your ways of staying healthy?

I've been pretty regularly lifting weights for a bit more than a decade. It's made a huge difference in my mental state (life long depression which is noticeably better when I can exercise) and my physical state. I no longer have lower back pain, the injuries I suffered during sports have gotten significantly better, I have higher energy levels throughout the day and many other positive effects. All of this is doubly more important given that I've had desk jobs for the last decade as well. I spend a lot of time playing video games or watching TV and movies at home, too, so I need to get all the exercise I can.

I think it's also important to be sure that you're not only eating adequately but eating healthily. Maximizing protein consumption, eating only slower digesting carbs whenever possible, eating a good amount of vegetables and keeping to leaner meats and fish are all important for energy levels in a way you won't really appreciate until you spend a month or more eating "clean".

If you are suffering from muscle pain, I'd suggest starting a lifting program to at the very least target the muscles that are causing you issue and the ones that support them. However, I worry about the consistency of the pain you are experiencing. I suspect there may be another underlying medical issue and you should get it checked out ASAP.

At the risk of stating the obvious, just getting in 30 minutes to an hour of regular exercise a day helps a ton. Biking is my preferred method, I find it pretty relaxing and there's some utility to it, but even just walking is going to be beneficial.

Self discipline at the grocery store. Self discipline to eat the food I've already bought and avoid spontaneous visits to a restaurant.
I'm operating on a simple rule: If it looks like it was grown as-is, that's probably a lot healthier than something that's been cooked, canned, fortified, etc.
Plus meat, cheese, etc. I'm not a vegan or anything, but still love veggies.
Lately, I'm struggling to stop eating when I'm not hungry, rather than when I'm full. I've put on some winter weight that I'm struggling to change my dessert-eating habits, too. My sweet tooth is angry about this decision.
I certainly lack an exercise routine, but I simply hate exercise, so that's not really an option for me.

Here are some simple things that I have done to increase my overall healthiness.

Plan out an entire week's worth of meals and then purchase that food at the grocery store. Do that for about a month, and it'll start to become your habit. When it's a habit, then deviating from that plan will start to feel a bit weird, so it'll be more and more natural to just eat what you put in the plan. When you're making the plan, I'm happy to say that Canada's food guide is a great resource for eating healthy. It's science based, and seems to actually match what nutritionists say, so I recommend giving it a read. If you only look at the pretty image then that's a good start - about half your meal should be vegetables with a bit of fruit, a quarter should be protein (preferably plant based) and a quarter should be healthy grains.

Switch to 0 Calorie soda. My experience is fully anecdotal, and I don't think there is a scientific consensus on this, but for me switching to soda that had no calories (Coke Zero is my go to) made an immediate, noticeable change, and helped me to immediately kick start the weight loss that I needed to do. Over time, I've reduced the amount of soda overall as well, but since my go-to beverage when gaming or coding was soda, this immediately cut out ~140 calories every time I grabbed a drink.

Reduce the sugar that you take in your tea or coffee. Then reduce from cream to milk (you can switch to black eventually if you want). It doesn't take long to acclimatize to that change, and you may actually start enjoying coffee more.

Start tracking every single thing you eat. I use LifeSum and I like it. It's free and easy.

Start tracking your fitness. Get a fitbit or something. I have a Garvin VivoFit 3 which has a few things that I love - you don't have to charge it, and it's fully waterproof. Keep it on and make sure you have it on for whatever activity you choose to do. Set a goal, and try to reach the goal. Mine is 10K steps per day on days where I'm not playing a sport, and I have specific goals around increased heart rates and strenuous activities over a week.

Good luck!

I want to gently point out that at the beginning of your post you wrote "signs of sedentary life, not being active and overconsuming certain stuff is showing...", which I believe is the problem and the implied solution. These signs are an issue for you, so in that case you should be more active and not over consume "certain stuff", whichever stuff it is that you over consume.

If you're asking for tips on how to do that, it's different for different people. Some people do very well with a routine of exercise. Others like going out and doing things to be more active.

Re: over consuming food, try to find some healthy foods you love. I mean truly love. Make sure you always have those around, so when you want to consume something bad for you, remind yourself that you have this healthy thing that you love, and consume that instead. I've had to cut out sugar completely. It is an addictive chemical (aka a drug), and here is a source supporting that statement.

Calorie counting. I use My Fitness Pal to track my foods, it has a pretty extensive library of foods to make tracking easy. If your calories in is less than calories expended, you will lose weight. Don't go overboard with your calorie deficit though, as this can have adverse effects. There is a lot of information in the My Fitness Pal online community and I've found Eat to Perform (ETP) is another helpful site with information around this. Be a little bit careful with the ETP measurements, I've always found them a bit on the high side. Once you've got the hang of how much calories you consume as a first priority, there are a range of other things you should look into such as macro/micro nutrient intake.

As someone else suggested above, meal preparation is a big help with keeping your calories on track. For myself, I do a big shop every weekend and approx 3 hours of prep time allows around 2/3 of my meals for the week to be either complete and ready to reheat, or at least all ready to be assembled. As an example, this week I made a chicken caesar salad, I have the lettuce pre washed and cut, bread pre-toasted, parmessian shredded, pancheta cooked and broken up, chicken cooked and shredded, eggs boiled and cut, homemade sauce prep'ed. In my earlier days, I would have made a calorie count of the whole lot and split it up per meal as I go.

Move your body. I was much like yourself, a little larger than average but not detrimentally so. My main reason for wanting to get fitter was so that when I was 10 years further down the track I hadn't blown out even further and was in a bad state. I'd spent about 10 years as basically a couch potato. I'd occassionally try a gym, sport or some program or whatever, but nothing stuck. For me, Crossfit was the thing that finally kept my interest and let me 'exercise' without realising that I'm exercising. I enjoyed learning new skills, competing with myself and others, the community feel of the class environment, and my personal experience the coaching was very good. I'm 5 years in now - no injuries, massive fitness improvement (the benchmark exercise took me nearly 12 minutes when I started, now takes around 3 minutes), body composition improvements (down around 14% body fat and more than doubled my skeletal muscle mass), and I generally feel much better about myself physically. Crossfit might not be for you, but keep trying things until you find something you enjoy! In Australia, F45 seems to be a newer program that is taking off as another example.

Reduce sodium. Reduce carbs (especially sugar carbs). Cook more often. Try to eliminate cans and frozen goods as much as possible.

Also tied to a desk most of the day... wasn't worried about being fat but wanted to feel healthier (aches and pains... general tiredness... etc). This is what helped me.

• Get Up --- just get up for a few seconds every 30 minutes or hour. Doesn't even have to be that much... just stand and stretch and then sit back down.
• Light Exercise --- I setup a short morning routine of one set of pushups, situps and squats (with light stretching in between) most mornings. Not even much to work up a sweat just enough to feel that I've used the muscles (usually just did the "until tired" instead of counting reps). Really short - like 5-10 minutes.

Really, the regular small dose of exercise built up over time to help me feel generally healthier. I wasn't trying to be buff or skinny ... just healthier ... and those two simple things worked well for me.

I started doing isometric stomach exercises while brushing my teeth ... two minutes of "try to flex your abs into your spine" and you'll feel it (should feel similar to trying to force all the air out of your lungs) ... a long time ago when a physical trainer mentioned it as a simple way to work core exercises into regular daytime routines. It really helped after a few weeks\months and that's what pointed me towards the short but regular exercise routine idea.

As a note - I varied the style of sit-ups and pushups after awhile to keep it from being repetitive and hit some different muscle groups. The idea was to just build up the core sets of muscles so I often ended up combining a few different stomach\back exercises (plank and leg lifts and so forth). I also got a pull-up bar eventually and use that at random times throughout the week and that helped a bit too.

Hope this helps or maybe someone with more fitness experience can expand on this type of routine.

I'm a programmer and have seen other devs get real fat from the long hours sitting down. What has worked for me is riding my bike to work. I started last year and have never been so fit in my life. You feel the effects all day when riding in to work, I just feel so much more awake and focused.

One of the cool things about cycling is its not taking up any of my time because the time I spent riding my bike is time that would have been spent sitting in a car or bus.

Two easy but noticeable ways to stay healthy are definitely having a healthy posture (e.g. when you pick up something relatively heavy, keep your back straight, don't bend it.) and taking the stairs instead of elevators.

I am a larger than average individual, but in the last year and a half I've lost 50 pounds by doing the following:

• P1, for me, is Social Accountability. Get one close friend that you can constantly talk about your health with, that is also trying to make positive improvements—they probably can't already be an athlete, they need to be struggling along with you.
• Use a fitness tracker (like an Apple Watch) and set ambitious goals, and try to hit those goals as much as you can (but, if you need, you can miss one day—but only one). I find that I only need to target ~30-40m of exercise per day.
• Control food consumption. I only have two meals per day, and I never let myself finish them, as a method to encourage myself to both eat slower and stop eating when I'm full.
• No sodas. Switch to carbonated water and coffee.

No fads, nothing crazy. Just trying to improve my life style for the long-term, so my life is sustainable even when I'm caring less about everything. Sure, I'd love to pick up a fad diet which will give me crazy fast results, but I don't think that'll teach me how to maintain when not on a fad diet. I'm proud of the 50 lbs I've lost, and am just going to keep with it.

I am very interested in this topic and try to optimize my own health. I focus on three things: diet, sleep, exercise, skincare. For a general reference of what I'm working with, I am a 30 year old female, 50-55kg. Here are the things I do in each category:

• Diet: Try to stay away from carbs and especially sugar. Does not always work, especially carbs, but I've been doing pretty well with sugar. Intermittent fasting most days - no eating before noon and usually no eating past 7pm, but again this varies. I don't count calories but have a feel for what "overeating" is for me personally in a day - if I overeat one day I just cut back the next day. Focus on trying to consume high fat and high protein foods. I also take some supplements: creatine, fish oil, B12, Vitamin D, hyaluronic acid

• Exercise: Work out 3-5 days a week. Preference for lifting but have also started working in cardio (running) and HIIT. I am in fairly good shape strength-wise though my aerobic capacity needs to improve.

• Sleep: Try to give myself at least an 8-hour sleep opportunity each night (highly recommend "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker). Attempt to turn screens off an hour before bedtime (11pm). Sometimes I use Calm or Headspace sleep stories/sleep meditations to help get to sleep, Headspace especially has been great for this the last couple of nights.

• Skincare: I focus on ingredients and treatments which I have looked into and believe have sufficient scientific backing in terms of their efficacy. My primary skincare products/ingredients of choice are: tretinoin 0.05%, sunscreen (with EU-approved more modern blockers like Tinosorb S/M and Uvinul A-Plus), niacinamide, hyaluronic acid, l-ascorbic acid, lactic acid, ceramides. Definitely not all on the same day and as part of a holistic routine.

You probably are healthy. You just aren't thin. And you're not going to get thin working in an office.

Vitamin D deficiency and/or depression? Consult with your doctor.

I'm sick as a pike, so I won't give advice.