Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Too early to start talking resolutions?

I know it's just December 2, but we can start looking at some changes to be made during the new year. I think I've been doing a pretty good job staying active and maintaining my body, but I could always do better.

That being said, I don't want to lay everything out in this post, I want to spread things out a bit and not limit myself to my train of thought this morning. On top of that, I know I'll find some interesting tidbits on maintaining and improving yourself that I'll want to share.

The first resolution has to do with encouraging an active lifestyle for those who work at a desk all day. It's sort of a two part resolution that will not only help us get on our feet just a little bit more each day (which will add up over the course of a year), but will help to keep my body functioning at it's peak.

Active Resolution #1:
I will never use the restroom closest to my office while I am at work again. As part of this resolution, I will also strive to drink more than 5 cups of water at work each day. These two parts will not only force me to use the restroom more often, but will mean I walk 3 flights of stairs down and 3 flights of stairs back up each time I need to go to the next closest restroom.

I probably go about 3-4 times a day now, so we're looking at a possible increase to 5 trips while adding 6 flights (3 up, 3 down) of stairs a trip. Using this resolution through just 100 work days will add 3000 flights of stairs to my energy usage. If I assume a bare minimum of 15 calories burned per 3 flights of stairs, I'm looking at an additional 45000 calories burned over 100 days that I previously did not. There are a number of opinions here, but presumably it will take a 3500 calorie deficit to lose a pound. These numbers will never turn out exactly, but that means that 12 lbs. of calories can be burned by just adding this small task to my day.

I don't exactly believe calorie-counting can be an exact science (since the body can be pretty stubborn concerning weight loss/gain), but the bottom line is that I will definitely add steps to my day and will most likely expend more energy doing so.

So there you have it, resolution #1.