First of all, as other people have said, if you are heavily overweight, then working out and becoming not-fat is easily the most important thing you can do.
Anyway, I am sort of trying to do the same thing you are and here’s what I’ve found.
After physical appearance, the lowest hanging fruit seems to be in the confidence/status/how you carry yourself/body language/power/assertiveness area, a cluster that you might call “swag” for lack of a better term. I think women don’t care about physical appearance quite as much as men do when it comes to attraction, and care about swag much more than men do.
The lowest hanging fruit in the broader category of swag seem to me to be the following:
Smiling
Making strong eye contact
Standing/sitting up straight
In particular, I’m trying to adopt the habits of a) looking women strongly in the eye and letting her be the one to break away most of the time, and b) briefly making eye contact with and smiling at all the girls I pass in the hallway or on the street or whatever. For the former, something that’s helped me is practicing making eye contact while wearing sunglasses—this way you can make yourself comfortable with the feeling of staring into a person’s eyes while appeasing the part of your brain that tells you “no, don’t do that, they’ll find out your secrets!” Then when you take the sunglasses off, the habit lingers and the fear is gone a little.
Learning body language is also a big one. GoBodyLanguage has a free online course that takes about an hour or two and yields large benefits. Adopting confident body language can make you both feel more confident and get other people to perceive you as such. The main confident gestures I remember to do are a) err on the side of taking up more space when I’m sitting down, b) keep my hands to my side and not as a barrier over my body, c) not stroke my arm, face, or neck when I feel nervous, and d) stick my thumbs out when I put my hands in my pockets.
An area that I need to work on is voice. I say “um,” and “like” and stammer a lot, which I think displays lack of confidence. Speaking too quickly also displays lack of confidence. And apparently there are vocal exercises you can do to make your voice deeper and more masculine, which I have yet to look into.
Another big thing is “non-reaction seeking behavior”. Essentially this is not giving off little signs that you care about how you are being perceived in a social interaction. Examples of reaction seeking behavior include looking around after you tell a joke to see if people laugh, or visibly fluctuating in your mood based on how you are being received in the social interaction. This is really hard and is something I need to work on.
Having good social skills in general seems to also be important. Having high status with your male friends is said to be a big turn-on for evolutionary reasons, and having close female friends is said to be a big turn-on because it shows that women trust you. So if having male friends is good and having female friends is good, this seems to generalize to “make friends”. I don’t know if this describes you, but if you go on something like r/foreveralone, you can find a lot of men with no friends and no romantic partners who are much more immediately concerned with the latter than the former (probably because their biology isn’t constantly reminding them every day that they need to make friends). This seems like the wrong order to do things in, considering that having friends is at the very least as valuable to one’s happiness as having a romantic partner. But if you already have a sufficient amount of friends then you can disregard this.
If you suffer from social anxiety, get a good cognitive behavioral therapy self-help book. This is what I plan on doing. It took me a really long time to realize that I have social anxiety because I always assumed that if you had it, it meant that you were one of those people who has panic attacks when you have to talk to the cashier at the grocery store. If you get irrationally nervous in social situations to the point where it causes you difficulty in your life, I think that you could benefit from self-help in this area. There are also specific forms of social anxiety that only revolve around romance and don’t appear in non-sexual settings.
I feel like you should also have some idea of what you’re going to say and do to attempt to attract a women before you actually go and talk to her. If women are an impenetrable mystery to you, then maybe try reading some PUA stuff, but make sure to take it with a grain of salt because some of it is weird and wrong. (I actually have written a long post meditating on this stuff that I’ll be posting in a few days on LW Discussion, so look out for that. :P)
Additional minor tips on the swag/body language in condensed form...
English has this incredibly stupid phrase “suck in your gut.” This gives people the misleading impression that they need to draw up their diapraghm, and they end up effectively holding their breath. This is, obviously, kind of hard to maintain. What one actually needs to do is not “suck” but “pull” one’s gut in. This relies on the rectus and tranversus abdominus muscles and should have no effect on one’s ability to breath when done properly. This can be rather hard to master when one is not already in shape. My suggestion is to work on pulling your spinal column straight from both the back (erector spinae) and front (abdominus) muscles simultaneously. Imagine a force simultaneously pulling your tailbone straight down, and the top of your head straight up, and tense your middle to maintain that elongation.
Eye contact is hard. Fortunately, from more than a couple feet away, no one can tell that you’re staring at their forehead or the bridge of their nose rather than into their eyes. Looking at the forehead has the additional advantage of forcing one’s chin higher; women find men more attractive when looking at the male face from below. Even if you’re not making eye contact, when just walking down the street, it’s good to practice looking straight forward or even slightly upward, not at one’s feet as most introverts are inclined to do. This is easier if one is already following the advice from the previous paragraph.
To get the taut, puffed-out chest effect requires using not the pectoral muscles but the back, by drawing the shoulder blades slightly together. This can be made more natural by practicing standing/walking with the palms of the hands facing forward.
Eye contact is hard. Fortunately, from more than a couple feet away, no one can tell that you’re staring at their forehead or the bridge of their nose rather than into their eyes.
Of course this only solves the “making eye contact when you pass women” problem and not the “making eye contact when you talk to women” problem. Fortunately, fear of eye contact seems so dumb and irrational that I suspect that despite its clearly firmly ingrained evolutionary roots, it’s relatively easy to completely eliminate after some initially painful practice period. So I suspect that the wisest thing to do is tackle the problem head on as soon as possible.
Imagine a force simultaneously pulling your tailbone straight down, and the top of your head straight up, and tense your middle to maintain that elongation.
Yes, don’t try to straighten your back with voluntary muscular contractions, find something to visualize or focus on that straightens out your posture.
I’ve found that focusing on particular points on my body tends to straighten out my posture. The best point I’ve found is that little notch in the middle of your collar bone at the base of your neck. Tends to relax the sternomastoids, putting the head in proper alignment with the spine, and the spine entire in proper alignment.
Likely different points have different effectiveness for different people, given what’s wrong with their posture in the first place.
Other points to try—ear holes, top of the head, sternum, sacrum. Try shifting from one to the other, and feel how your body adjusts.
First of all, as other people have said, if you are heavily overweight, then working out and becoming not-fat is easily the most important thing you can do.
Anyway, I am sort of trying to do the same thing you are and here’s what I’ve found.
After physical appearance, the lowest hanging fruit seems to be in the confidence/status/how you carry yourself/body language/power/assertiveness area, a cluster that you might call “swag” for lack of a better term. I think women don’t care about physical appearance quite as much as men do when it comes to attraction, and care about swag much more than men do.
The lowest hanging fruit in the broader category of swag seem to me to be the following:
Smiling
Making strong eye contact
Standing/sitting up straight
In particular, I’m trying to adopt the habits of a) looking women strongly in the eye and letting her be the one to break away most of the time, and b) briefly making eye contact with and smiling at all the girls I pass in the hallway or on the street or whatever. For the former, something that’s helped me is practicing making eye contact while wearing sunglasses—this way you can make yourself comfortable with the feeling of staring into a person’s eyes while appeasing the part of your brain that tells you “no, don’t do that, they’ll find out your secrets!” Then when you take the sunglasses off, the habit lingers and the fear is gone a little.
Learning body language is also a big one. GoBodyLanguage has a free online course that takes about an hour or two and yields large benefits. Adopting confident body language can make you both feel more confident and get other people to perceive you as such. The main confident gestures I remember to do are a) err on the side of taking up more space when I’m sitting down, b) keep my hands to my side and not as a barrier over my body, c) not stroke my arm, face, or neck when I feel nervous, and d) stick my thumbs out when I put my hands in my pockets.
An area that I need to work on is voice. I say “um,” and “like” and stammer a lot, which I think displays lack of confidence. Speaking too quickly also displays lack of confidence. And apparently there are vocal exercises you can do to make your voice deeper and more masculine, which I have yet to look into.
Another big thing is “non-reaction seeking behavior”. Essentially this is not giving off little signs that you care about how you are being perceived in a social interaction. Examples of reaction seeking behavior include looking around after you tell a joke to see if people laugh, or visibly fluctuating in your mood based on how you are being received in the social interaction. This is really hard and is something I need to work on.
Having good social skills in general seems to also be important. Having high status with your male friends is said to be a big turn-on for evolutionary reasons, and having close female friends is said to be a big turn-on because it shows that women trust you. So if having male friends is good and having female friends is good, this seems to generalize to “make friends”. I don’t know if this describes you, but if you go on something like r/foreveralone, you can find a lot of men with no friends and no romantic partners who are much more immediately concerned with the latter than the former (probably because their biology isn’t constantly reminding them every day that they need to make friends). This seems like the wrong order to do things in, considering that having friends is at the very least as valuable to one’s happiness as having a romantic partner. But if you already have a sufficient amount of friends then you can disregard this.
If you suffer from social anxiety, get a good cognitive behavioral therapy self-help book. This is what I plan on doing. It took me a really long time to realize that I have social anxiety because I always assumed that if you had it, it meant that you were one of those people who has panic attacks when you have to talk to the cashier at the grocery store. If you get irrationally nervous in social situations to the point where it causes you difficulty in your life, I think that you could benefit from self-help in this area. There are also specific forms of social anxiety that only revolve around romance and don’t appear in non-sexual settings.
I feel like you should also have some idea of what you’re going to say and do to attempt to attract a women before you actually go and talk to her. If women are an impenetrable mystery to you, then maybe try reading some PUA stuff, but make sure to take it with a grain of salt because some of it is weird and wrong. (I actually have written a long post meditating on this stuff that I’ll be posting in a few days on LW Discussion, so look out for that. :P)
If you need resources, I recommend Post Masculine and The Dating Specialist.
Good luck! :)
Additional minor tips on the swag/body language in condensed form...
English has this incredibly stupid phrase “suck in your gut.” This gives people the misleading impression that they need to draw up their diapraghm, and they end up effectively holding their breath. This is, obviously, kind of hard to maintain. What one actually needs to do is not “suck” but “pull” one’s gut in. This relies on the rectus and tranversus abdominus muscles and should have no effect on one’s ability to breath when done properly. This can be rather hard to master when one is not already in shape. My suggestion is to work on pulling your spinal column straight from both the back (erector spinae) and front (abdominus) muscles simultaneously. Imagine a force simultaneously pulling your tailbone straight down, and the top of your head straight up, and tense your middle to maintain that elongation.
Eye contact is hard. Fortunately, from more than a couple feet away, no one can tell that you’re staring at their forehead or the bridge of their nose rather than into their eyes. Looking at the forehead has the additional advantage of forcing one’s chin higher; women find men more attractive when looking at the male face from below. Even if you’re not making eye contact, when just walking down the street, it’s good to practice looking straight forward or even slightly upward, not at one’s feet as most introverts are inclined to do. This is easier if one is already following the advice from the previous paragraph.
To get the taut, puffed-out chest effect requires using not the pectoral muscles but the back, by drawing the shoulder blades slightly together. This can be made more natural by practicing standing/walking with the palms of the hands facing forward.
This all seems very useful advice, thank you!
Of course this only solves the “making eye contact when you pass women” problem and not the “making eye contact when you talk to women” problem. Fortunately, fear of eye contact seems so dumb and irrational that I suspect that despite its clearly firmly ingrained evolutionary roots, it’s relatively easy to completely eliminate after some initially painful practice period. So I suspect that the wisest thing to do is tackle the problem head on as soon as possible.
Yes, don’t try to straighten your back with voluntary muscular contractions, find something to visualize or focus on that straightens out your posture.
I’ve found that focusing on particular points on my body tends to straighten out my posture. The best point I’ve found is that little notch in the middle of your collar bone at the base of your neck. Tends to relax the sternomastoids, putting the head in proper alignment with the spine, and the spine entire in proper alignment.
Likely different points have different effectiveness for different people, given what’s wrong with their posture in the first place.
Other points to try—ear holes, top of the head, sternum, sacrum. Try shifting from one to the other, and feel how your body adjusts.
Great post! Those are both sources I really like. Some of Mark Manson (writer of PostMasculine)’s old material on Practical Pickup is good as well.
Did this ever get posted? I’d happily read through the draft and give you some feedback, if you like.
That was a good wealth of apparently sound advice!
I’ll follow your suggestion and will give a look at the sites you mentioned.