Fitness Weekly Discussion

My life just hasn’t been great lately and right now I’m in the middle of back to back 12 hour night shifts with day shifts before and after.

Adding a commitment to your life, at a point in your life where it might be even more difficult to maintain, will only make things worse by making your life harder and making you feel worse when the commitment slips. Don't set yourself up for failure.

It has to be something you enjoy; something you look forward to. Otherwise it won't work. I can't speak for pills…

I recommend starting by looking at dietary improvements. Meal planning, specifically: It saves both time and money. There is the /r/mealprep subreddit, as well as /r/EatCheapAndHealthy. Same advice applies: make it (cooking and prepping your meals for the week) an enjoyable activity you look forward to.

You have all the business in the world posting here and I'm sure many of us would love to help because we've been in your shoes. I don't know a lot of your situation, but going off of just what you said, I'd second @adys' recommendation of getting your diet under control first and foremost. This is three fold. One, most people are going to be happy with just being thinner when they talk about fitness. Two, the benefits of working out aren't really using up calories; building up muscle is a long, slow process. Third, you're going to find physical activity more palatable and less damaging to your joints if you weigh less.

The third thing is pretty self explanatory, but I'll get into detail on the other two:

For one, it means you really don't need to carve out a lot of gym time, go running 5Ks daily or anything like that. You just need portion control and a switch to more "whole" foods as they are sometimes called. 100 grams of lettuce and 100 grams of candy bars take up about the same amount of room in your stomach, but have vastly different calorie counts. So, count your calories, start a food diary, something like that and see what you can do. I was able to shred off almost 50 lbs (~215 to ~170) in about half a year just by counting calories, you'll be amazed at what knowing what you're putting into your body does.

The second thing is what working out actually does. A good 40 minute session at the gym is going to burn probably around 300-400 calories. That's about what's in one slice of pizza from 7-11. It's much easier to just cut back on a slice of pizza a day's worth of calories than find the time and motivation to work out. So, again, start there.

That said, working out is still a great idea for cardio vascular health, but like you said, it takes quite a bit to get both the energy. The best exercise program is the one you do. There's no magical formula on this. While an expert could tell you what to do based on your goals (be more healthy, build muscle, lose weight, etc) for optimal use of your time, if those optimal exercises aren't motivating you to work out, then they suck, they're not optimal. So, you need to find something that you want to do first and foremost.

For you, and again I'm basing this on knowing almost nothing about you so apologies if this sucks, I would recommend taking a half an hour walk a day. Just get an audiobook or podcast to binge, pop in some headphones and give yourself a walk at your pace for a half an hour. Going from the couch to that is going to give you a lot of physical and metal benefits.

For a lot of your "fit" friends, hitting a goal is their motivation. That's why do they do optimized workouts for their goals. They have the discipline to get the work done, even when they don't feel like doing it, because their desire for the goal outweighs everything else. Until you get to that point, just do something you can at lest tolerate, if not enjoy, and worry about the rest later.