Mental Meanderings

10,000 steps per day

Last week as a congratulations on joining Weight Watchers gift my mother gave me one of the Bonus Buddy WW Pedometers. I'd never used one before and it was interesting to find out the amount of walking I did in an average day, an average week.

If I didn't do the walk to school (a weekend) I'd be barely hitting 1,000 steps in the day. The walk to school is almost exactly 1 kilometer. 1 kilometer, with my stride of 55cm equals nearly 2,000 steps. You need to walk about 3 kilometers per day to hit the healthy level. This means that even if I wasn't trying to lose weight I should be averaging 6,000 steps per day to maintain health.

The good news is that on a good day I'd be hitting that by the walk to and from school twice each weekday. Of course, Tuesday mornings I don't walk to school. I do however go shopping which gets the points up about as much as walking to and from school (at least according to my measuring it today). Thursdays I occassionally don't walk to or from school and so far haven't done any other exercise to make up for it.

So, I've learnt that even to maintain a healthy standard of living I'm not moving around enough. Working on the computer is a huge inhibitor to getting the activity level up there.

Today, I was reading some of the fitness threads on the WW web site. Apparently for effective weight loss you should aim to get 10,000 steps in at least 5 days a week. So, this is this weeks goal. To get at least 10,000 steps into every day.

There is a great website that can hopefully help keep me motivated. A few other WW ladies have joined a group there and we are stepping together in a goal to reach 6.5 million steps. Being able to do this with others is defiantely great for the motivation.

I'll tell you what's not great for my motivation. My weigh in today. I GAINED WEIGHT!!! 82.2 KG starting weight, last week. This week I was up to 82.3 KG. I was wearing basically the same sort of clothing so it's not like any of that could have factored in. The good news is that there was a lot of things I hadn't been doing right. Many of those I'm going to start getting right every day.

First of course is the 10,000 steps per day. Second I'm going to get 2L of liquid into me. This one is a big step because I know that I'm always dehydrated. I never drink enough liquids. Some days I can go a whole day without remembering to have even 1 drink. Even sitting here right now I can feel the stress my body suffers through thirst.

I'm also going to be more careful about my sugar points. Last week I baked a cake. At 6 points per slice. The cake is high carb, high sugar and high G.I. So very bad for me. I shouldn't have done more than one slice in the week. I could have halved the slice portion and had two slices. Oh well, we live and learn.

Hopefully next week will be better. I'm definately getting more involved in making it happen this week. Last week I mostly just tracked my food. I didn't really think about exercise other than measuring what I was already doing. You always hear the ads on TV about finding 30. 30 minutes of exercise, take the stairs instead of the lift, get off the bus two stops early etc. I thought that doing 20 minutes to and 20 minutes back was me finding 30. I thought that meant I was doing plenty of exercise.

Anyway, going over the same old same old. lol Basically this week it's more water, more exercise, and less sugar. We'll see what those nasty scales have to say about that next week.

All the best to everyone, g'night and have a great day.