea, I will do this. Thankx

I found this weird controversial nutritionist, I'm not sure how much of what he says is bullsoykaf. It's interesting nonetheless https://regularbeaneater.com/

Thread is locked for cleaning and rerailing To reiterate this thread is about Self-Improvement/Health Tips , if you want to talk about traps or cross dressing , then make a separate thread and keep it non soykaf. Edit thread is unlocked.

Healthy living guidelines There are lots of resources for this http://www.euro.who.int/en/health-topics/disease-prevention/nutrition/a-healthy-lifestyle https://www.cdc.gov/healthyliving/index.html http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs394/en/ http://www.who.int/dietphysicalactivity/strategy/eb11344/en/ or http://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/43035 http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/43035/1/9241592222_eng.pdf is the strategy document telling governments to do so. Some of the responses from both national and local governments and corporations include From New Zealand http://www.health.govt.nz/system/files/documents/publications/eating-activity-guidelines-for-new-zealand-adults-oct15_0.pdf From Canada http://www.physicalactivityplan.org/resources/CPAG.pdf From New York City https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/cdp/healthy-eating-active-living-guide.pdf From Australia https://www.eatforhealth.gov.au/sites/default/files/files/the_guidelines/n55_australian_dietary_guidelines.pdf In general, the top 3 are 1. Eat food and drink water, you tend to get unhealthy if you don't eat food and drink water. Eventually if you get unhealthy enough then you will die. 2. Exercise, remember to exercise, eating and drinking puts energy into your body, but exercise is responsible for actually using that energy. If you just eat and don't exercise, your muscles can atrophy ( see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4241367/ , https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/003188.htm ) and will eventually be at risk of obesity if your body doesn't use the energy from the food and converts and stores it as fat. 3. Sleep , sleep is important, see (http://healthysleep.med.harvard.edu/need-sleep/whats-in-it-for-you/health and https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/health-topics/topics/sdd/why) Make sure you eat, exercise and sleep healthy. In terms of eating healthier and exercising healthier, I have found the following steps to work. 1. Evaluate your current circumstances (whether self evaluated or using a medical examination / practitioner) 2. Identify areas of improvements. 3. Make an action plan with actions that will allow you to work on areas of improvement. 4. Convert that action plan into goals, tasks, routines and habits. 5. Start attempting to reach those goals, do those tasks , get into those routines and develop those habits. Don't worry if it doesn't work straight away or if you mess up a few times, just focus on making eventual / gradual progress. Of course this 5 step approach does benefit from asking other people for assistance including personal trainers, nutritionists, doctors, or even just your friends and family.

>>4911 OP here. Sorry for the mistake.

>>4914 The mistake wasn't yours: > Mostly started this thread as someone looking to become more fem for crossdressing purposes ..that WAS the original topic for Frith's sake.

>>4914 >>4925 4925 is correct, specifying the final line in your post wasn't a mistake (if it was I would have warned your post), however the original topic is healthy living / self improvement tips and that isn't something exclusive to people in subcategory of the final line. But the other replies arguing about the merits of lifestyle choices and belief systems is off topic for this thread. E.g. Saying that as a person you have X where X is anything (genetic disorder, preference for eating live catfish,etc, etc) and you want advice on how to live healthy, doesn't mean people should tell you to not have X because your life will be healthy. People need to understand the compromise between living with a condition or preference whatever it is and being the healthiest you can be, and not just resort to the attitude of you have condition Y, kill yourself you have no chance to be healthy unless you take this other path C that involves sacrificing your preference or belief system. E.g. 2 This isn't the transexual /cult/ thread that existed before the wipe and was also just as much of a soykaffest for the same reason.

This is what i been doing for the last 2 month's. Every day, with no exception, i prepare a juice withi the following vegetals/fruits. * beet * cucumber * spinach * watercress * leek * carrot That's my breakfast and dinner, usually i don't take a lunch, just water or citric juice (grapefruit, oranges) juice. Friday's i can eat something like a pizza, stews, ...etc, without go to a extreme obiously. I feel more energetic than ever before, what benefits i see in my self ?. * Can do my job better (Design software, programming, BI ...etc) * More energy * I sleep more confortable * I do not get hysterical anymore. Well, this is not just for the food, there is a hundred other's factors that change my life, but i simple can't explain in detail right now

>>7713 Do you eat anything between foods? Nuts, almonds, seeds?

>>7713 So, you only have protein one day of the week?

>>7719 >seeds Sometimes yes, i eat grapes.

>>7725 No, spinach have a very vast portion of proteins, do you see "popeye the marine" :). Just for clarify my juice is about 1.75 Litre, it's not just a glass, i don't even use a strainer

>>7713 I'm interested in the veggies' ratio. Feel like trying it out. Also, how's the taste?

>>7737 >>7737 >I'm interested in the veggies' ratio * 4 leaf of spinach * 1/4 beet (medium size) * The whole cucumber (medium size) * 5/6 units of watercress * 4 leaf of leek (White part just a tiny piece ) * half of carrot (medium size) >Also, how's the taste? The first month, puafff!!!, then just you get get used to it, and the metabolism start to say to you in louder er 'thank you!!!!, stop eat soykaf'. The leek is the most strong of all, for me

>>4262 Can fuarrrking confirm on the sleep stuff. I invested in a memory foam mattress and pillow. They're not a new technology or a luxury anymore, so they're more affordable than they used to be. I found a queen size for <$200, and I hear you can get a twin for around $80. I think it's one of the better bang for buck purchases I've made in a while. In addition to that, I've had someone who's already on a good sleep schedule help re-program mine over the course of three weeks. After the three weeks, I lag behind around an hour of when they were getting me up, but it's still a marked improvement, and it really stuck. I used to need melatonin a few times a week, now I have a surplus because I haven't touched it in months. The last thing I've been doing regularly is taking supplements. I get migraine headaches from certain things, like deviating too much from my sleep schedule. I've noticed magnesium threonate and powdered lion's mane help prevent migraines on a good day and reduce their severity on a bad day, as well as giving a slight boost in general mental clarity. I've played with the dosage enough that I'm sure it's not just the effects of sleeping better that I'm attributing to the supplements. they can be expensive though so I'm not gonna say everyone should depend on them