Walk on….

Last month, while lying on my Couch of Pain, I read The Best Life Diet by Bob Greene. It has made me think a lot about my lifestyle and eating habits and whatnot over the past couple of weeks. The basic premise behind the book is that in order to lose weight and have that ever-elusive healthy lifestyle, you need to start by building yourself a foundation of healthy habits and work from there. It’s a process, and one that you’ll continue for the rest of your life.

That is something I can get behind 100%.

There are several things that I don’t agree with in the book. I don’t like how he continually hocks the “best life seal of approval” on certain foods and brands. But I’m taking the good stuff and ignoring the salesmanship. I’m not going to eat his favored brand of yogurt, no matter how awesome he tells me it is. On every other page. But I think overall it’s a great starting point. And after my injury and a month of almost complete inactivity, that’s what I need right now.

I’m not going to do a complete overhaul or anything like that. I know myself well enough to know that would be setting myself up for failure. What I am going to do is work on habit building.

Last week I did a trial run to see where I am, as regards to moving my butt. I got a pedometer and tracked my steps every day. I wanted to get an average so I could have a starting point and work up from there. I found that through my daily activities I can get around 5,000 steps a day. My knee is mostly healed up at this point, but I’ve found that right now if I get much over 7,000 steps a day, I’m in for some pain. So my goal this month is to steadily increase my steps each week and  eventually end up around the 8,000-10,000 a day step range at the end of November. I also want to be doing regular cardio workouts of some sort by then. I’m shooting for 90 minutes a week by the last week.

My ghost rug is like totally shocked at how many steps I got one day last week.

It doesn’t sound like much. I have to try hard not to think of the days when I was working and got at least 25,000 steps a day. I’m not going to dwell on the things I used to be able to do easily, like climbing stairs. I’m going to start where I am right now and appreciate the fact that I can climb stairs at all without using crutches or gripping the rails for dear life. It will get easier. It just takes practice.