You will start to notice some change in Pedals and Pedometer Steps. I have not been able to get into bikes so far and to my surprise have developed a belated interest in light running. Just as I’ve decided to take a simpler way to ’step up’ I’ve simplified the theme and am in the process of blogging on my experiences with the Start Walking Get Running Lose Weight program.
Over the last few weeks I’ve made so many changes in many areas of my life it is taking a little time to integrate them all into a cohesive whole. I had just decided that I (and some other enthusiasts who’ve signed up!) would enter the City2Surf 14 km run in August 2011. I was anticipating that all or most of that ‘run’ would be walked. The group had asked me to put together a program for us (all walkers) to get up to speed-after all we have 12 months to prepare! I looked at some good YouTube videos I found (view on walking versus running including the one that decided me on trying these Dunlop Volleys – originally a tennis shoe) and Start Walking Get Running Lose Weight.
Pedals & Pedometer Steps was originally designed to be my transition blog from Walking to Lose Weight into a more intense exercise such as cycling. Somehow it never happened unless the cycle of a perfected routine counting pedometer steps and then something (injury/illness/away time) causing a disturbance to the routine and then building up to the perfected routine again.
My feeling now is that cycling, which I have never done before so it is a big change for me at my time of life, was too big a jump for my self view to accept.
The strategy to move on from simply walking for weight loss has always been one in which I introduced something new. The gym, dvds, workout sessions with friends have been a part of my agenda for years whenever I have been attending to my ‘weight’.
Walking itself and using a pedometer, counting pedometer steps and recording those steps and targets etc. was a new discipline and technique for me I started when I got serious with walking to lose weight as a lifestyle.
As I wrote in the last post this was one of the best things I’ve ever done!
The technique though for weight loss is a continual process of upgrading my exercise to maintain or increase my calorie expenditure. Over time the same level of exercise is accommodated by the body and calorie or kilojoules used decreases unless the exercise is intensified.
So as I continue on my weight loss journey I am preparing to include some running within my walking routine. Stay with me as I start preparing for this change.
Do you want to do your pedometer steps perfectly and assume that means successful weight loss?
There is a flaw in the logic of this approach because pedometer steps, when used correctly, do lead to weight loss, however, it requires ongoing commitment to the walking and activity, with eating moderation, for successful weight loss; any pressure to perform perfectly, whether this is a self expectation or of others, can take away some positive results.
Have you ever felt really excited about something, a new opportunity, a new weight loss diet, a new trainer? And to start it is just as magical as you hoped. You seem to be more capable of whatever it is you’re trying to achieve. Then something like a letdown happens and it seems it wasn’t magical and the results or gains you achieved went away and you think you imagined them in the first place.
I’m someone who has done that -a lot!
Now I know that was a wrong approach. My doubt was what killed the success.
This is similar to a new relationship which starts on a high-high hopes, high enthusiasm, high agreeability-and then becomes a work-in-progress!
Perfecting your pedometer steps process is not part of a walking to lose weight lifestyle. Using a pedometer is how to monitor action. The acceptance of your lifestyle changes become the main factor promoting success.
The advantage of a new system or approach to your fitness, health or weight loss is the change it brings into your attitude.
Pedometer steps encourages you to routinely exercise, makes it easy to remember to do it, and gives you motivating results, as you see the steps total rise and your body trim.
Enthusiasm is a great precursor of weight loss success. Enthusiasm for the process. Maintaining enthusiasm is a key to your success.
Tips for maintaining enthusiasm with Pedometer Steps:
Take heart from all the others who successfully and routinely use a pedometer as their focuser.
Work it! Use the system as best you can. Anytime you question it say to yourself:’it works-I know it works.’
Avoid discussing it with anyone who wants you to justify its ability to work for you. People who might say discouraging things are not the best people to share your enthusiasm with-they can take it away and it is the loss of enthusiasm that damages your weight loss not the system’s lack.
Find the ways you most enjoy using it. This is important because wearing a pedometer is a commitment, like a relationship and you have to put good feeling into it. The best way is to discover how you enjoy it and focus on making that even more fun or rewarding than ever before.
Share it with others-but not too much!
Learn that the responsibility is yours for enjoying the process. Don’t rely on others to make it special for you. Any interaction with others such as on the web is a weight loss tool. Use it when it is to your advantage but don’t if it takes you away from your goals.
Calories burned walking when you walk 100 kms adds up to a significant calorie deficit and weight loss! This video is indicative of a fun attitude from these women doing the Oxfam Trail Walking Sydney for 2010. This fundraising program operates in several Oxfam countries around the world and exemplifies an opportunity for serious walking to lose weight people to combine fun, team work and philanthropy.
Pedals and Pedometer Steps recommends including activities to enhance your pedometer steps counting and to keep your interest alive for your pedometer steps program. This example of a special event walk demonstrates the opportunity to build pedometer steps and a walking to lose weight lifestyle.
Why is this such a good idea?
Pedometer steps counting is a great example of the tried and true method to not only losing weight but keeping the weight off once the activity level developed through walking for weight loss is continued as a lifestyle.
To develop your exercise or activity into a lifestyle choice requires building interest and variety, and friendships or family relationships into it. The charity or fun walk is a perfect opportunity to do this. What is appealing to me in this video is the fun attitude the girls have taken when recording the promotion. This Sydney event is in August.
The event began in 1981 as a military exercise for the elite Queen’s Gurkha Signals Regiment in Hong Kong, and has since grown into one of the world’s leading sporting challenges. Oxfam TRAILWALKER is a global event, taking place annually in New Zealand, UK, Hong Kong and Japan.
Pedometer steps counting is truly a feature of the modern age. Walking itself as a leisure activity or necessary means of transport has been with us forever.
As with technology of other sorts the pedometer is a means of increasing our satisfaction with the ongoing process of walking for health (weight loss in particular) or fitness (training). Logging pedometer steps whether online or in a journal is part of the self interest movement of the last 20 years. We are more engaged with a process when it not only relates to, but includes, us. On the one hand it acknowledges that “we” make a difference, at least to our own results. On the other hand it streamlines the process to fit like a glove.
The weight loss dream has far too many components for easy assessment. We all know the nightmare of the scales and its lackluster performance as a guide. For some twenty years have gone by without the right combination of the stars and good fortune. Well the time is now. Never have we lived in such a choice- full, abundant society where many more suffer the diseases of excess than lack. Over whelm when it comes to finding the ‘right’ weight loss program is more likely to be the difficulty. Copying someone else’s successful process can have limited success for weight loss in the short term but for longer lifestyle choices then the changes must be one’s you choose.
The New Walker will be my new walking for weight loss e-letter. It is a combination of news and anecdote, thoughts, questions and answers and philosophy of life. Pedometer steps are my favorite way to get someone hooked on the new wonder ‘drug’ of exercise and activity as an anti-depressant, stress relief, mental and creative stimulant and mood enhancer. This is not to mention the other feel good benefits to the body and disposition.
One of my ‘new’ discoveries has been the benefits of walking after eating a meal. In the books of the 1800s and early 1900s, it was often mentioned that the family but particularly the head of the household would go for an evening walk after the meal. It aids digestion and generally makes me feel good by adding pedometer steps. If for some reason (!) you have eaten too much it also is one way of lessening any guilt and even reducing the effects of any excess calories.
The new walker does have most of the characteristics of the old except that the deliberate introduction of activity into a lifestyle previously devoid of much exercise from necessity, is different, because to exercise or not is now a choice.
Pedometer Steps and Walking to Lose Weight are my favorite blogs to write as the benefits of walking have helped me feel good every day. Am I claiming a happy ever after scenario? I am claiming the processes and tools to being happy every day in a healthy and loving work, home and family environment. The process requires implementing, adapting and using those tools with as much enthusiasm as possible. The New Walker is one way to get some input into your new lifestyle in a comfortable manner.
Please sign up for the FREE e-letter, The New Walker, in the column on the right if you’re open to making changes over time which will enhance your life, give you confidence and the desire to live your life lovingly,
For those new readers of this blog, let me introduce Pedals and Pedometer Steps, and me, Oni Raynbo. I enjoy writing about my experiences in walking to lose weight and counting pedometer steps. I also hope that the experience I have gained and the love of this life I have developed, is of help to others who have had similar issues with being active.
It took some time before I gradually understood the benefits of ongoing everyday activity. At this point a decision needed to be made. How could I have an active lifestyle rather than superimpose an activity i.e. exercise, over and above my ‘normal’ daily life. I had never thought of myself as active. On the other hand I wasn’t keen on seeing myself as inactiveeither, which was the accurate description.
It seemed to me from observing others, that the truly successful weight losers (who lived with the new body they’d discovered through exercise and weight loss i.e. did not return to their previous weight) continued the activity even after they had lost the weight and created a fabulous new life.
Hello…getting the message?
Decide now what changes you are prepared to make to get the body you want for a lifetime.
There is a totally different approach mentally and physically to a short term exercise and diet program compared to a lifestyle change.
Think of it this way. Do you remember studying for school exams? The last minute cram would get many of us through but did any of that stick with us?
I know when I went to my first job after I graduated, and for too long after, I still used the same approach. It bugged me that others did better with promotions etc. when I couldn’t see the difference between us. Eventually the concept of applying my talents daily to my work rather than as a special full-effort event began to take hold. Success was almost instant. It was something I knew how to do under certain circumstances but didn’t apply regularly, until that point.
That attitude change has benefitted me in many ways.
With weight loss I was also a cram for 3 days kind a’gal. Often 3 days was enough to achieve my desired results then.
Some 20 years later it wasn’t the same at all.
What had happened? Somehow weight loss had become less important or perhpaps lost amongst the many competing priorities and I had focused less on it when the focus was needed. This led to accumulated weight past earlier overweight experiences. Activity had decreased markedly without my having any real understanding of this. Starting an exercise program and ‘going for it’ was more likely to lead to overdoing it and extra fitness-related issues. It became a multi task event instead of a single focus. Too hard, too hard, too hard…
Again, over time, I realized that now I was not up for the gang busters approach to weight loss. And slower methods and results meant less impact upon my body and my lifestyle. Slowly the results and other benefits of including activity daily through using a pedometer steps approach accumulated to the point where even I could see it.
Change up your lifestyle with pedometer steps’ blog. It’ll help condense your understanding of how to be the active person who’s always been inside of you waiting for permission to come out.
Come back again for the continuing story at Pedals and Pedometer Steps. If you’ve enjoyed this article let me know in the comment section below.
Have you considered combining two of the world’s most popular forms of stress relief- walking and meditation?
As you’re reading Pedals and Pedometer Steps your main interest in walking may be for fitness and weight loss. Also as you’ve developed your regular walking you may well have noticed yourself feeling better generally.
If you are having difficulty fitting everything into your life and you meditate you can have the best of both world’s with a walking meditation. The video below demonstrates the sort of attention one needs to pay to details.
A major part of my pedometer steps progress has come from combining the activities necessary to get the steps’ target and also to act as a release valve for stress and frustration.
Walking in itself is a wonderful way to divert the mind of frustration and release a feeling of well being. Each step enables us to concentrate on where we are physically, noticing details of our surroundings in positive ways.
The major difference between a Pedometer Steps’ Meditation and the Zen version above is that you will have your pedometer strapped on and be walking with intention to exercise your body at the same time as you rest your mind.
On a road trip but still want to get those pedometer steps in? There are options you may not have considered before. Are you of the get there as fast as you can type? Look for a better way.
I am driving to a long distance destination and I want to put some pedometer steps in with the other aspects of driving and arriving safely. I took a short break without stopping long so I could arrive at the mid way point earlier- in time for an enjoyable walk around a park into the city center.
If walking at the end of the day was unlikely to be an option I would have gone for an early walk. Lots of activity in other ways may substitute for walking to lose weight. I find that walking in a new city means I understand a lot more about it than just driving.
Lots of other options exist if you look at pedometer steps seriously. When looking for a place to stay ask about the walking paths in the area and their destinations. Often it is possible to pick a better option just by asking the question. If others in your group aren’t aware of what you are looking for make the calls yourself.
Fill time outside of car sitting with action-generally your triip and holiday will be more fun because of the focus on enjoying yourself.
If this winter you have to find fun ways to make treadmill walking your way of counting pedometer steps then add some incentive by trying virtual walks. In a previous walking to lose weight post I talked about and then featured virtual walks, and had a lot of fun doing it. Part of the reward is learning about interesting things to do and plan trips or activites for the future. I know that eventually I will do that 6 day luxury walking tour of Rocamadour. I can see how walking about 25 kilometers daily will create the perfect environment for gourmet meals and wine at night! Although cruises and wine valley tours are wonderful, afterwards the participants tend to look puffed up instead of fit and glamerous.
This year my suggestion for designing a virtual walk is to do one million steps in 90 days. This averages at 11,111 pedometer steps daily for 90 days. Do you want to make your first million? This could do it for you.
Inside the home look at your own equipment such as a treadmill (or treadmill desk for in the office), exercise DVDs which contain aerobic or high calorie impact movements (preferably which show up as pedometer steps) or something like the Wii Fit which has a great running exercise where you can freestyle in front of your favourite TV program, all the while keeping track of distance and your faithful pedometer looks after the steps.
Anyone using the 10,000 or more steps a day target for weight loss should start thinking about how to keep going in winter, now.
I have noticed that the gym classes consist of not so many attendees during the colder months but those who are there are slim, and the same classes are full with half the class overweight in summer. Obvious lesson- to stay slim forever keep the exercise program going, once you’ve lost weight and during the less fun months.
Start Walking, Get Running, and Lose Weightis filled with common sense strategies for managing the food you eat and simple but very effective exercise plans that ease you into shape.
A Proven Walking or Running Plan For All Ages and Experience Levels...
