Comment by eastbound
9 hours ago
Why did you stop? It seems you did, but since it made you feel excellent, it seems strange to “choose to stop”.
It’s not an innocent question: Gains and feeling extremely well and confident and serotonin-boosted are only useful if it can be sustained in life. The two alternatives are: 1. It pumps you but tires you very fast and you get fat down the line, and your overall life is ~obese (seems to happen to way more people than one could assume), 2. Only the change produces this feeling, and change cannot be sustained forever.
Not just one reason, but I stopped because I more or less maintained my physique for 7-8 years afterwards (probably being in your 20s helps) and my life circumstances were in a goldilocks zone; my dad (a doctor) was adamant I'd destroy my heart with all the muscle mass I added.
The thing that motivated me to start was the fact I was not very successful with girls and gaining 30 pounds of muscles in early 2000's Romania was intoxicating, if anybody told me before that girls would send kisses in the subway, grab my arms in the bus and start conversations with me or ask for my number in clubs, colleagues ask me to dump my girlfriend I would have said it's impossible.
I'm ashamed to say, but all that validation was even better than the way lifting made me feel and the primary drive to weight lifting.
It's only now that I remember how good weight lifting in itself made me feel, I never did give it much thought back then.
But now it's very hard to find the time or motivation to start it again.
I'm not really scared of getting fat down the line, I'm in my early 40s now and I've never been fat.
You could be right, that it's only the change that makes you feel amazing, and I only ever went to the gym for some 6 months total, but I have my doubt that it would ever go away, I've been on many, many drugs, NOT ONE ever made me feel good for 6 months straight, they all downregulate very fast.
Now thinking about it, I get a renewed motivation to re-start weight lifting