While not a top athlete I have personal experience with this as "desk worker" at SpaceX, Google etc who went from being chubby to being lean You can read (most

While not a top athlete I have personal experience with this as "desk worker" at SpaceX, Google etc who went from being chubby to being lean You can read (most) of the story here https://ravinkumar.com/WhyFitness.html#WhyFitness https://ravinkumar.com/WhyFitness.html#WhyFitness But in summary I'd say, exercise is great, getting lean isn't necessarily great. In this picture three years ago I was the leanest I ever was, which like the article says, looks great, but doesn't always feel great. I wasn't even body builder lean which would have been a new level of suffering. Since then I've put on fat again, not as much as before, but enough to be a point where I'm happy with where I look, I don't need to track macros etc. My suggestion is use the influencers as motivation, but unless you really want to sacrifice a lot don't try to be them. But no matter how you look, exercising has a number of positive effects and I'm very happy to have reversed the trend in my late 20's. Even though I don't get paid to look good at my job, feeling great both inside and outside of my job has changed my life