The following is a long drawn out tale about why I’m starting this blog. In short I am trying to improve my health and if I’m forced to write about it to the public at large (however boring that may be to you) then I can be held accountable (yes, its the auditor in me) if I don’t stick to my program.

I have been saying for some time now that I would like to improve my overall health and its time to finally do something about it. There is no one measure that can tell you whether you are healthy or not – but monitoring things such as blood pressure, cholesterol, body fat level, your diet and physical activity is a good place to start. Blood pressure (self-taken) and cholestoral levels (thanks Boots!) appear to be fine. Body fat level will hopefully take care of itself as part of my new outlook on life.

Thus, I’m left with the two things that I have direct control over: diet and physical activity.

Diet. Many of you know will know that going on a diet is the least of my concerns in life. I like my M&Ms and chips (or crisps for you UK folk) and darn it I’m not going to give them up. Of course a gal can’t live off M&Ms and chips alone (actually you probably could but I don’t think I’d admit it if I did!) so where I can, I am going to try and choose the healthier alternative. However, I must draw the line at eating a salad as a meal – salad is a side-dish thank you very much (to be ignored until you’ve stuffed yourself with your main meal such that you can legtimately state that you are too full to eat any more).

Physical Activity. It’s all about walking baby! Because I can’t seem to get off my sorry butt to go jogging (*gag*) or to the gym I have decided that walking is the key. I am now the proud owner of my third ever pedometer. Unfortunately I’ve managed to lose two already in my life time – one at the snowfields in Banff last year and another on a wonderful roller-coaster ride called X about four months ago. Here’s hoping it’ll be third time lucky! In case any of you are interested, and to have read this far you must be (that or you are so bored out of your brains that you have nothing better to do!) I have a Yamax Digi-Walker. It has a reputation for being the most accurate pedometer in the world. After all I wouldn’t want to cheat myself by getting one that overestimates my steps (… or do I? *grin*)

I don’t know who said it first but apparently walking at least 10,000 steps a day means you are on your way to achieving good health, 12,000 – 15,000 gets you into that weight loss category. So I said to myself, Grace, you will need to set yourself an achieveable goal otherwise I will see you giving up on this. 10,000 steps it is!

10,000 steps is a surprisingly tough target to hit. To give you some perspective here are the steps we took at a few theme parks in California that I managed to take note of before I lost my pedometer on X:

– 32,114 steps taken at Disneyland (8am-midnight)
– 16,011 steps taken at California Adventure Park (10am-6pm)
– 12,010 steps taken at Legoland (11am-5pm)

And as you can imagine we were hoofing it too!

The results so far …

I’ve been measuring my steps for about a week now (I’ll post the stats up tomorrow) and I’ve sort of been hovering around the 6,000-7,000 range. Apparently most people take, on average, only 3,000 steps in their every day life so I think I’m not doing too bad. I just have to make sure to make that extra effort to get it to 10,000.

On a side note: Right about the time I came to my senses a national campaign to get Britain healthier also began. It appeared to be something that was taken up by both ITV and BBC. BBC’s programme was aptly named: “Fat Nation – The Big Challenge”. The timing, I assure you, was purely coincidental.