How can I become more healthy and fit?

Chicken? Chicken is not unhealthy. Same with pasta, peanut butter, etc. I eat significantly more candy than you do, and I would not consider myself "unhealthy," whatever that means. Here are a few problems, though: 1. Reese's peanut butter is full of sugar. Eat unsweetened or low-sugar peanut butter. Peanut butter on a banana is a good, healthy snack that should keep you full in between meals. 2. Chicken and pasta are unhealthy if you eat out a lot, especially at chain restaurants. Do you know how to cook? Do you have access to a kitchen? 3. Even if you don't like salad, there are a lot of ways to cook vegetables. It's fall - roast some squash! I hate my pudge, but I want to eat better! Not like a health freak, and I never want to go back to being overly skinny, but I want to tone up and instead of fat, I want muscle. I'm not willing to take weight lose supplements because I take medicine that would interfere with that. I also feel like since I am eating crappy I have less energy to go to the gym...Any motivation or words of advice on food, getting over pickiness, and exercises would be very helpful. It doesn't really sound like your diet is the problem. Maybe it's part of the problem, but I think you're emotional issues around food and your body are tripping you up. The language you use to describe yourself if very negative. For someone with body image issues, I'd suggest finding a physical activity that you enjoy outside the gym. The little calorie counters (which are mostly full of shit, by the way) can lead to obsessive thoughts. Can you go hiking? Ride a bike? Start couch to 5k? Dance? Find a form of exercise that you genuinely enjoy.

Yay, skydiving sounds fun! Yeah, just try to find other drinks to replace soda and eventually get to mostly water. Maybe if you're looking for a soda alternative, sparkling water with a slice of lime is a good alternative? San Pallegrino makes me feel fancy. Or maybe Ginger Ale without High Fructose Corn Syrup? Don't know if you live in a cold city, but bagged/loose-leaf teas are not a bad substitute to drink in large quantities. I replaced my soda addiction with coffee, so try not to go there.

I think I am addicted to sugar.Not just in soda, but any desserts or any food they serve at restaurants. I've tested this theory out. I have a headache one day right? I will eat at home, make pasta, soup, or whatever. I'll feel alright. The next day I go to eat with friends at Denny's (yeah broke college graduate here :P) but then I feel amazing and happy the rest of the day. I'm just so sick of it. Yeah and I'd rather just quit drinking soda all together then drink diet. Does diet have high corn fructose syrup in it too? I'll probably find this out on my own. I've been trying to read articles on why and how soda is bad for your body. I was highly maybe addicted to lemonade for a few years. I'd get up in the middle of the night and drink almost a half gallon. It was pretty bad. We don't keep soda in the house because the person I live with doesn't drink soda and I don't buy it. It's just at work, we get to drink whatever we want, so it's pretty easy to just grab a cup and fill it up with soda. Today though, instead of drinking soda I drank hot chocolate. Someone mentioned I should take up a hobby that I enjoy besides the gym. This Saturday I'm going to start skydiving solo working towards my skydiving license. I know from skydiving tandem before staying hydrated like crazy is very important. My life is at stake and if I mess up just because I was hungry..well you know :)

Just stumbled across this free course in nutrition through U of WA Seattle - Open UW: http://www.outreach.washington.edu/openuw/asp/transform.asp?course=Energy&xml=energy_intro1 Good luck! (Keep at it - it's worth it! You can feel sooo much better than you can even imagine!)

Just to add on to my comments based on the responses: - I double checked this before my post but did not link it: Reese's peanut butter is no more 'unhealthy' than other peanut butters, with http://www.thehersheycompany.com/brands/reeses-peanut-butter/creamy-peanut-butter.aspx. I eat the Fifty50 low glycemic peanut butter personally, but it really isn't much different: http://www.fifty50foods.com/peanutbutter/creamy.html. So from my perspective if you like Reese's peanut butter, go to town. - You said "I've heard diet soda is way worse for you than regular soda." "Way worse"... well, I would have to disagree, especially if you're trying to prevent diabetes. Compare diet Coke to regular Coke. If you're trying to avoid calories, diet Coke has zero calories, regular Coke has 240 per 20 ounce bottle. Don't want to eat too much sugar/carbs? Regular Coke has 65grams of carbs and all of them are sugar. Diet Coke has zero grams of carbs and zero sugar. So, why is diet Coke "way worse" than regular Coke, when it has far fewer calories, carbs, or sugar (i.e. zero compared to a lot)? Well, probably because whoever told you that is afraid of artificial sweeteners. Diet Coke is sweetened with aspartame. Although many people are wary of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartame, the last comprehensive medical review in 2007 reported the scientific evidence showed that it was safe for human consumption. Now, I wouldn't recommend you drink a 6 pack a day of diet Cokes or any other aspartame containing soda. As ablazingsaddle noted, no soda is good for you. But we're talking about baby steps to improve your diet, and switching from soda to diet soda is, I maintain, a good baby step, and much easier to do than completely cutting soda from your diet. Once you've switched to diet, you could then work on cutting down how many times a week you drink it.

You sound like you have a sugar addiction. Sugar withdrawal symptoms are headaches and lethargy. I would seek advice from a nutritionist. I am aspiring to be a nutritionist and you are the exact person I'd love to work with. Look at www.coachcalorie.com for great articles on healthy weightloss, fitness tips, and recipes and nutrition. I learned a lot from this site. You need to take baby steps as your diet is mainly comprised of high starch and high carb and processed foods. It will take time for you slowly to incorporate healthy foods and stop eating so much candy. Start with eliminating soda completely and more water. Then add one vegetable a day and one fruit a day. Work on incorporating more fruits and veggies and don't focus on what not to eat. If you keep in mind the concept of whole foods, real food, unprocessed food, this will help. Regarding toning up- lift weights or do exercises involving your own body weight as resistance (pushups, lunges, lower leg lifts, squats).

I'm right there with figuring out what you like to eat and combining them: Mr. Telophase used to think he hated salads. But I discovered that he likes romaine lettuce, red bell peppers, mushrooms, and onions. Hey presto: a salad. (He still won't eat them without ranch dressing or ginger dressing, but hey, he's eating salad!) I'm still pretty picky about vegetables, but I've come up with workarounds. I find most lettuces unbearably bitter (and haaaate cruciferous vegetables like broccoli and cauliflower, and have never met a squash I didn't loathe), but (a) salt takes away some of the bitter, and (b) bitterness varies between variety, so if I stick to iceberg or butter lettuce and other light green ones, I can usually deal with the taste. Also, in extremis, I will put a vinaigrette dressing on it if I'm given a large bowl of dark green bitter ick. I dislike the vast majority of dressings, and rarely eat dressing on a salad. I routinely encounter servers at restaurants who can't believe that I'd eat a salad dry, but in those cases I tell them to bring a couple of lemon wedges, which I then carefully ignore. (Well. Occasionally I sprinkle some on the salad, but mostly I just give them to Mr. T for his ice tea.) My husband also dislikes most raw or steamed vegetables, but I've found that roasting them changes or destroys whatever it is that he objects to, so roasted green beans, asparagus, portobello mushrooms, and roasted tomatoes are on the menu. (Now I just have to find a way to get him to appreciate the beauty that is peas!) Simple vegetable roasting: put a sheet of aluminum foil in a baking dish or cookie sheet. Preheat oven or toaster oven to 400°. Spread your vegetable out on the foil in a single layer (if it's tomatoes, cut them in half, cut side up. Feel free to scrape out any oogy bits that weird you out. Other chunky vegetables cut into 1-2" pieces). Sprinkle them with olive oil (toss them in it, if you're so inclined). Dot them with butter if you're feeling luxurious. Salt and pepper them. Put the dish into the oven. It'll take 10-60 minutes depending on the thickness and heartiness of the vegetable: tomatoes and green beans closer to 10, asparagus more like 15-25, potatoes more like 45-60. Poke a fork, sharp knife, or a skewer through a piece periodically to judge how done they are--when it goes through easily, it's done but you're the best judge of your preferred mouthfeel and may want to stop when there's a little resistance (better for green beans and asparagus). You can also cut little bits off and taste them as you cook, to check that it gets to a texture you like. If you're lucky, all the oil will have been contained by the foil so all you have to do is throw it away and the cleanup is done. If you're not lucky, at least much less of it will now be baked to the pan. You can jazz it up by sprinkling a bit of (fresh! not from a bottle!) lemon juice over them before or after cooking, or sprinkling various fresh or dried herbs on them. (start with rosemary and thyme, and experiment from there.)

Honestly, one of the best things I did personally is to simply round up all the essential nutrients as supplements - whey protein, potassium (citrate was the best, tastes ok and doesn't come with extras like gluconate), iron, everything in the RDIs as well as biotin and leutine (sp?). Only the essential nutrients. A lot came from life brand chewable multivitamin. Then divide a bit more than the AI for each one into 5 parts or so - you can't just eat them all in the morning I found, that doesn't work - and add some crackers. That was my base, for about 3 months. And I drank just water otherwise, filtered brita is a lot tastier. And then *don't worry*. It's cheap, ultra convenient, and I didn't feel deprived if I didn't eat any particular meal. It gave me the freedom to miss meals, which meant freedom to experiment and try all kinds of new things, focusing on agricultural not processed foods and produce in particular. Also, I lost a lot of weight by just not bothering to eat, basically. I found my impatience regarding learning how to cook was much reduced as I sort of liked being around food more. It was so handy I use it in a modified form about 6 months later now, added creatine which helps sustain and improve muscle mass (20g per day again divided by 5 into separate doses). Now I combine the whey, potassium, 15 g ground chia ( for ALA) and 25g.day of powdered freeze dried parsley (I just computed that it was a food that was easy to add and relatively nutrient dense and low cost) and creatine into a drink mix, and append the other supplements in pill form (fish oil for epa/dha (7 with 180 mg dha and 120 epa I think each), multivitamin, choline, iron, calcium and magnesium and zinc plus sunflower seeds for LA though those aren't needed much as LA is pretty abundant in food and I'm switching to safflower oil on vegetables soon). I could . If I'm not eating anything else, which is often, I'll use that as my base on which to build by adding veggies etc., subtracting supplements if/when the nutrients are displaced by actual food. The main way I'd like to improve this is by making it a solid instead of a drink mix, for convenience and because there is research that indicates liquid calories are processed differently than solid by satiety centers in our brains. Haven't quite figured that out yet, if I mix a bit of water in it turns into a dough but then I have to either add a preservative of some sort or remove water again to reduce the water activity low enough that it will keep without refrigeration... and it's kind of hard to experiment. A stopgap measure is to put some powder in a plastic ziploc sandwich bag, to which water can be added on-the-go and I can drink from. I feel and look better now, a 5 9 guy, I went from 88 kg to 66 kg in only a few months. But I should warn you that I have started going back up again now slowly. Such is the problem; ultimately we live in a poor food environment, and I think a good part of the solution is to use your neocortex to try to maintain your own micro-environment. What that means is changing the relative difficulty of obtaining various foods (especially in a daily or hourly time window) such that it becomes relatively more biased in favour of more agricultural, relatively unprocessed and relatively tasty (in season, spices etc) lower calorie density food being easier to obtain. To read more on this I suggest Marion nestle's books and blog. Doesn't sound too healthy? it's not. It's not a healthy diet, really, but it's what worked for me. A truly healthy diet as described by Nestle, for instance, is just too much work and too expensive right now to be practical. This is better than nothing. It's wheylent green, basically. And it's as good as it gets for now. This is the world we live in these days. People won't switch to wheylent green because they "have to", they will do it because they think it is somehow smart and they are beating the odds. Which it is, given certain realities. But ultimately the only good solution is to change those larger scale realities. In my local grocery store, a single peach, maybe 80calories, costs more than a 225 bag of flavoured corn chips, 1500 calories. And try comparing it with chocolate. Peaches are food, they are not supposed to be rare treats. Chips are treats, not food. Until this is reflected in the food environment we will keep having these problems.

I know people with food issues who like http://www.thefresh20.com which puts together well-rounded daily meal plans and shopping lists for $5 a month. Haven't tested it myself, but you might find it helpful.