The person responsible for mailing out pedometers & setting up progress blogs on the intranet site got my blog set up, so I wrote my first entry. A lot of it repeats info I’ve given here already, but oh well. Here’s what it says:
Monday, May 8: Waiting for the pedometer
Okay, my blog’s up & running!
First, a big thanks to [name deleted for privacy], who’s been doing all the work mailing out the pedometers & setting up these blogs for us. It’s not her fault my pedometer’s not here yet: it’s mine for having not paid attention, & so not noticing until late that that this was going on, so I didn’t sign up until Wednesday. But with the speed a couple of my coworkers received their pedometers, I’m guessing mine might show up in the mail when I get home tonight.
A little part of me sat here last Wednesday whining, No fair! why can’t my baseline be from two weeks ago instead of now?!!! That’s because two weeks before was when I started riding my bike to & from work at least two days of the week — four miles either way. Thanks to the step conversions, I think I’m going to have some pretty high step counts for my baseline, not only for the biking, but also for a mainstay of my exercise program that’s been going on since late December: plugging myself into my iPod & dancing to whatever’s on my playlist for the day. I seldom fail to work up a sweat. On days I don’t bike or take the car (the car is only one or two days a week), I take the bus, using a bus stop some 15 minutes’ walk from home. And I do some weights too.
I’ve been on this health track since late December as one of my responses to my mother’s death in late November from complications of diabetes. I myself am prediabetic, diagnosed as such about five years ago, but sad to say it took my mother’s death to shake me out of my torpor about doing anything real about it. Now, nothing can shake me back into that torpor. Since end of December, I’ve bought a glucometer (on my own dime), changed my dietary habits, and begun to consistently get exercise.
And I’m seeing results: thanks to the dietary changes (lowered carbs from the low to medium end of the glycemic index, smaller & more frequent meals, lots of vegetables, minimal packaged/processed foods & absolutely no vending machines, mostly organic) I no longer have problems with acid reflux, & I feel much more energetic. Thanks to consistent exercise, I’ve taken off 10 pounds, but I’m pretty sure I’ve taken off even more in fat, & replaced some of it with muscle: my clothes fit a little more loosely, & I had to make a new notch in my belt because it was too loose too. My face is a bit thinner too, & my leg muscles & glutes (butt) especially are firmer & more muscled.
So this program fits right in with my goals for health anyway.
I’m not complaining any more about what my baseline will be, because it’s not a matter of what goodies I might get; it’s a matter of seeing continued improvement to my health & fitness. I’m just glad that other people will be doing this too, & I hope seeing similar really good results.
But I do want to run some estimates of what my baseline might be.
Step conversions for things I do:
- Dancing: 131 steps per minute of dancing. So if I dance for 30 minutes, which is pretty typical for me, that’s 3,930 steps.
- Biking: this depends on the speed. I figure that however hard I feel I’m working, I’m going maybe 10 mph (“easy”), which converts to 133 steps per minute of biking. It takes me about 35 minutes either way, for a total of 70 minutes biking each day I ride: 9,310 steps.
- Hiking: I haven’t done any of that yet this summer, but it’ll be 232 steps per minute of hiking if I’m carrying a load of 21 to 42 pounds; 217 if I’m carrying 10 to 20 pounds. Gee, guess I ought to weigh my daypack even for a simple day hike, like our walk in the Ft. Rich woods Saturday before last, I may have been carrying that much in food & water.
So with just dancing & biking from last week, that would come up to about 19,650 steps in the week for about five half-hour sessions of dancing; 18,620 for the biking to/from work on two different days; call it another 5,320 or so for the biking I did on Saturday downtown & along the coastal trail. That’s 43,590 steps for the week. Divide that by 7: I’m at 6,227 & some change as a daily average — & that doesn’t even include the actual walking I did.
I think I’ll have a fairly high baseline. If the goal is to get up to 10,000 steps per day by the end of the program — gee, I just have to do a little more.
Will see how my estimates match up with reality, once the pedometer comes along.
And in hopes this cold I came down with over the weekend goes away, because with it I don’t feel much like biking four miles to work!
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