“Step 1: I decided to find an activity, sport, hobby where fitness can actually be used. In my case climbing.”
My intention was to give strategies that can be used to build any good habit, not necessarily physical fitness. But within the realm of fitness, you make a good point that a sport where you can see the gains provides additional motivation on top of the desire to be healthier.
I think this is about other good habits as well. I am not sure yet if I won the battle against alcohol, but if yes, it reducing my sports performance will have been a huge part of it. Simply not dying at 50 and things like that were not strong enough motivators, I needed something more immediate, and for that I needed a goal daily drinking directly interferes with.
The problem is most goods habits is just that we follow them out of a certain sense of guilt, because otherwise people will judge us, or because not doing so may kill us decades later and there is a social expectation to pretend to care about that (somehow it is not understood, that if there are people who are so depressed that they want to die right now, there must be far many more people being half-depressed who are okay with the idea of dying in a few decades, and this tends to be primary reason behind unhealthy habits, drugs, booze, cigs, overeating, but there is a strong social expectation to not be so). In this sense healthy habits are very similar today as religious piety was in the past, of course it has better reasons, but those are usually not the real reasons. Any my point is simply that for every virtuous habit, it is very important to find a short-term goal that the habit improves on, so there is some motivation beyond social expectation or a vague fear of death decades later.
Or for example high school and college. I tried not to get fail grades largely because my parents expected me to live a respectable middle-class existence and I needed a marketable degree for that. If I was completely free from such social obligations, I have no idea if I had studied or just chosen the easier, shorter life of some drug-addict homeless hobo or something like that, a no-effort and not uncomfortably long life. So it was the web of obligations and mandatory gratitude pressing me, but that vague sense of duty to my parents did not give a strong enough motivation to get better than pass grades. My point is if I had found a way to make grades more useful, in the short term, if I managed to find a personal goal good grades are useful to, I would have studied better.
So my point is largely about trying to find personal, and short-term goals that require precisely the same kind of good habits that we are socially expected to get anyway. This is sometimes very difficult (the only thing good grades would have bought me back then is a bit more scholarship money, it was not worth it, and nobody looked at my grades after graduation, nor at most of the actual knowledge) but for fitness related ones it is easier.
So that would be my general point. If people guilt-trip you due to obesity, try finding a personal goal a lighter weight is useful for, such as climbing. If people people guilt-trip you about usually not having a job and being a bit of a penniless bum, try figuring out maybe there is something you would actually want to buy, and thus worth investing time into working a regular job to earning a money for. Feel guilty about drugs or boozing, try doing things that you cannot do when high, like have a new hobby that requires driving there because the subway doesn’t go there. And so on, it would be a general method.
My intention was to give strategies that can be used to build any good habit, not necessarily physical fitness. But within the realm of fitness, you make a good point that a sport where you can see the gains provides additional motivation on top of the desire to be healthier.
I think this is about other good habits as well. I am not sure yet if I won the battle against alcohol, but if yes, it reducing my sports performance will have been a huge part of it. Simply not dying at 50 and things like that were not strong enough motivators, I needed something more immediate, and for that I needed a goal daily drinking directly interferes with.
The problem is most goods habits is just that we follow them out of a certain sense of guilt, because otherwise people will judge us, or because not doing so may kill us decades later and there is a social expectation to pretend to care about that (somehow it is not understood, that if there are people who are so depressed that they want to die right now, there must be far many more people being half-depressed who are okay with the idea of dying in a few decades, and this tends to be primary reason behind unhealthy habits, drugs, booze, cigs, overeating, but there is a strong social expectation to not be so). In this sense healthy habits are very similar today as religious piety was in the past, of course it has better reasons, but those are usually not the real reasons. Any my point is simply that for every virtuous habit, it is very important to find a short-term goal that the habit improves on, so there is some motivation beyond social expectation or a vague fear of death decades later.
Or for example high school and college. I tried not to get fail grades largely because my parents expected me to live a respectable middle-class existence and I needed a marketable degree for that. If I was completely free from such social obligations, I have no idea if I had studied or just chosen the easier, shorter life of some drug-addict homeless hobo or something like that, a no-effort and not uncomfortably long life. So it was the web of obligations and mandatory gratitude pressing me, but that vague sense of duty to my parents did not give a strong enough motivation to get better than pass grades. My point is if I had found a way to make grades more useful, in the short term, if I managed to find a personal goal good grades are useful to, I would have studied better.
So my point is largely about trying to find personal, and short-term goals that require precisely the same kind of good habits that we are socially expected to get anyway. This is sometimes very difficult (the only thing good grades would have bought me back then is a bit more scholarship money, it was not worth it, and nobody looked at my grades after graduation, nor at most of the actual knowledge) but for fitness related ones it is easier.
So that would be my general point. If people guilt-trip you due to obesity, try finding a personal goal a lighter weight is useful for, such as climbing. If people people guilt-trip you about usually not having a job and being a bit of a penniless bum, try figuring out maybe there is something you would actually want to buy, and thus worth investing time into working a regular job to earning a money for. Feel guilty about drugs or boozing, try doing things that you cannot do when high, like have a new hobby that requires driving there because the subway doesn’t go there. And so on, it would be a general method.