Exercise makes me depressed. Anyone else this way?

It sounds like you just need to figure out which type of exercise you can get excited about.

Not sure why it's taking up to 3 hours. 15 minutes there plus 15 minutes back is 30 minutes and your cardio is done. Spend 60 minutes on strength training and you are done in 90 minutes.

Do you have an MP3 player? That can make the walk and workout more interesting. I like listening to NPR when I am walking or gardening, and I have an awesome playlist for lifting weights.

Reading between the lines I think it's possible that exercise itself is not the problem, but rather depression and anxiety. Has this been an issue for which you have sought help in the past?

I have struggled with depression and anxiety and what helps me these days more than talk therapy or meds is...exercise!* I often have to force myself to start, but am always glad I did. Are you fine once you start heading towards the gym?






* I am aware that not everyone with depression benefits from exercise, but statistically speaking studies have shown it is indeed beneficial for mild-moderate depression.

I do my exercise at home because I also can't find motivation to keep going to a gym.

A side effect of that is that my house is filling up with exercise equipment.

sam33a wrote: »

I just cannot get myself to exercise. I joined the gym with the aim of going 5 days a week. However, the first week I managed to go 3 days, the second week, again I went for 3 days. The third week I went 2 days and so far this week I haven't been once. I just hate going. It's so time-consuming, it can easily eat 2.5-3 hours out of my day. Plus, the gym is a good 15-minute walk away from my house and I hate walking there and back. The whole thing is just stressful.

I know people will say to do something else instead, but that just never happens either. I have an exercise machine at home and weights, they rarely get used. I have exercise videos I can do, again, never get used. How can I learn to love exercise?

I've had to lower my calories to 1250 so that I can hopefully, still lose weight, but weight loss without exercise is terribly slow. I lose maybe 2 lbs a month if I'm lucky.

What the hell are you doing that the gym takes 2.5-3 hours out of your day. A 15 minute there and back is 30 minutes. Another 30-60 exercising...

At any rate, you don't need a gym or exercise equipment or DVDs or whatever. My primary exercise is riding my bike...I also do a little hiking, some rock climbing here and there, and I spend a lot of time playing with my kids in the pool. I don't really do exercise for the sake of exercise...most of my exercise is what most people would consider recreational activity. I'm not real big on the gym at the moment, but even when I was hitting the weight room, it was 3x per week...zero reason for me to get to the gym more than that.

To me, it sounds like you're trying to do too much too soon. You don't have to exercise for hours on end and you don't have to spend 5x per week in the gym.

I've joined a lot of gyms over the years and followed the same trajectory of starting off strong with 3+ visits a week, and then a few months later having to deal with the "customer retention" teams and the cancellation penalties.

Clearly the solution, assuming you are not willing to be a person who just doesn't exercise, is to get a home machine that you can tolerate. That will knock your three hour investment down to 30 minutes plus a quick shower.

And just as clearly, you need a machine you can use while watching TV so that you don't have to pay attention to the fact that you're exercising, or enjoy it, or really, do anything other than get it over with.

Exercise isn't just for weight loss, and at some point in your life whether or not you kept in shape will become crucially important, and if you didn't, you'll pay dearly. It's better to suck it up and find a way to make exercise happen, whether you enjoy it or not. There are lots of things you do without liking it. Do you like paying taxes? Fixing a flat tire? Going to the doctor? You just do them because you have to. Add exercise to that list and get on it.

A machine you can use while watching TV is probably the ticket for you. Recumbent bike, treadmill with a panel screen, etc. Or, load up your phone with tunes you like, get a good pair of headphones, and put on those walking shoes. The louder you make the music, the less you'll notice you're walking LOL

1250 is not a realistic number of calories to eat. Have you ever heard of a single person who ate 1250 and stuck with it over time? That kind of diet doesn't last. People who do 1250 are the people who a year later have gained it all back and are posting about yo-yo dieting.

I disagree with the posts above that say exercise isn't very important to a diet. Actually, it is. If you're running a 500 calorie deficit on a 1,500 calorie diet and doing 300 calories of cardio per day, depending on whether you eat the exercise calories back the exercise accounts for either (a) 38 % of your total weight lost, or (b) an additional 20 % more food. Either way, the impact of exercise on a diet, just mathematically speaking, is absolutely huge. Beyond the numbers, exercise is a habit that keeps you on track as far as feeling like you're working on your own health and well being, which helps a lot when dieting starts to seem tedious, which it will. Yes, you can diet without exercising, but it's harder and slower, and easier to just fall off the diet as soon as there's a life interruption or event. Exercise keeps you plugged into a larger self-improvement project that gives the dieting context and purpose.

I wouldn’t say exercise makes me depressed but it’s certainly so stressful to fit into my life that I rarely do any form of ‘purposeful’ exercise.

Stressors include:

1. Unsupportive sarcastic husband who works from home so is always around.
2. Distance from nearest bearable gym. Also see point 1.
3. I’m not a ‘joiner’ so can think of little worse than classes. If there was yoga anywhere near me I’d think about it, but see point 1.
4. It bores me to tears! I can get 3 or 4 reps into something and want to scream with the tedium.

So, I just try and increase my daily activity where I can...housework, gardening, decorating, walking the dog (small dog so distance is restricted), some resistance band stuff while reading/watching Netflix etc on my iPad alone in my bedroom after I’ve gone to bed(we don’t share a bedroom because he’s overweight and a dreadful snorer). I’ll park right at the back of a car park, shop like a moron in the supermarket so I can go back and forward through the aisles rather than being logical. 😂, take the stairs anytime I can in preference to a lift or escalator.

Maybe once a month I’ll go for a proper walk with a friend, maybe 14 to 16 miles when we do this, but she’s 20 years younger than I am so still has small children at home so opportunities for this are limited. Even this is met with derision and scorn from my husband ‘so you’re off for one of your little walks eh?’....🙄. I told him a couple of days ago I was going to go pick a prescription up at the doctors and would be walking so I’d be longer than expected. His response was to say ‘Alexa’ is Barbara insane’ to his Amazon Echo on his desk....

Honestly, if it’s depressing or stressful I’d suggest you don’t do it, the benefits are probably not sufficient to counterbalance the way it makes you feel to do it.