Weight Loss #4: Dealing with the easy life (or hauling your butt off the couch)

For some time your definition of activity consisted of what you've got recorded on TiVo. It's time to get real and less virtual!

There’s so much to be thankful for right now when it comes to how easy everything is. Communication is faster, there’s ready transportation everywhere, and food is always close at hand. In a lot of ways, living in this period ensures that we can maximize a lot of things and make the most of our time.

Oddly enough, these factors have contributed to making an overweight nation, and we’ve got to stop and wonder – so many weight loss devices and research are already out in the market – why haven’t we all lost weight yet?

We’ve got the answers right here. Where before you’d go up and down several flights of stairs (or walk to and fro the elevator) to gab with your friend in another office department, you can now e-mail and send a text message to her instead. Where before you’d do a lot of walking to go from one destination to the next, it would be so much easier to hop onto a cab or take you car to get there faster and easier. Where before you’d cook your meals to make sure that you were getting all your nutrients, you’d now just buy preserved stuff and stock it in the fridge. And why shouldn’t you? The package said balanced, home-style, easy-to-cool meals, didn’t it?

Notice the amount of ease with which we go through everyday life these days. Everything’s just a bit too easy, and oftentimes, it leads us to a lot of inactivity. This “ease” can certainly account for one-half of why we’re overweight. What’s even more worrying is that we have also come to expect everything else in life to be easy – even when it comes to weight loss. Nobody ever said that weight loss was easy (well, except those chirpy weight loss adverts, that is) – doable, yes, but not easy. Equate it the same way you’d regard the ups and downs of dating and maintaining a relationship. It’s got its difficulties. It needs work. It can be absolutely rewarding when done right. Getting my drift now?

Assuming that you’re now in full battle mode to start you weight loss regimen through calorie counting, you’ve got one more slot to fill – activity. I could just as easily say exercise but that’s gotten so much negative attention and often gets visualized as difficult, boot camp-level chores that one just has to bear, so I’ll just use the word activity.

As much as you’d just like to get on with your diet and from your couch, to get the maximum effect, you should haul your butt off wherever you’ve been resting it for the last three years and get a move ON. There doesn’t have to be dramatic acts of gym memberships and iron pumping involved. I have known so many people who’ve eased back into getting active simply by brisk walking around the neighborhood – first for five minutes, then ten, then twenty, and so on, everyday.

Warm up your feet. We're going places.