Have you ever had a really busy and physically active day only to find that it’s only amounted to 6,500 steps! Even though you wake up sore and tired the next day-it’s still 3,500 steps less than walking to lose weight requires.
Take yesterday for me. It started with early shopping, which is fun because with shopping list in hand, away I go and the coast is clear for some intensive trolley pushing and walking. So at the end of the grocery run, I had been away 50 minutes, driven to a new but more distant supermarket with wider aisles and fewer people, and almost no waiting at the checkout, lugged groceries inside and put them away, all for a total of 1630 steps!
If you remember the new definition of “moderate exercise” is 3,000 steps in 30 minutes. Of my 50 minutes only 30 would have been actually active so I was walking about half the pace I would have been doing if I was specifically walking to lose weight.
Then cooking a roast lunch for family, including clearing up a broken glass which had shattered and gone everywhere requiring me to drag out the vacuum as well as sweep and wash the kitchen floor. Crawled around on the floor to store various boxes under other boxes, and away from sight. Etc.
You get the idea, this was a day that didn’t stop yet still was less than the 10,000 steps recommended for weight loss. For most people who are not naturally active, a 3,000 step walk is required to bring their daily total up to 10,000 steps on otherwise normally active days.
Sometimes with the best of intentions a few days like this join up and you fear the downward spiral which can occur when circumstances combine with disappointment to result in weight gain. It hasn’t happened but the anticipation causes your motivation to slip. Without conscious thought at this point you may allow negativity to pull you off the walking to lose weight track.
Consciously acknowledging the potential problem allows your natural solution-finder to come up with options for getting through this.
Think of ways to support walking to lose weight in other ways:
1. With an active life our bodies require fuel to keep going effectively and this means balanced eating. Unexpected inactivity when we are used to eating to keep energised for a high energy daily routine can unbalance the calorie burning versus intake relationship. Remember to look to portion control and less calorie intake.
2. If the situation seems a little out of your control, look at your options: do what exercise you can, any sort of activity is better than none.
3. Keep your motivation high by accepting that ups and downs are normal not cause for alarm.
4. Think about your current priorities: are they in conflict? If so, what can you do to change that? This may mean a change of location such as doing walking on a treadmill at home, for instance.
5. Eat less!
6. Contribute in other ways to ongoing weight loss by finding a new article or website with alternative weight loss suggestions, talk to friends for encouragement, clear out an area for storing the various accessories to a walking to lose weight lifestyle, such as high calorie burn walking dvds and weights, exercise mat, etc. In other words use this time when you are focussed mentally on weight loss to prepare for an improved or even accelerated experience for when you get a chance to jump back into it full time.
