Stepping Out in 2015

I've blogged before about my only form of exercise being walking, but that it has worked very well for me. Not only do I enjoy walking, but the bad weather doesn't stop me either, because I have some good all-weather gear. Even if the weather is too nasty for going out at all, I like walking inside, to the accompaniment of blast-from-the-past CDs, many of which I hadn't heard for twenty or thirty years.

I bought a pedometer about a year ago, and started recording my daily steps on a spreadsheet, so I now have a year of figures to keep me entertained. To a numbers geek, it's fascinating reading! For the whole of 2015, my average daily steps were 10,177, which I'm pretty pleased about. I thought that it might have been a fad at first, and that I would give up. It's true that it has tailed off a little bit, but only a little - basically I have ended the year at roughly the same average daily stepping as when I started it.

That means I did 3,715,000 steps in 2015, something like 1,500 miles. In other words a little stroll from Gloucestershire to Kiev! I've had the odd problem, because of 63-year-old feet and knees, but I've been careful with them, and I'm going into 2016 in pretty good shape.

Of course all of these steps have helped me lose weight and (recently) to maintain. The calories I've used to take steps over the 2,500 a day that I would take just doing the basics of life come to 350 in a day - 128,000 calories over the year. And that works out at 16kg (36 lbs) of fat - more than two-and-a-half stones.

These daily steps can be quite difficult to fit in, because I have a totally sedentary job, and I work from home, so I don't even need to travel to work. But I grab the opportunity to do steps whenever I possibly can, and it's enough to keep my average over the magic 10,000 steps a day. It does mean that when we go away for any sort of holiday, walking is an important element, and Ann seems to be reasonably keen. Even, like this week, when we are having three days away to celebrate our 40 years together. She is still happy (I think!) to pack her walking boots and all-weather gear.