Now Playing: Arthur on diet and exercise success.
Topic: Health & Science
Lifestyle changes driven originally by take the RealAge.com test are having an intitial dramatic impact. The incredible dietary change resulting from Lietta's research and committment to change has been augmented by my own promise to exercise frequently.
At work - where I'm authorized a morning and afternoon break, I stopped sitting and reading and committed to walking. 7 1/2 minutes from the office and 7/12 minutes back morning and afternoon. Add to that a 15 minute walk during my lunch hour and the results have been very gratifying and motivating.
Not only are my clothes already fitting better, but my internal sense of health, energy and mobility are readily apparent moment to moment.
Check out the following article from McClatchy Papers via the Olympian
[Excerpt]
Walk 10,000 steps a day and count on losing the weight
James A. Fussell
McClatchy Newspapers
Many of today's fitness regimens recommend walking 10,000 steps per day. There's only one problem: Almost nobody knows how far that is.
Do you burn 200 steps puttering around your house in the morning before work or 1,000? Does a walk around a city block knock off 5 percent of your daily goal or less than 1? Sure, you can guess or try to count all your steps, but that's inaccurate at best and annoying to say the least.
Recently, in the name of good health, we bought a pedometer and measured various daily activities step by step. Walking the dog around the block? Going to the grocery store? Two hours of clothes
shopping at a local mall?
We know how many steps it takes. But we didn't stop there. Just for fun, we set out to find how far we'd go if we walked 10,000 steps all at once.
The answer: much farther than we thought. With our 10,000th step, we wound up more than 5 1/2 miles away.
We can hear your incredulity now. But relax. You don't have to do it all at once. Remember, every step counts.
But why even bother trying to get 10,000 steps per day?
Two words: your health. And, yes, just by walking, you can make significant gains - or losses.
The idea of walking 10,000 steps per day is enjoying a renaissance in the United States. It originated in the 1970s with Japanese researcher Yoshiro Hatano, who advocated walking to help slim down his increasingly obese country.
Today, walking has gained popularity for many reasons. It's easy, there's no equipment to buy and, unlike jogging or other high-impact exercises, there's virtually no risk of injury.
And talk about health benefits. A University of Tennessee study published in the journal "Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise" revealed women who averaged more than 10,000 steps per day had 40 percent less body fat and waist and hip measurements that were more than 8 inches narrower than those who averaged fewer than 6,000 steps.
Then there's the Amish. Researchers measured the daily steps of 98 Amish adults and found that men took an average of 18,425 steps and women took 14,196. Compare that with 3,000 to 4,000 steps for the average American adult, and it is easy to see why only 4 percent of Amish adults are considered obese compared with 31 percent of the general American population.
And attention older Americans: If you walk long enough, you could even trigger biochemical changes that grow new neurons in your brain. A study by researchers at the University of Illinois says three hours of brisk walking per day can help reverse brain shrinkage.
The rest of the article can be found at McClatchy Papers via the Olympian
The other day, looking for a pair of work pants, I pulled out clothes from the back of my closet and found lots of pairs of pants. Only two of them still do not fit but all the others that did not fit before fit now.
Voila!
Eureka!
But my wife told me, "You can wear any of those pants for working in the yard now that they fit again.
But if you wear any of those to your real job in town, don't come home."
