Fitness Friday| Getting exercise without feeling like you're working out

Is it Friday already?  I'm just blown away by how quickly the week has gone by.  Since last week, we talked about a 7 day "Love Yourself Challenge" How did that go for you?  The difference it made for me this past week was really evident.  I've increased my water intake back to acceptable levels. I enjoyed yummy salads all week as a way of feeding my body and skin. After realizing that too much time passed since being consistent with my lash treatment, I started doing that again.  On top of that, I took time in the mornings to apply a little bit of makeup & got back on the habit of taking fermented cod liver oil before heading off to work.  

Things are great!  Obviously, since this challenge worked so well for me, I'm ready to continue.  I'd love to see how far I can take it.  The only area where I didn't get the results I wanted was in my daily workouts.   My schedule has been beyond hectic lately which made getting to the gym a bit of a struggle.  Instead of feeling bad about myself, I decided to focus on what I could do to within my circumstances.  So I got a Fitbit Activity Tracker! This thing is pretty awesome. It tracks all of my activity including calories burned, number of steps taken, distance walked and stairs climbed.

Just having that with me has caused me to walk much more than usual.  For example, this morning I didn't do any "workouts" but as I look down to check my activity, the Fitbit says that I've already walked 1.2 miles!  So now I'll set a goal for myself to walk 5 miles and see how I can fit additional steps into my day.  For example, on Monday I had an all day meeting.  We started at 9:00 am and ended after 7:00 pm for dinner.  Normally, I would sit for the entire day. But a coworker, who also had his Fitbit, showed me how well he was doing and I thought to myself, "I can do that too!"  Long story short, before 12:00 pm, I already clocked in over 2.5 miles.  Every opportunity I had, I took steps and kept moving. When I was waiting for copies, I walked around.  During bathroom breaks, I walked the parking lot.  Each step added up.  Best of all it made me more conscious of my movement which caused me to do more without having to get on a treadmill.

This reminds me of a time when I was listening to an author discussing her book on the subconscious mind.  She shared a story of a study conducted using  housekeepers as the subject.  The hotel housekeepers were asked how many calories did they think they burned doing their job. The answers were provided to the people in charge of the study.  Those leading the study then provided them the actual numbers of how many calories they burned on an average work day.  The housekeepers were then asked to keep doing their work as they normally would for the remainder of the study.  Guess what happened.  A large percentage of them actually lost weight over the next several weeks.  Why?  The hypothesis was that once they had awareness to how much physical activity was taking place, the housekeepers viewed what they were doing, not as a job, but as workout, and lost weight as a result.  I'm hoping this Fitbit will have a similar effect as I now have awareness of how much I walked today and will focus on doing more.

If you would have asked me on Monday how many miles I walked (pre Fitbit), I would have said, "Miles?" I've been in a meeting all day, there was no time for exercise."  But because my awareness was higher, I made sure to maximize every opportunity to keep moving.


Want more inspiration? Be sure to check out other Fitness Friday posts from KLP of Saving our Strands, Ebony of Longing for Length and Britt of Oneand20.