I love basketball…

I love basketball and find myself watching more games during the winter months.  That means I’m sitting still more, and I’m more tempted to eat in front of the television.  This is a really dangerous trap!

There are two or three very simple things you can do to lessen the impact of winter-time inactivity:

1. Determine what and how much you want to eat while you’re in the kitchen, and only bring the amount you’ve selected to where you’ll be sitting.  When we have unlimited food within arm’s reach, we will almost always overeat.
2. Pop a piece of sugarfree gum in your mouth when you’re sitting down.  Or brush your teeth before sitting down.  These activities reduce our urge to nibble.  Another approach is to keep your hands busy with knitting, crocheting, or even a hand-strengthening device you can squeeze while you’re watching television.
3. Jump up at every break and move a bit.  I saw a suggestion in Reader’s Digest recently that if we sit a lot, we could work in some exercise around our sitting down.  The idea is that each time as you start to sit down, just before your butt touches the chair, bounce back up.  That’s actually like doing one squat.  If you do that every time you sit down, you’ll get in a good number of squats every day.  The average office worker sits down at least 50 times a day (I had no idea!).  What an easy way to build in effortless exercise.  Wouldn’t it be fun to tell folks that you do 50 squats a day?  And I feel like a kid bouncing back up.  I find myself grinning about this secret workout I’m sneaking in.

It’s all about making the choice to care for ourselves and finding fun ways to do it.  It doesn’t have to be hard.  Sometimes the little changes are the easiest to make and the most impactful. 

Go Celtics!