Starling Fitness: Daily writings on Fitness, Diet, and Health

The following article has the lofty goal of convincing you that a pedometer can be as fun as a video game:

• Steps Across America – How To Make Your Pedometer As Fun As A Video Game

Here is their list of ways to make walking with a pedometer fun:

• For the person who likes to compete: Keep track of the number of steps you walk every day. Strive to beat that number on a daily basis. If you’re extremely competitive, challenge your children and spouse to a Step Off.

• For the person with chameleon-like tendencies: Put a series of numbers ranging from 8,500 to 14,000 in a hat. Each morning, pull a new number and commit to walking that many steps before you go to bed that evening.

• For the person who can’t seem to get over the past: Walk one thousand extra steps a day for all of those ex-boyfriends and girlfriends you can’t seem to get over. After walking for half the day, you’ll be amazed at how quickly you’ll be over what’s-his-name.

• For the person who likes to show off: Purchase pedometers in several different colors and match them to your purse, sunglasses, and designer trainers.

• For the person who collects too much stuff: Clip on your pedometer and count your steps as you collect all of the unused things gathering dust around your home. Walk each item to the local Goodwill one at a time.

I don’t know about you, but none of these ideas really make me feel like they would make walking with a pedometer as fun as being in a video game. Here are my ideas to boost the fun in your walking.

• Walk Across Your State: Get a large map for your wall and some pushpins. Measure the miles from one end of the state to the other. Each day, move your pushpin a little further across your state based on the miles you walked on your pedometer. After you conquer your state, get a map of your country.

• Create A Wall Chart For Your Mileage: Just like the telethons who mark how much money they’ve earned, set a goal for mileage and each day, fill in the chart with the mileage you walked. When the chart is full, reward yourself.

• Use Time As Your Goal: Give yourself a limited amount of time to exercise every day and try to earn more miles within that time frame each week.

Video games are fun because there are clear goals to accomplish and you KNOW when you’ve achieved them. With a walking or running exercise regime, it’s hard to tell if you’re successful if you don’t set goals. The goals for video games are artificial, but that doesn’t make the game less fun. The same can be true for walking or running. Set some artificial goals, whether it’s walking across your state or increasing your distance, you will know when you’ve beat the game when you achieve them.

This postcard from PostSecret is for you. There is someone out there who is kicking themselves right now because they never told you how beautiful you are. They wish they had just had the guts to tell you how much they enjoyed the moment when you walked into the door every day. No matter who you are, there was someone in your past who felt like this about you and wasn’t brave enough to tell you.

Think about that next time you feel like skipping your workout or bingeing.

PostSecret‘s beneficiary is the National Hopeline Network. It is a 24-hour hotline (1 (800) SUICIDE) for anyone who is thinking about suicide or knows someone who is considering it.

Heather Armstrong, Dooce, has given us a precise example of how NOT to deal with plumbing problems.

• dooce: How to medicate with legal substances

She created this concoction with the sympathy cookies that were brought to her since she has been dealing with a blockage in her sewer lines.

I remember when we had very similar problems in the house that we currently live. I wrote this entry, Raw Sewage, during that time. That’s how I dealt with the situation without overeating. I have found that writing has been the only thing to keep me from dealing with problems with food.

There was a time when I felt like this, but I have been beating myself up lately. I need to get to that place emotionally again. It was the only time I ever felt healthy.

I didn’t know that it was possible to lose that feeling. I guess I figured that if I felt happy with who I am that I would feel like that for the rest of my life. I had no idea that I would have to keep working on feeling good about myself. It’s a continual process.

PostSecret‘s beneficiary is the National Hopeline Network. It is a 24-hour hotline (1 (800) SUICIDE) for anyone who is thinking about suicide or knows someone who is considering it.

While driving to California, Mike and I met up with the most amazing couple who are riding their bikes across the world, Rhona Quarm and Gavin McDonald.

• Starling Travel » Perth 2 Perth 2 Perth

Check out what I wrote about our encounter with them and their website:

• Perth2Perth.org – Rhona and Gavin cycle 18000 miles around the world

Both of them were physically fit before starting the trip, but after ten months of riding, they are built of lean muscle and strength.

Next time you think about skipping your workout, remember Rhona and Gavin travelling the roads of India, Australia and the United States. The thought of them will keep your legs going.

As of 04-10-2006, there are 20,590 photos tagged with the word running. A lot of them are of race participants and children, but some of them are surpisingly inspiring.

• Flickr: Photos tagged with running

Here is a slideshow of my favorites:

I’ve been thinking a lot about keeping my mind fresh and active and I’ve found that exercise is one of those things that keep me “bubbly.” It looks like Kathy Sierra has noticed the same:

• Creating Passionate Users: Animals love exercise… why don’t we?

Her weblog concentrates on teaching me how to write a weblog that people will love. What it has to do with exercise, I don’t know, but this article was very helpful to me.

Want to be a little smarter? Have a better memory? Stay mentally sharp? Improve higher brain function? Run. Those who exercise have a mental advantage over those who don’t.

Every day when I take my dog for a walk or play with the horses, I watch them tear around and think, “Why do I have to force myself to do what they do because they love it?”

Sometimes we think too hard about exercise. Next time you go outside for a run, try running like a crazy maniac. It’s what my dog does everytime I remove his leash at the dog park. There is something about just letting loose and running full speed that is so fun and invigorating. Somehow, it gets lost when we grow up.

I piled the green apples and clementines into the grocery basket. We were going to Disneyland and I planned on stocking the cooler with lots of healthy food. The carrots bagged into individual servings along with the apples and clementines, they were going to accompany me into the park, offering me healthy snacks when I felt hungry between meals. I had planned it all.

Mike and I were bringing up the suitcases up from the basement.

“By the way, how are you planning on taking those huge bags of produce into California?”

I suddenly had a vision of the border of California. The border patrol doesn’t care if I’m an immigrant or not, but they don’t want me to bring any fruit or veggies into the state. I’ve surrendered bananas in the past, their brown and yellow skins passed from my car to the kiosk sheepishly.

“Crap…” I responded to Mike.

“Yeah, I wish I had thought of that at the grocery store.”

We crossed the border with an empty cooler, but my lack of produce wasn’t an excuse to eat unhealthy. I just stopped at a grocery store in California. The fruit tastes better there anyway.

I’ll eat my clementines when I get home…

I read a comic called Mousewax. The artist, Brandon Lewis, is participating in the Biggest Webcomic Loser. It’s a contest in which webcomic artists are taking pledges on their weight loss for Unicef.

• Biggest Webcomic Loser – Cartoonists lose weight to save lives!

I just finished reading all the comics on the site and some of them are weight related and pretty funny. Here are some of my favorites:

• This is why we never diet before the trip!

• This is not a punchline.

• The third robot to show up at my house…

• Some people notice they’ve put on weight when a button pops off their jeans.

• That’s it! Now you die!

• I knew the world was trying to tell me something.

I enjoyed skimming all of these comics and laughing to myself. Sometimes we need just a little levity to make it through the day.

Kell, one of the authors at A Blog For Fat Athletes (wish they’d get a catchier name), wrote about her discovery about heavy breathing and sweating during exercise.

• A Blog for Fat Athletes: From Kell: Speaking of Sweat, Something Stinks

She used to think that only fat people sweat or get out of breath and television was partly to blame:

“Once upon a time in the late 1960s, when I was 8, 9 years old, I truly believed that thin people did not sweat or get out of breath. After all, whenever you saw a fat person doing anything athletic on television, they always showed us huffing and puffing.”

The truth is, if you’re exercising at the correct intensity level, you will sweat and breathe heavily, whether you’re skinny or fat. Conversely, if you are “working out” and not even breaking a sweat, you’re not working out hard enough, whether you’re skinny or fat.

The day I realized that skinny people sweat too was the day I was able to feel good about how hard I was working.