A Lot to Lose

Time for a confession. I have a problem, a common problem that many people have: I'm too heavy. It has various reasons, but it really comes down to the old culprits of too much food and too little exercise. When I stepped on the scales recently out of curiosity - it's not a regular habit at all - I was horrified. Six months in the land of Supersize has indeed done a number on me.

So when I heard about a group of writers getting together to spur each other on in the health department, I jumped in. I only know a few of them so far. The idea is that the most successful "loser" each week is to get linkage and cheers from the rest. Sounds good, yeah? This week's winner was K. Ann Seeton and you can find her blog at Quicksilver to Gold.

I'm not going to win this week. I'm probably not even going to register any progress, because I'm still away from home and any hope of setting up regular habits.

However, I did buy a treadmill, and it's waiting for me when I get back. I plan to build up to walking all day with an adapted high desk. It'll be great for my ongoing back problems - walking has always done a load of good right there - it's healthier than sitting and a way to get that exercise in even if I'm stuck in front of the computer for 14 hours a day at times. (Whether I'll walk all 14 hours is another question entirely!)

I've heard about treadmill-deskers mapping their virtual progress cross-country. That sounds like a really cool idea so maybe I'll track myself from Cape Reinga to Bluff. In hunting around for webapps to help with this, it seems most of them exist to track actual routes and calculate distances, not take input distances and calculate a location along a route. I may have to resort to drawing on a paper map!

I hear great health benefits are possible even at a slow speed, and that I could log 5 miles / nearly 10 km per day with a gentle pace. We'll soon see about all that, I guess...Interesting times are definitely ahead.