Healthy Living for Desk Dwellers

The online health-focused community for desk dwellers

Improve your lifestyle in small steps to help future you big time

The Healthy Living for Desk Dwellers initiative is currently under construction. Sign up for free to become an Early Member and receive emails about our progress. We appreciate your support.

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Is Healthy Living for Desk Dwellers a good fit for you? Read the Healthy Living Manifesto to find out.

The Healthy Living Manifesto

We are uncovering better ways of healthy living by doing it and helping others do it.
Through this work, we have come to value:

  1. Making small changes that last over sudden, drastic lifestyle changes.
  2. Discovering how healthy living fits in your life over implementing strict protocols.
  3. Being open to learn more about healthy living over having a narrow-minded view of health.
  4. Using a combo of data & tools + personal experiences to work on health over just using either one of those in isolation.

That is, while there is value in doing the things mentioned after over, we value doing the other things more.

Read the principles that come with the Healthy Living Manifesto.

How will Healthy Living for Desk Dwellers take shape and help you?

Our mission is to help desk dwellers, people with an office job, lead healthier lives.

Many office workers move too little, have eating habits that could be improved on, feel back pain because of sitting too much and so on. These lifestyle habits aren't problematic at first, but over the years they can start working against you. Before you know it, you start grappling with aches and ailments or even full-blown lifestyle diseases.

The good news is that you can change your lifestyle for the better. The bad news is that everybody already knows that, and most folks find it very difficult to do. In the Healthy Living Manifesto, you already read that we believe in small changes that last over drastic lifestyle changes. We also believe you shouldn't have to do it alone.

Free resources

That's why we want to offer you a safe and uplifting community, so you can improve your desk dweller lifestyle in small steps. On this website, we will build a forum (web 1.0 style) where you can chat with other desk dwellers.

Furthermore, we will share information, tips & tricks about common topics. Tips about:

We will also help you with:

When you sign up, you'll receive a free mini-course that will cover the most common topics as mentioned above. Every lesson in the course will help you take a small step in the right direction to help you be a healthy desk dweller. Please note that this free course is still under construction. When you sign up right now, you are signalling your support for this community and indicate that you want to be kept up to date.

When you join the community, you also have direct influence over the topics that will be covered.

Everything that's mentioned so far will be free. The only thing that's required is your interest and willingness to change and work on yourself. If you end up liking what you learn and want to support us, you can give us a donation.

I want to join!

Paid services

There will also be a couple of optional paid services.

Personal coaching

If you want to work on your specific lifestyle goals (losing weight, eating healthier, strength training goals), personal coaching will be available for tailored guidance. Maaike is a nutrition & strength training coach that can help you feel comfortable and confident in your own body. Work on your health and lifestyle goals with tailored help in a safe environment. You can choose nutrition coaching, strength training coaching, or a combination of both.

Group strength training

If you are interested in gaining some muscle mass (a very good investment for long term health), consider joining the online strength training group program. We will train in cycles of 6 weeks. You can choose to train 2x/3x or 4x per week. Maaike will create the program, you show up for it in your local gym and get the muscle gains! Because you are in a group, you can share progress and success stories on the forum. Send videos of your training to Maaike (and the group) to receive form feedback.

Healthy Living for Desk Dwellers is an initiative run by just two people

We, Maaike and Oliver, are worried about the direction the web is currently going: enshittification all around, your data being owned and used by big companies without your consent, dark patterns everywhere, to name just a few things.

That's why Healthy Living for Desk Dwellers is different. We don't want to own your data, we don't want to mislead you, we want you to thrive and be healthy.

Our tech stack reflects our philosophy.

Our tech stack

We host this domain deskdwellers.town on TransIP (EU based).

Our web server and CMS are made in Django. Our CMS is Wagtail and it's self-hosted.

The forum will be self-hosted. We choose Discourse as our tooling for this.

Who are we?

Hi, we are Maaike & Oliver. We met at work in 2012 and have been a couple ever since. We both have work experience in IT. Oliver learned to program as a child, fell in love with it, and never looked back. He has over 20 years of experience working as a developer. He can do almost anything tech-related: frontend, backend, infra, security, design.

Maaike started working in IT "by accident" (that's the TL;DR of it). She became an experienced software tester and learned to program as well with Oliver's help. However, her heart is somewhere else. She enjoys healthy living and strength training a lot more than working in IT, and her passion is to help others feel fitter and healthier. She also wants to get more women into strength training, as that is a very good investment for their health (also for men, btw!).

We figured that: our combined IT + desk dweller life + healthy living experiences + worries about the current state of the web can be combined in one initiative! With Healthy Living for Desk Dwellers, we want to work on multiple things in one go:

We hope you already want to become a part of the community. Don't worry, it's free!

Become an Early Member