Walking for 2 hours a day is a very good thing – if you can motivate yourself to do it every day that is. Walking for 1 hour a day is also good – even better if you can stick to a consistent and regular routine. Walking for no hours a day is a bad thing as I’m finding out as my weight loss slows right down and my energy levels slide to the floor.

I still have the bad chest thing going on which has severely curtailed any kind of exercise but that’s being treated with inhalers and steroids so I should be on the mend again very soon. I certainly can’t let it affect me for another 3 months or I’ll be in danger of never leaving this bloody house again. I can’t say I’ve missed the very early walks if I’m being brutally honest – work is taking up so much of my time these days that I’ve settled much too easily into logging on about 10am and not logging off again until 2am the following morning. I still have sooooo much to learn about my new career and if I’m not actually working on client projects I’m reading up on industry news, learning about a new aspect of online marketing, catching up on forum and blog posts, trying news things, trying to understand other things, trying to catch up….

It struck me yesterday that I couldn’t remember the last time I had a proper “day off” – as in not being online, not reading up about SEO, not doing SEO, not reading emails and articles about SEO. It may have been Christmas Eve but I’m pretty sure I was working on something that day too, I certainly was on Christmas Day. I need to start spending time away from the laptop and work if I’m going to properly recharge my batteries on a regular basis and being out on the hills has always been a fantastic way of doing that for me. It’s so lovely up here at the moment with the daffs out and the trees in bud that I’m going to start walking again for at least 20 minutes a day, every day, and see how that goes. It’ll have to be on the flat and I’ll need to carry my inhaler but at least I’ll be outside and away from the PC for at least a few minutes a day.

It’s been about a month since my last post and I think I have walked precisely 0 miles since then It’s not for want of trying, but I can’t seem to shake off this stupid bronchitis which is making even the shortest journey on foot a bloody ordeal. Another visit to the doctor this week should confirm whether there’s any improvement and when I can start seriously walking again.

However, despite the (forced) lack of exercise, the losing weight bit is going brilliantly well. After a shaky start in the New Year, I went back and re-read Paul McKenna’s “I Can Make You Thin” (ICMYT), and caught the repeat of the series on LivingTV. Like regular walking, I knew this worked because I successfully lost a stone very easily on it last year. Also, like regular walking, I knew it wouldn’t work if I slipped back into my old ways of over-eating/bingeing. As an emotional eater, I know from bitter experience that ‘diets’ don’t work – it isn’t about the food I eat, it’s about how I act towards the food I eat. Limit me to 1500 cals a day and they’ll be gone by 10am if it’s a bad morning. 25 years of almost constant dieting has made me heavier than I’ve ever been with such a twisted attitude that sometimes I literally don’t know how to react when left alone with food. Pretty sad, eh? What I like about the ICMYT/NLP approach is that it forces you – gently – to change your behaviour in a very simple way. Bottom line is eat when you’re truly hungry, eat slowly and conciously and stop when you’re full. I don’t know why it’s clicked with me, but it has – I don’t argue, I just enjoy feeling like a normal person for once. Although I can eat what I want (as long as I’m truly hungry), there’s a big round tin of Kitkats, Swiss chocolate & pecan fudge in my kitchen and a packet of custard creams in the cupboard (along with lemon sorbet in the freezer and cheese, hummous and luxury yoghurt in the fridge) but I don’t want them. It’s not willpower, I just don’t want them. I’m genuinely not hungry. I can’t describe why I don’t want them, I just don’t. It’s a nice feeling

As an aside, knowing that McKenna does wonders with other problems, I used his tapping technique before going to the dentist today. To say I’m frightened of the dentist is an understatement (the last time I went I was so hysterical he advised psychiatric treatment before returning) so I wasn’t looking forward to it. However, the tapping worked, I felt calm and relaxed and I even laughed while in the chair.

Unheard. Of.

The one that gets you moving everyday of course. I’d love to think I could spend a couple of hours in the gym each evening, or play netball twice a week or train for the London marathon but I won’t and I’ve finally stopped wasting money on gym membership and running magazines. Like many people, I’ve grown up believing there is a magic formula to weightloss and the fat will just melt away if I stick to my alloted calories, points, syns or carbs/proteins and exercise to a schedule devised by someone who has never met me. Such is the grip of the diet industry, it has become perfectably acceptable to live on breakfast cereal or liquid shakes all day or waste hours in front of the tv jumping along while some C-List celebrity shakes their arse in your face. Sometimes, it takes years of failure and let downs before you realise that eating a bit less and exercising a bit more is all it really takes.

I choose to walk because it’s something I enjoy and can stick at. I’m lucky enough to live in a little town surrounded by beautiful fells and moors, canal paths and city walks so I get the variety I crave and the chance to explore places I’d never think of going to in the car. I can roll out of bed at 6am and chuck a coat and boots on and get out on my own for a couple of hours and it feels great, and well, it just feels like the most natural thing in the world to do.

After a hair raising few hours (due to a lack of technical ability on my part) I’ve managed to upgrade this blog from WordPress.com to WordPress 2.7 – and I’m really pleased with the results. I particularly wanted to use this theme (Frozenage) as I absolutely adore the winter and walking in snow is one of my most favourite things to do in the whole world. Hope you like it!

OK, back to business. I’ve had quite a few comments/emails regarding the walking for 2 hours a day thing. Consensus seems to be it’s a great thing to aim for but a little over-ambitious and, well, frankly extreme. As I mentioned before I’m lucky enough to work from home so I can fit in a long but very early morning walk without panicking about showering and catching the train into the city. However, even if I have to get up at 5am to fit in a walk I’ll just have to grit my teeth and do it. Walking everyday is a must but unless I give myself a goal that stretches me day in and day out I’m afraid I’ll slip back into old habits – missing the odd day, then the odd week, then the odd year…..

It was this article http://www.healthcentral.com/diabetes/c/17/21472/hours-fat-fit that made me sit up and take notice. I’m not diabetic but I’m absolutely on the way to being one if I carry on eating the crap that I do, I know that. Walking for 2 hours a day and eating a healthy diet can only improve my health and hopefully reverse some of the damage I’ve done to myself and it’s something that I know I can do and something I can stick at.  All the naturally slim people I know walk everywhere and eat good quality food only when they are hungry – I think that speaks volumes.

As another New Year approaches, millions of people are yet again gearing up to lose weight as one of their resolutions. I too am hideously guilty of this but only because a) I’ll just be fighting a losing battle over Christmas and will end up binge eating for the sake of it and b) being the OCD-lite kinda gal that I am, I want to be able to achieve all of the weight loss in 2009. I also like the idea of being the one who bucks the trend and sticks to what they set out to do – nothing better for wiping the smile off the smug faces that say it’s not possible. I gave up smoking on New Year’s Day four years ago and haven’t touched a cigarette since which I’m pretty chuffed about considering I was up to 40 a day at that point. So it can be done – all it takes is as much motivation and perseverance as it would at any other time of the year

Because I feel I need to get it right from the very start i.e. 1st January, I’ll do my first 2 hour flat walk on NYE so I can start the New Year with a proper hill walk (I won’t really blog about the flat walks unless something extraordinary happens as there’s only so much you can say about a walk into town and back).  I fancy a really good walk along the Rochdale canal on New Year’s Eve – either from Sowerby Bridge to Todmorden (which actually takes me about 3.5 hours to do but what the hell) or Tod to Littleborough or Rochdale.  I never used to take much notice of the canal until I came across this brilliant site http://ealees.com/walks/hebden.html which made me smile so much I started to incorporate a canal bank walk into my schedule every 3 weeks or so.

With a good flat walk under my belt I can then start the New Year with a hike up a hill. Living where I do I’m ridiculously spoilt for choice – an hour or so in the car and I can be in the Southern Lakes or the Peak District, half an hour will get me to the Forest of Bowland or Saddleworth Moor.  Better still, a 30 second walk from my little terraced house will get me onto the foothills of the Southern Pennines from where I can hike for hours and hours in pretty much all directions.  I’ll have to see how the weather is and how achey I am from the day before but I really fancy a walk up Pendle Hill as it’s not *too* much of a challenge but will certainly get the flood flowing – especially if it’s a blowy, rainy day (which, being Lancashire, it will be).

It’s almost a cliche now that walking 10,000 steps a day will do wonders for your health and waistline. I was stunned to recently discover this wasn’t based on extensive medical research at the time but was a business concept used to promote and sell Japanese pedometers. Even more stunning was the discovery that 10000 steps may be ok to maintain good health but you need to do nearer to 17000 steps a day to achieve a decent rate of weight loss. Blimey.

10000 steps a day apparently equates to around 5 miles – I seem to average 7000 steps in 3 miles (can’t quite work out whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing) so a 2 hour walk should amount to 140000 steps. However, that’s 14000 continuous steps which is, apparently, even more beneficial than spreading the exercise out over the day. Whatever. I’ve found it too easy to get obsessed by counting steps in the past, to the point where I’ve given up any intention of doing any exercise because I’ve forgotten to hook the pedometer on the second I got out of bed.  Counting steps on a hill walk is a bit of a waste of time too I find as it really doesn’t reflect the effort in climbing a bugger of a steep hill or negotiating a boggy field.

Having said that, I do have a fantastic pedometer which I love as it’s wonderfully accurate and user friendly. I’ll use it to measure how many steps I’m taking on a ‘flat’ walk on the first day of every month. That way I can see whether my pace is improving as the weight (hopefully) drops off.