Isaac Clark

Hey all! So, I was just thinking, with the recent rise in virtual reality as a gaming technology, more and more gamers are starting to stand up and move around in order to play their games. I believe this could have very interesting implications for gamers and the fitness community, and going forward we may see those two communities intertwine much more often. First of all, VR games on systems like Occulus and the Vive have people on their feet, ducking and dodging and flailing their arms wildly. Generally, these games have people moving and at least getting some kind of workout where, using traditional methods, they would have been sedentary. Secondly, as VR evolves and becomes more accessible, user-friendly, and compact, I think we could see people begin to integrate it into legitimate fitness experiences. Imagine putting on your HTC Vive or Occulus Rift while you stand on the treadmill, and instead of having to stare at a wall and blare music, you could be jogging through the grand canyon on a sunny day, listening to a nature soundtrack, even if it's the dead of winter where you live. Or taking part in a simulated boxing match that requires you to duck, jab, kick, and perform other movements to win. I think the potential for VR to be used as a tool to promote fitness in the future, as the technology becomes more refined, is incredible. I'm interested in hearing your thoughts! Can you think of any other uses VR could have, fitness-related or otherwise? Or am I getting far too ahead of myself? Thanks for reading, guys. Have a great day!

Nutrition is a stumbling block for many people. I still struggle with eating healthily myself. If you want to remain vegetarian, there are other ways to get your protein in very effectively without having to eat meats! There are the obvious things, like protein powders, protein bars, and other supplements like that. But even things like eggs and beans have protein in them. But hey, if you find yourself enjoying getting back into cooking and eating meats, more power to you!

Hey there! I'm Isaac, from Canada. I'm up way past my bedtime. In many ways, Canada is the Australia of the Northern Hemisphere. Think about it. Anyhow, spend some time getting familiar with the forums and fleshing out your goals, and I hope that you can find all the resources you need to turn your relationship with fitness into love-only! Hope to see you around more

Hey there! So, there are a few ways you can go about doing cardio and strength at the same time. The first is to train them on the same day. Most studies I've seen recommend doing your cardio after your resistance routine, to maximize output. But honestly, the results of the study weren't exact ground-breaking, so you wouldn't be losing much at all if you chose to do cardio first. Another option that many choose to do is split up their cardio and weight routines entirely. Some people choose to do this by doing weights in the morning and running in the evening, but if you wanted to split them up into different days entirely, that's fine. Cardio is something you can do most every day, as long as you avoid injuries. A daily running routine should see you make pretty good progress for both your endurance and speed, both qualities essential to running your half marathon. Just remember to take a rest day or two every so often, especially as you get closer to the marathon itself. Also, protein and a good amount of carbs will be your best friends in keeping you going the distance when you run. A lot of runners, myself included, find success by increasing those two nutrients in our diets, since they give you the energy to help both your running and lifting! No to mention protein will help you build your muscle mass, and make sure the muscle you've gained stays on you if you shed a few pounds from your running. And lastly, I'm going to shamelessly plug the Ranger Guild. Our entire focus is building strength and cardio together! Swing by our forums to get some routine ideas or workouts, as well as some helpful advice, and stay for the GIFs of dooting skeletons.

Hey there, welcome to the forums! Getting over mental hurdles involving food can truly be a monumental task. I've been tackling my issues with binging and eating unhealthy foods for a long, long time and I still slip up every so often. But progress comes with time, and a few mistakes mean nothing in the grand scheme of a new lifestyle. Anyhow, best of luck! I hope we'll see you around more

Welcome back! A good support and accountability system is everything when it comes to achieving your goals. As long as you and your brother hold each other to task, I have no doubt you'll both come out of this looking and feeling awesome

I transitioned off of Habitica and now I don't really use anything to keep track, aside from an online spreadsheet where I just log my workouts. Although, I'll admit I'm very lucky. I have a gym buddy who holds me accountable and helps me ensure I never forget to fulfill my goals, and I have enough willpower to slug on until positive things become habits. What worked for me may not work for you, and if you find that things like the NF Characters or Habitica helps you reduce your bad habits, rock those things!

I'm a professional writer / editor, so I do write quite a bit. I started off writing my own short stories and stuff when I as still in Highschool, but now that I do it as work, I just can't seem to get the willpower to write in my free time. It kinda just reminds me of work

Glad to hear you're coming back strong! You sound determined, I'm certain your comeback will be legendary. You have well-defined goals, and that's already half the battle.

Habitica is a great choice! I used it for a little while when I first started my routine to make sure I never forgot anything. Any steps toward improving your health are good ones, and we're all glad to see you taking them You have some really solid goals, and it sounds like you're starting off really strong. Good luck!

Any improvement is a good improvement! A lot of people (especially me) have trouble maintaining a proper sleep routine, and that's incredibly important. You don't see many people actively working on that And have fun on the SNES, the Zelda series on there made up my childhood.You're in good hands!

Good luck! Just remember this really is a marathon. You might slip up sometimes, but even if you have a bad day, that isn't going to be the thing that will stop you. I look forward to seeing your results!

Congrats on starting your first steps! I'll break it down based on your goals: Main Objective: Loose the belly Lucky for you, this one is the easiest to do, if you are good at holding yourself accountable. You simply need to consume less calories than you expend in a day. You mentioned living a sedentary lifestyle, but even when you are just starting out lifting weights, you are going to want to eat at a deficit. Basically, you will want to calculate something called your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE). This is roughly the amount of calories you burn through your normal activities in your day. It will be different for everyone, and you can find some pretty reliable calculators online (such as: https://www.iifym.com/tdee-calculator/). What most people do is take that number and deduct 500 calories from it, and only eat up to that amount a day. This shouldn't be overly difficult and this will set you to lose about 1 pound per week. When you are training and cutting fat at the same time, you will need to fit a lot of protein into your diet to make sure you retain and build muscle mass. Protein bars, shakes, and meats are your best friends with this. But remember you still need a good amount of other nutrients, too. Secondary Objective: Regain strength You have all of the equipment needed to start a decent training regimen at home, so I suggest you go down that route and supplement it with bodyweight workouts. The main website (www.nerdfitness.com) has some pretty great resources for workouts. I'd especially recommend you trying their beginner bodyweight workout just to see where you're at with your fitness (https://www.nerdfitness.com/blog/beginner-body-weight-workout-burn-fat-build-muscle/). DO NOT push yourself too hard. Challenging yourself is good, but be realistic about what you can do right now or else you run the risk of injury. You'll want engage all of the muscle groups you can, I'm sure you'll familiar with them. So, no matter if you want to do them all at once or spread them out on different days, remember to hit everything. Chest, shoulders (if your injury doesn't cause you any grief), biceps, etc. Since you've already been fit in the past, it should not take you very long to regain a lot of the muscle mass you've lost, you will probably see results in a couple of months. Bonus Objective: regain my relatively pleasant physical appearance As for this, all I can say is cut fat and groom yourself. Well-fitting clothes, a good hair/beard cut, and everything that goes along with that will really help with your confidence, and your appearance. If anything I've said is unclear, feel free to message me about it! I'd be happy to help Good luck with your goals!

Congrats on your progress! It's amazing to see such dedication from anyone, especially someone who's been pushing themselves as hard as you have. You've earned this! I say enjoy it and come back to your regular routine when you're ready and feeling refreshed Have fun with the Yoga! I've been thinking of trying it myself.

I know that a lot of science backs up training for marathons while fasting. PictureFit on Youtube has a very interesting video about this, I suggest checking it out (Link Below)! As for actually running the marathon fasted, I wouldn't think that's best. If it is a long cross-country affair, like Micahfisher said, it is very common to load up on carbs and protein for a couple of days beforehand to store energy and eat nothing the day of. Which makes sense, since if you did eat anything immediately prior to the race, you've probably feel terrible at best, and at worst, throw it up. But, if you find that you can safely run it without any special eating pattern beforehand, go for it! Here's the video I was talking about

Hey there! I like the way you write, you seem quite gifted with it! Welcome to our little community here, I hope you like what you've seen so far and I hope we'll see a lot more of you in the future The leveling-up and class features are what really drew me to this website, too. It's hard to shake off love for the RPG genre. The only thing I can add that haven't already been said: Remember to get your protein in to help your muscles! Very important part of the process if you are cutting fat while trying to preserve lean mass. I wish you best of luck in your journey, see you around!

Great choice of game! I can't wait either.

@Emilycvaughn Those are good goals for the long-term! Ambitious, but something you can easily do, from the sounds of it! If those are the goals you want to commit to, you will then want to break them down into smaller goals that you check your progress on periodically. For instance, when I first started on my weight loss regimen (Started at 165, weigh 134 now), I simply made a commitment for just one week to log all of the food I ate on MyFitnessPal, a food tracking app, so that I could see how many calories I ate in a day and throughout the week in total. When the week was done, I looked over everything to see how I did with logging my food, and decided I could do it again for the upcoming week. There are a LOT of resources you can find on these forums, on the main website, and throughout the internet about losing weight and building endurance. As a beginner, I recommend you do some reading about Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE), and see where yours is! That way, you can compare it to the amount of calories you consume now, the figure out exactly where to go. If you're up for it, a challenge that helped me was to aim for, just two or three times a week, give up an unhealthy snack you otherwise would have had out of habit. Things like chips, candy bars, full-calorie sodas, stuff like that. If you had any questions or I wasn't clear on anything, just send me a PM!

Hey there! Welcome to the rebellion! I really like your goals. They are tangible, achievable things that will easily improve your quality of life. That is great! But like @Red1263 mentioned, long-term goals are also very important, because they help you focus you short-term goals so that everything you do helps you towards an end point. These goals can be anything you like, with more commons ones such as weight loss, muscle building, toning, or just building endurance. You set your own goals! If you are looking for some ideas for these goals, check out the guild system Nerd Fitness has going on! You can join a guild based on whatever sounds most interesting to you at the time (Warriors for strength training, scouts for endurance, etc.) and be able to scavenge ideas from their boards! When I first started looking around on these forums, before I officially joined, I would check a few of the guilds that focused on things I liked and wanted to do, and took my goals from some of the users there. Start off with small thing, and eventually it'll come naturally to you! I'm glad you're here, and I wish you luck with forming your new life habits

Welcome! I'm a bit new here myself. All you need is 20 seconds of courage to make a difference in your life! Good luck on your fitness journey, I hope I'll see you around these forums

Welcome back! Congrats on the pregnancy and the upcoming trip. I look forward to reading some of your challenges coming up

Hey! Welcome to the community. Don't beat yourself up over previous attempts. We all have trouble sometimes, and all of those brought you closer to the goals you set now! If you're at 155lbs, you may or may not be able to meet your goal. The higher end of what is generally considered healthy in most cases is losing two pounds per week. If you have six weeks, this puts you at 12 pounds. So, if you put in a little bit more effort than would be otherwise standard into both your diet and workouts, it's not impossible for you to lose that 15 lbs. But, like I said, this is generally on the more aggressive end of weight loss. It's good to have a number, but one thing that will really put you in danger of quitting again is being married to the idea that you HAVE to lose X amount of weight in X weeks, especially if you're still new to this. Just focus on small changes, like @godjira1 said, and recognize when you see progress. And, here's just a little bit of anecdotal advice. I see your long, long, long list of things you want to do. It's great you're so detail-oriented and know what you want! But, I think you really need to start trimming that list down in a major way, at least for now. Basically, what I've found works for me and some of the people I know is choosing three or four of those tasks to be a priority. You can only put your energy into so much in a day. It's important you don't get overwhelmed. Focus on a few specific things, and take a couple of weeks to get them done well and form habits. Then, come back to your list with that satisfaction you've crossed some items off, and choose a few more that you feel are priorities for you at that time. Instead of saying "I don't have time to do that", say "That isn't a priority for me right now." But hey, that's just my ideas! Either way, congrats on getting married, and good luck on your journey to live a healthier life

Hey man! I've been going though a bit of a diet slump too, honestly. For me, it's manifested itself in wild cravings and sporadic fatigue. I find myself going over my caloric intake more often than I stay below it. I'm just popping in here to say keep going. Keep logging everything, even if it's painful to see the numbers, and go to bed every night with the mentality of "I'm going to do better tomorrrow". You've already lost 60 lbs. You've proven you have the dedication to do this, and this slump is only temporary. You've got this!

"How long has it been? Two months, three?" The Ranger pondered, staring up at the weathered and ragged leather roof of the barracks tent as he lie on his cot, suspended precariously above the mud on little more than a set of uncertain sticks. Unable to either rest nor find the will to train, he found himself listening to the heavy, quick pitter-patter of raindrops against the roof as they beat down upon the encampment. "Time seems to hard to keep track of when you are never certain how much of it you have left." Dark, angry clouds stirred in the sky that summer morning, mixing and intermingling with one another as far as the eye could see while they rained hard upon the Ravenguard Forest below. It may have been day, but the dark clouds covering the sky blocked out any hope of seeing the sun. Isaac Clark was a young man, this summer marking his 18th in this world. Ever since he was a boy, Isaac had been enlisted and training in the Imperial Ranger Corps, a subsection of the Imperial Military dedicated to scouting, covert raids, and unconventional warfare, when need. When he was younger, Isaac used to daydream about the foes he may face while he was doing his duties. He did not imagine, however, the predicament he and his countrymen now find themselves in. Two weeks before Isaac would have officially finished his training and been granted full status as an Imperial Ranger, the tensions that had been simmering just underneath a thin veneer of civility for as long as he could remember had finally boiled over into mass conflict. The emperor was a cruel and strange man, well-known for having a first of iron, made for crushing dissent and opposition. His reign was one held together by fear and mistrust. Men and women abducted from their homes in the night, entire villages and vital farmlands burned to the ground, all at the emperor's behest. It had always been a tolerated, if not shameful, aspect of culture in Iminia. Isaac grew up under this rule. He remembers seeing the Emperor's Guard, an army in its own right, marching to raze a church that belonged to a dissident priest in his village. The Guard nailed the door shut with the priest inside before setting the building ablaze. That day was forever set into Isaac's memory, and will be there until he dies. The military had never had any part in this oppression, as the emperor preferred to trust these horrible duties to his own Guard. Roughly three months ago, the Emperor executed one of his most prominent generals for speaking out against the widespread suffering the common people faced. Many of the remaining generals, along with much of their men, began a rebellion which now split the Empire of Iminia in two. Isaac's platoon leader, James, had approached his trainees just as the rebellion was beginning, and promised an immediate promotion to full Ranger status if they came with him to join the rebellion. All but one of Isaac's fellow trainees took the offer, and they left that night, taking with them all the weapons and supplies they could. They all had grew up resenting the system that oppressed them, and were filled with an idealistic fury at the death of a general many of the soldiers revered. Ever since then, Isaac's life consisted of moving from remote camp to remote camp, occasionally scouting or skirmishing with Royalist forces alongside more experienced men. He was new, and so he was never trusted with any of the more important missions handed off to the veteran Rangers. It frustrated him. He wanted to prove his worth, but was given no opportunities to do so. And so, he now found himself in yet another remote camp, this time in a solitary clearing in the deep heart of Ravenguard Forest, on the northern edge of the Empire, waiting. "Up and at 'em, boys." He was pulled out of his daydream by a gruff voice at the entrance of the tent. The voice belonged to Marius, Isaac's direct squad leader. "We've got campfires to the south." Unexpected campfires meant Royalist soldiers. Isaac hauled himself off of his cot, planting his feet firmly on the ground as he filed out of the tent alongside side the rest of the rangers in his squad. He had better hope his training up to this point was enough. My challenges Hey everyone! So, better late than never for my first challenge. 1: Build Endurance by walking or jogging daily. I've recently found this fun app called Zombies, Run! and it has really been helping me enjoy jogging by providing a fun, game-related system and interesting audio stories. I have always wanted to take my cardio more seriously, and this is a great chance! 2: Scout the Region (Go hiking at least twice this week). I am a huge fan of hiking, and now that it is getting warmer, I feel like this will really help improve my mood and indulge in the part of me that loves exploration. 3: Write Reports (Journal). I have a journal, but I am terrible about writing in it. So, I am committing to writing in it at least three times this week. 4: Prepare for Combat (Strength/Weapon Training). I will commit to doing additional strength training outside of my usual gym time. This can be anything from bodyweight training, to practicing proper form and technique with some of the wooden weapons I have at home! 5: Scavenge to Supplement Rations (Monitor Diet). I will be more strict with my calorie intake, as I often find myself snacking too much for not real reason other than it being a bad habit. So I will work towards eliminating my snacking while eating better foods to keep me satisfied longer, while trying my best to stay at or just under my caloric intake goal daily. I'm new to all of this, so please tell me if you think my story is too long or convoluted, or if there is something I'm not doing or doing wrong! Thanks so much to everyone!

You're doing great! Keep going strong and stick with it and I'm sure you'll get the progress you're looking for! I can already see you're very determined