Beholden said (among other things): "Here is my question to you. And I'm not trying to be mean or smug or anything, are you looking for a justification to keep on with the way you are currently living and not really wanting to change any lifestyle/habits? Or making an excuse to keep doing what you want to do? It sounds to me you want to know what will get you healthier and you are trying to weigh the pros and the cons through research. Good, but what are you really willing to do about it once you find that changes need to be made?"

And here's what I say in reply: "Motivation for change" is something very personal, although I'm convinced that it can be increased or decreased in a number of ways. My search is for effective motivational levers that I can use on myself. I know what's healthy and what's not. The problem is prying myself away from those unhealthy behaviors that nonetheless provide a substantial degree of palliation to the everyday miseries I have to put up with. There's no way around it: the fact is, consistently bad behaviors aren't there because one is a bad person, nor are they there because one's character is lacking. No. Consistently bad behaviors are there because certain pain levels are simply not acceptable and anything at all, regardless of its health effects, is more acceptable than those levels of pain.

So, to me, your challenge about "are you looking for a justification to keep on with the way you are currently living and not really wanting to change any lifestyle/habits? Or making an excuse to keep doing what you want to do?" is really betraying an absence on your part of any understanding of the real dynamics of combining pain control with healthy behaviors. Whatever motivational gambits one employs, they have to be strong enough to deal with and overcome a constant level of pain, and that's a tough thing to do. I assure you that simply knowing what is healthy will by no means be enough.

For those of us like myself who don't have masochistic tendencies, the obvious self-torture (and enjoyment of self-torture) of many health fanatics is simply not something that can be adopted, even if it comes with the payoff so frequently seen in self-torture addicts: that really awful sense of superiority they emit. Many negative behaviors from a health point of view have a very positive payoff from a pain point of view. Whatever pro-health behaviors may be adopted, they simply will not be successful without in some manner compensating for the absence of pain-reducing but otherwise negative behaviors.