[spoiler title=’Click for transcript’ style=’default’ collapse_link=’true’] how do you become a consistently active person if you’re sedentary right now let’s talk about it so in this video I wanted to talk about how you can go from being sedentary to being active and you know I’m just gonna base it on my own experiences because you know in 2014 back when I was at my heaviest I was also at my most sedentary but the thing is I was really unaware of it if you had asked me at the end of 2014 are you you know an active person I would have said yes I am very active I’m busy all the time you know I had three kids under the age of eight at the time and I really thought I was moving around constantly but I got a Fitbit for Christmas that year and it showed me just how sedentary I had become you know I put on my Fitbit and I didn’t change anything and I think that’s a really important thing to do if you ever do get a Fitbit or if you ever do want to see just how active you are you know use a pedometer or use your cell phone as a pedometer you can download any kind of health app and it will count your steps for you and see how active you are just as you are right now and that can be really eye-opening I mean I would sometimes only get like much at all especially when I thought I was so busy you know once you kind of know where you’re at then you can start to make goals and that’s what I started doing for myself and one mistake I made in the beginning was to set my goal too high I went from you know just normally getting thirteen hundred steps a day to trying to set my goal at ten thousand steps a day and that didn’t work because it was too many steps like I was just I was a very sedentary person and that goal was out of reach for me at that time but what worked for me was to increase my step goal gradually and eventually learning when to stop increasing my step goal and for me that point was when I got to 14,000 steps a day I started to see like if I increase it any more than that I’m going to start to resent this it’s gonna be too much for my everyday life because you know walking six miles a day is about two hours every day so I realized like I got to stop there and I would recommend that if you’re trying to figure out where your step goal should be really look at your life right now and see how it can fit in because if you make it too high then it’s gonna be hard to stick with in those early days when I was going from sedentary to active I had to learn how to get myself to do the steps and it’s actually a kind of difficult thing to do you think it’d be easy like well you just got to do these steps and that’s just it but it’s hard to get yourself to do the things that you want to do and one thing that really helped me was to give myself breaks when I needed them because you know at first I would try to kind of like bully myself like you should just be able to get out there and do 10,000 steps and you shouldn’t need to rest but what worked out much better was when I told myself I’m going to rest like after every thousand steps like so at the 2,000 mark at the myself just rest and recuperate and then get back up and do some more or you know I would break them up throughout the day so doing those things helped it to be achievable every day and you know there were days where I could go out there and walk it all in one big chunk and that was fine but there were other days where I really did have to sit down and take breaks and chunk it up throughout the day but by allowing myself to do it both ways I was able to stay consistent with it which is the really important part of becoming active is just to do it all the time do it every day and another important part of this was to learn how to enjoy it you know like for me walking was really boring in the beginning you know like if you had asked me like what’s the most boring exercise you can think of it would have been walking but what I did was I made it enjoyable for myself so in the beginning that looked like you know listening to some sort of you know upbeat music that I really liked and then I started listening to stand-up comedy which was really a fun thing to do and then after that I started listening to podcasts and I started you know texting with people connecting with people on video chat and sometimes I would even like let myself watch TV but the point was I needed to learn how to enjoy it so that I could continue on doing it because at first you can just kind of say okay you’re just gonna do this but I learned really quickly that if I don’t make it you know fun for myself I’m gonna quit but as I did that I started to learn how to like walking for just walking and at this point in my life walking is just a well-ingrained habit and you know it took time though and so I want to encourage you right now if you’re sedentary start out with something small you know start out with a very small step goal and hit that consistently get consistent with anything first and then add in a little bit more and a little bit more and just baby step your way there until you get to a step goal that you are consistent with or you know whatever kind of exercise it is that you want to do do it consistently and eventually you’ll become a very active person thank you for watching that video I hope you found it useful and if you’d like more information about intermittent fasting head on over to my website sixmilestosupper.com and you can find tons of information on how to lose weight sustainably and keep it off for good [/spoiler]
Video Notes
- If you are sedentary, you can become active.
- Start out by figuring out your baseline. Wear your pedometer without changing your normal routine.
- Once you know your baseline, set a goal that is slightly higher. (Example: if you currently average 2,000 steps a day, try to get 3,000 consistently.)
- Slowly and gradually increase your step goal, each time getting consistent before you increase it again.
- Stop increasing the number of steps once you feel like your step goal is high enough. (For me, this was 14,000 steps.)
- Take breaks when you need them! I liked taking them after every 1,000 steps (approximately every 10 minutes of walking).
- The most important part of becoming active is to be consistent with it.
- Learn how to enjoy it:
- Listen to music, podcasts, or stand up comedy
- Text or video chat with friends and family
- Chat on the phone (as an introvert, this is not my favorite option (: )
- Watch tv & movies