Hey, I posted about two weeks ago in another thread that I finally built up the nerve to just start using the weights and stop giving a shit what everyone thought. I'm still at it and I'm making progress, and I feel better than I have in maybe my whole life.

I started by just telling myself I'm going to go to the gym for an hour a day, regardless of if I did anything. Now luckily that same fear of looking like an idiot that kept me out of the gym actually came in handy because once I had resigned myself to the fact I'm going to go to the gym regardless of what I did there I didn't want to just stand around like a weirdo, so my promise of of going to the gym for an hour turned into, "I'm going to go to the gym and move for an hour".

I had tried running in the past and it always hurt my knees and shins (probably never got the right shoes) but I'd heard the elliptical was low impact so I just got on an elliptical for an hour.

Each time I turned the resistance up one notch until I could go for a full hour on the max setting, then I started seeing how long I could go for. I did 2 and a half hours once and really only stopped because I was afraid I was going to get dehydrated but felt like I could go all day.

Now in all the time I was going their I'd see other people come and go, do their own thing, lift weights, run on the treadmills, do aerobics, yoga, whatever. I didn't care what they were doing, and I realized that they wouldn't care either.

The whole time I was just thinking about my own stuff, "Okay, 10 minutes in, 20 minutes in, halfway there, past the point of no return, 20 minutes left, 10 minutes, done, nice".

It's like high school man, you think everyone is silently judging you but really everyone is too wrapped up in their own stuff to even notice you.

So I figured If I was going to spending all that time in the gym I might as well do more, so I started the dumbell stop gap alternative because my gym only has a smith machine.

Anyway, I know I'm probably not the best person to be giving advice and maybe my resolve will crumble and I'll go back to being a couch potato as I've only actually been lifting weights for less than a month and doing cardio for like two months but I totally get where you're coming from.

There's no way around you just have to do it. Just keep going, even if you only sit in the parking lot, maybe the next week you'll go stand around inside for an hour, then the week after walk on the treadmill for an hour, then run. Just try to a little more each day, you can do it.