Getting More Exercise 1: Fitting it into your Life

If you could make one change to lose weight, lower cholesterol, improve blood pressure, and prevent diabetes, would you do it? After all, heart disease and diabetes are two leading causes of death in America, and millions are on medications to manage these conditions. So what is this cure?

The answer isn’t an expensive drug but exercise.

That’s right. Exercise can accomplish all of the above, plus build muscle and tone your body, increase blood flow to your brain, strengthen your heart, and sometimes improve sleep quality and relieve stress. Despite this, most of us don’t get the recommended 30-60 minutes of low to moderate exercise 5 or more days per week.

If that sounds daunting, don’t feel intimidated. Chances are you already achieve some of that, and incremental increases towards the minimum have a positive cumulative effect. An extra 5 minutes per day adds up to an additional 30 hours of exercise each year. Think of the benefits over your lifetime!

Aim to get as close to the recommendations, and it’s OK to start slow and build up. It may take awhile to adjust to a new program, but you’ll start finding ways to add in ten minutes here or there.

Part one of this series focuses on ways to fit exercise into your daily life. Part two helps you keep it in your life with tips on making it happen consistently.

MAKE THE TIME

Ideally you’d be able to carve out a daily chunk of time for physical activity. Even if this is not feasible on a daily basis, a couple times a week still brings benefits!

Also, studies have shown that you get equivalent benefits from breaking exercise into smaller chunks – two 15-minute walks are just as effective as one 30-minute walk. Note this means you don’t have to head to the gym for an hour every day to get adequate exercise. In the effort for increased exercise, consistency is key. To find time, ask yourself:

-Where can I find 10-15 minutes daily?

-Do I have more flexibility in the mornings, daytime, or evenings?

-Are there 1-2 days during the week when my schedule is less full? How busy are my weekends? Can I commit to 30 minutes on these days?

-Are there natural breaks that already occur during the day? Lunch is a perfect example, but get creative! Maybe you have a solid morning routine at work and can build in a 15-minute break between tasks.

Once you’ve established a good time think through how you will fill it. Will you be at the gym, on a walk around the block, using your elliptical machine at home? Do you need special equipment or clothing, or to new carpool arrangements? The more you think through the specifics the better prepared you are to carry out your plan.

It may be that some days you manage half an hour of walking and household chores, punctuated by 1-2 days of focused exercise efforts. Others choose to start off the day with a 30-minute walk. Either way, the key is to just start.

HARNESS THE POWER OF MULTITASKING

Short of setting aside time solely devoted to exercise, some prefer to multitask their exercise. For example:

-Exercise while watching TV. This could mean using the bike while watching the news, or some free weights and crunches during commercials of your favorite show.

-Watching a sporting event? Climb up and down the bleachers a couple times during the course of a game. Stand up every time you cheer. Pace the length of a soccer field while watching your child play.

We all have tight schedules and a long list of obligations. Combining exercise with a regular item on your list increases your success in incorporating it into your life.

GET CREATIVE

We all have multiple demands on us, and sometimes exercise can help you manage those demands. Investigate all areas of your life to see if exercise can be part of the solution.

-Find stress building at work as the morning wears on? Step out for a brisk 10 minute stroll to remove yourself from the stress and clear your head.

-On that note, 5 minutes of stretching mid-afternoon fights off drowsiness and refocuses your efforts. After all, a 10-minute bout of productivity can accomplish more than half an hour of half-hearted attempts.

-To mix up the weekend routine suggest a hike with friends instead of the standard “catch up over a meal,” and save money to boot! Or go out dancing, try out the new ice skating rink, etc.

-If the nighttime munchies hit after dinner, take a 20-minute stroll immediately following the meal. Exercise is a moderate appetite suppressant, and staying busy distracts from cravings.

-If you have problems sleeping try ten minutes of relaxing yoga stretches before you sleep.

Is there another area of your life that you’ve wanted to work on? See if you can’t kill two birds with one stone!

ALL THE SMALL DETAILS

Make your daily routine less sedentary. Take the stairs, park further away in the parking lot, use the furthest bathroom from your office. Wear a pedometer to track your efforts and experiment with new ways to fit in more steps. Housework and chores count too. Everything from gardening to washing windows gets you moving and active, so schedule that in regularly.

Finally, take a look what you’re already doing. Is there is a way to increase the activity level further? Use a push lawn mower or forego golf carts in favor of walking. Love to play fetch with your dog? Think about all that time you spend standing around – do squats or bench push ups while she chases, or start her off with a jog around the park, she’ll still get to run but you join in on the action.

Making time for exercise is less difficult than you think. Use any combination of the techniques above, and don’t be afraid to experiment to find the solution that works for you!

In favor of an integrated approach to wellness

In my previous job as a health coach, we were instructed to focus solely on the physical aspects of health and wellness – weight management, improving nutrition, increasing physical activity, stress management [but only the physical aspects like stress management techniques], and smoking cessation. The reason was that staff members simply weren’t trained to deal with the emotional aspects.

While I can’t argue with the rationale behind the policy, it seems a false dichotomy at best. The physical and emotional are intertwined in intricate and subtle ways, and each manifests itself in surprising and unexpected areas of life. A classic example might be emotional eating, where the seeming physical problem of eating too many sweets or junk food stems from a deeper emotional concern. The act of eating is a symptom, a coping mechanism, a red flag. If your attempted solutions do not address the underlying concern of emotional eating, then your efforts will only be partially successful, at best.

Or for those wracked with insomnia and other anxieties around falling asleep and staying asleep, changes to the physical environment can do much to increase relaxation and sleepiness, such as ensuring proper bed temperature and mattress firmness. Altering eating habits and exercise patterns can have beneficial impact on sleep, as well. Thus a seeming emotional issue – anxiety, frustration over low sleep quality, and the corresponding irritability, can also be traced to physical factors.

Thus to treat one without the other is to ignore a powerful set of influences on total health and individual well being. The world moves in vast complex ways, and so too do our daily lives. If we accept that there is a mind-body connection, it follows that this connection should permeate multiple levels of our lives, allowing us to move in vast complex ways as well.

Photography Friday: Upcycling

Eek! I'm late! Sorry about that. This was written and ready to go Friday but I've had no internet access until now. Without further ado ...

























Upcycling: (verb) reusing old fabrics in new projects, thereby giving them a new use. For example, in the photo above I took an ill-fitting duvet cover and transformed part of it into a skirt [with enough leftover for PJ pants, cloth napkins for my mom, and possibly the start of yet another quilt]. The mittens below are another example:

Take a wool sweater accidentally shrunken in the washing machine, trace around your hands, stitch and turn inside out to create mittens.

Given the durability of fabric and recent innovations in synthetic blends most fabrics will not wear out before we tire of them, whether it is clothing, bedding, tablecloths, etc. By upcycling, we keep perfectly usable goods from landfills and stretch our creativity in finding new uses for materials.

Good for the environment, good for stimulating creativity and resourcefulness, good for an evening's entertainment. A second chance, a new lease on life for something whose time has not physically come, merely that we have grown tired of it and are forever wanting something new [and yes, I'm quite guilty of that!]

If we reused everything once, we’d only consume half as much.

The epic battle: TV vs. hobbies

My friends used to think it was quirky but “very Jessica” that I didn’t own a TV in my apartment. I never had one in my dorm room in college, and couldn't squeeze one into my small city apartment later on, so I've grown accustomed to life without sitcoms and evening dramas [I suppose if I was really determined I could watch shows on the internet, but by now I've completely lost track of the new shows].

Now that I’ve moved home with my parents TV has started to become part of my nighttime routine, especially since my parents are both addicted to a nightly Chinese-language soap opera.

I have newfound appreciation for the amount of time TV can potentially consume. Before my days fell into the rhythm of:

7-9:30 run or craft, breakfast, shower

10-6 work

7-10:30 dinner, call boyfriend, hobbies, household chores, miscellaneous things that need to be taken care of

With the reappearance of television in the landscape I accomplish much less in the evenings. Not that accomplishment for the sake of productivity was ever the ultimate goal, but I enjoy my hobbies. I love making things or writing to friends or reading a good book. And while television would seem a sad excuse not to do the things I enjoy, it is true that actively overcoming the inertia of constant, passive entertainment can take far longer than I’d care to admit. I know I’m not alone in this.

I'm not against television per say, but I definitely need to find ways to work around it's constant draw. I have some projects that require handwork that can be completed in front of the TV so that's one temporary solution, but I'd like to find a more permanent one that limits the total hours I watch. When I head to school in the fall I won't be furnishing my place with a TV, but I know that eventually I may get one, so it's handy to start thinking up solutions now.

Photography Friday

Strawberry shortcake with homemade whipped cream and biscuits. June 2008.

Ah, dessert. As much as I am all about healthy eating, I confess that I love dessert. And why not? One of the keys to moderation is the occasional indulgence. Note: occasional, and reasonable. Not necessarily a 64 oz. Supergulp slurpee [nothing against slurpees, I had my share in my youth, usually on the 3 hour road trip to and from my grandparent's house], but a little mindful indulgence in foods you truly enjoy, preferably of good quality [and increased enjoyment]. And when they are occasional and reasonably portioned they become a special treat, which is the meaning of indulgence anyways.

So when did our feelings towards desserts change? These days I feel it is less about indulgence than about guilty pleasure, that we are less mindful of seasonal and regional variations, and that quantity has replaced quality. We suck down the daily caramel frappuccino for the sugar and caffeine jolt to start our mornings, more hooked on the habit than relishing the morning indulgence. And by frittering away our calories with high fructose corn syrup "breakfast" substitutes or trans fat laden munchies that we mindlessly down between meals, there is no room at the end of the day for a small sweet to end off the meal, one of many "traditional" desserts built upon a base of milk, flour, eggs, sugar and butter - ingredients you can prnounce in quantities that can be adjusted to suit individual tastes.

No, I'm not saying that we should go out and indulge every night. Again, that runs counter to the meaning of indulgence. Rather, if we took away the mindless eating or overly sweetened/fatty meal substitutes we've come to rely on, and brought back regular, balanced meals, there might be room for a bit of a treat at the end of the day. I'm not one for total deprivation, but when you indulge yourself, make it count.

I love biking. I really do. Some times I forget just how much I love it, like this morning as I was dithering over breakfast and the newspaper, trying to talk myself into heading out for a short ride while my lazy body wanted to go back to sleep. Luckily my brother came down and asked if I’d been out for a run, which was enough to shame me into going for a short ride as planned.

As I was biking under tall trees and past beautiful homes [this area is really charming to bike through], I was reminded of all the times in the past few years I’ve wanted to bike, but had no opportunity to do so. These past few years running has been my exercise of choice, in part because it requires so little equipment and can occur almost anywhere. Biking and rollerblading required gear I couldn’t store, swimming and dance or yoga, facilities I didn’t have ready access to. In college I had readily replaced team sports like badminton and cross country with dance classes, swimming, yoga and the occasional weights, but once thrown out into the working world I was back to a pair of running shoes and all the dirt paths the park had to offer.

This summer, though, reunited with my bike, rollerblades, and a community swimming pool within striking distance, I think I'll give my knees a break and take advantage of other forms of exercise that I love. Running is my default, my backup, my longstanding partner in the quest for lifelong exercise and well being. But even best friends occasionally need a break from each other, and because cross training strengthens your body by challenging it in new ways, this long-term relationship can only improve with a bit of absence.

The Value of Time Off

For the third time in my adult life, I find myself unemployed. Unlike the previous two times where I was between jobs and searching frantically, this time unemployment [or “funemployment,” as my friend dubs it] is a deliberate move – two months of freedom before I go back to school, two months to do whatever I want.

Of course, I won’t be doing whatever I want. I plan to use this time as investment in the future, both towards grad school and beyond. On the surface it seems rather silly, giving up a steady paycheck for some nebulous “prepping for school,” and I’ve had many moments where I question the logic of this decision. Given my other two stints of funemployment in the 3 years since graduating college, it almost feels excessive to take yet another break for self-discovery and inquiry into the workings of the world.

Certainly a short break, say one or two weeks, would seem reasonable. Yet despite the fact that I am entering a professional program, I’m not exactly clear on my career goals once I leave school, which I feel is both foolish and to be expected. I care passionately about the field and about learning additional theories and tools to further my career. While I have [finally!] narrowed my interests down to a couple fields [thanks, in part, to the questioning that accompanied those previous two periods of funemployment], I’ve defined those fields in such a way that they’re really just broad generalizations that encompass many areas – “wellness,” for example, could mean nutrition or fitness or emotional well being or neighborhoods or community strengthening or the environment.

So part of my reason for taking this time off is to further narrow down my interests. Another reason is to explore the academic literature, popular literature, current fields and their potential areas of growth. Investigate the resources available to me, both in school and in the surrounding community: opportunities to get involved, innovative community or research projects, mentors, worthwhile classes and student organizations. Get a leg up on coursework and build a solid foundation, so that I will actually have time to take advantage of the resources I discover, because the coursework will be ever-so-slightly less challenging.

By nature I am drawn to the interdisciplinary and the collaborative, and I plan to take courses in other schools. As with undergrad I anticipate my classes will be eclectic at best, but I hope for a “focused eclectic” selection this time around. Unfortunately we are all of limited time and means in this world, and I need to focus in on my strongest interests and most realistic choices. Yes, the arts and the power of creativity in strengthening emotional and even physical well being fascinate me, but in all likelihood that will remain a side interest or hobby rather than the main focus of my career, and I must choose accordingly. Yes, I am interested in adolescents and women, but perhaps I can learn enough about these populations on the job and in my own time that I do not need coursework on them [or perhaps one course will be enough], so that I can instead gain other technical or academic skills to better support the work that I do in those populations.

Really, I only have two years in school, and I intend to make the most of them. The plan is to hit the ground running, and use these two months to build a foundation for the two years to come. That sort of investment is worth more than the additional paychecks [which themselves would hemorrhage rent, transportation, food and utilities …] By writing this out I’m giving myself a visual reminder to rein in the self-doubts and provide an agenda for my free time. It may not fall under conventional wisdom, but if I stick to the agenda I think it will be more than worthwhile.