Taking the Stairs

It was raining outside last week.  My walking partner & I still wanted to do something, so we did some indoor walking at work.  We also did some stair walking, which really had me gasping for breath.  This is really a good way to increase the metabolism.  The physiotherapist I work with, Steve Colangelo, recommends interval training to burn fat, such as walking for two minutes, running for one.  Going up the stairs was a good alternate to running indoors at work, which would have security running to catch us!  As the weather is getting colder & wetter, doing the stairs will be a regular activity for us. 

    I don’t want to bore people with continuous posts about what we ate or that we walked the dog again, so I am not going to post all of the daily mundane details.

    But you may wonder what are we doing to try to lose weight?  In the past, I have weighed & measured my food on diet plans, which is hard to apply to the real world.  So instead the plan is to simply eating less calories, drink more water and do more activity (starting with increasing amounts of walking).  For example, last night we went to a restaurant to eat, and instead of my typical chicken dinner with fries, a buttered roll and an order of perogies to share, I had chicken soup and a salad.  I brought the chicken and roll from the meal home with me to have for lunch today. 

    We took the plastic garbage from our meal home with us.  Paul thinks it is weird to collect all of the non-compostable, non-recyclable trash from our meal and take it home.  It is odd, but seeing how much trash we produce is already quite eye-opening. 

    I did find a walking partner at work today, and we went for a good walk before lunch, to boost our metabolism while digesting our food.  It was nice to get outside! 

Paul and I weighed and measured ourselves last night.  The numbers are just too embarrassing to post at this time. 

One of our first sub-challenges is to increase our activity level, and to do so in a green way, without using energy other than that from our bodies.  This includes:

·        not driving to a gym to exercise on electric equipment that does not go anywhere. 

·        not using an elevator or escalator, or using a push button door opener. 

·        using our bodies for transportation when possible. 

I once went to a presentation by a chiropractor (can't recall her name all these years later) who said people often get discouraged because they do not have a big block of time to commit to exercising.  She said she encourages people to spread their exercise throughout the day, even in as small of blocks as 5 minutes.  Something is better than nothing.

So I am going to aim to do less reading and TV watching and substitute adding some activity minutes to my day this coming week.