Simple Suggestion #229... Count your steps

For about the past year, I've added one small thing to my daily wardrobe -- a pedometer that hooks to my belt. It tells me, every evening, how far I've walked during the day, and encourages me to get more exercise.

You'd think that having a dog might be enough encouragement, but being a lapdog, Shadow is happy to lounge around for much of the day, and I could just as easily get exercise without him. But I know that walking is good for us both, and Health Canada recommends that Canadians make an effort to walk at least 10,000 steps a day.

For me, that usually translates into at least a half hour of concerted effort, going outside, breathing fresh air, and striding briskly. On days when my pedometer reads less than my 10,000 steps, I don't feel quite as good, somehow. Maybe I'm lacking the endorphins provided by that extra exercise? Shadow seems a bit more lethargic, too, when we miss a walk, but then, in the evenings, he has too much puppy energy and tears around the house out of boredom!

Walking is probably the best exercise there is. It doesn't require any memberships or special equipment, you don't have to drive to a facility to participate, and you can do it indoors or outdoors, depending on the season. Best of all, your steps matter -- all day long. If you go outside, you can have a little nature fix, too, listening to the birds or checking out the scenery -- and things are always changing, have you noticed? Today, the tulips in some yards are a little taller than yesterday. The house that's being rebuilt around the corner has some windows installed since I last walked that way. I like making walking into an opportunity to notice and appreciate things in my world.

But if that's not where you're at, and you like the idea of more motivational, competitive options, there are walking websites that feature challenges to encourage participation, usually connected to different pedometers, which aren't that expensive. Mine cost me nothing, thanks to a library share program I participated in -- and when I returned the pedometer kit after the three week loan period, the program, called UWalk, sent me a free pedometer to encourage my further participation.

For Christmas, I bought three more pedometers (at about $15 ea) for my daughters, and we all joined the UWalk website (https://uwalk.ca) for a "walk Alberta" challenge, our cumulative steps taking us from Coutts, in the very south of our province, all the way to Hay River, North West Territories. Wouldn't have made it in our 100 day deadline without the help of my sisters. Right now, some of us are tracking our steps for the distance to Radium Hotsprings, BC, one of our favourite summer vacation places.

Most pedometers these days have some sort of tracking website or way to log steps in order to encourage a pedometer "habit." My little "accessory" motivates me to walk further than I would otherwise -- I'll admit there have been a few evenings when I probably would have settled into couch potato mode, but when I saw that I had only 8500 steps, Shadow and I took Lee with us for another little walk, which Lee also appreciated. It's also fun, on busy days working in the garden, to be surprised when my pedometer reads over 20,000 steps. That means I walked 16 km just in my own yard! Sometimes, the number of steps spent cleaning the house surprises me, too!

There are all sorts of ways to keep tabs on our exercise levels and encourage a healthier and less sedentary lifestyle, but counting steps is one of the easiest for me. How do you motivate yourself toward fitness?

The song that's stuck in my head

Meghan Trainor's little ditty won't leave me alone. It was in my head already as I climbed out of bed this morning! I love its message, "every inch of you is perfect, from the bottom to the top," no matter your body shape. I hope everyone in the world has heard this little musical lesson by now, but I'm posting it here in case my regular readers haven't yet.

I haven't always loved my body, and as a result, I'm afraid I've been one of those moms who has tried to steer her girls in certain directions because I know the guilt feelings that come with carrying too much weight as a teen. And so my own anxiety about weight has been passed along to my daughters, who fortunately have named the issue as one "belonging to Mom" and are dealing with self image on their own terms -- in a better way than I ever did -- with the help of positive body image messages like the one below. (For the record, it's not about what boys like, or what anyone else thinks -- it's about feeling good about yourself from the bottom to the top, period.)

Fat shaming happens too much in our culture -- and in our own lives and heads. But here's a start to stopping the cycle... and it's a bit of an ear worm, too. I get a charge out of how it makes fun of Barbie images and colours. Dance around the room if you like, and enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PCkvCPvDXk

A dozen reasons to have a garden

My tomato plants are an endless source of happiness to me as I'm waiting for my favourite time of year, which is called Gardening Season. True, it takes time and energy to bring tomatoes from seedling to harvest, but it's a process that makes me happy to the bone. Nothing tastes as good as a tomato I've grown myself. Or a carrot. Or a potato. You get the idea.

Now that the snow is melting in a serious way, I'm having garden dreams, and thinking and planning what our almost 900 square foot garden will hold this summer. And I'm thinking about all the reasons that everyone should have a patch of dirt for themselves:

1. Fresh air and exercise are good for the body.

2. Watching things grow is good for the soul.

3. Being involved in nature's life cycles is good for the psyche.

4. Digging your own dirt means that huge machines aren't spending enormous amounts of fossil fuels tilling the soil.

5. Planting your own seeds means other huge machines aren't adding tons of carbon to the atmosphere.

6. Pulling your own weeds, while a mindless task, is good for stress reduction.

7. Adding compost from your own compost pile (every gardener needs one!) fertilizes plants without extracting chemicals from the earth.

8. You control the chemicals that you might employ to get rid of bugs or weeds, but if you're like me, you see bugs and weeds as an important and necessary part of our ecosystem, and do your best to live with them.

9. Harvesting your own vegetables means more huge machines aren't polluting the air we breathe.

10. Making a salad (or anything else) from your own back yard means your food hasn't been sprayed with preservatives or picked before it's ripe.

11. It's handy not to have to run to the grocery store.

12. Things grown in the back yard also save your wallet and the environment a lot of shipping and transportation costs.

13. Sharing the bounty with friends and neighbours feels great, but good luck getting rid of zucchini!

Okay, so it's a Baker's dozen, but they're all good reasons. Of course, not everyone has the privilege of tending a garden, so the next best thing is to buy food at a farmer's market where you can meet and chat with the people who grow real food, instead of purchasing what Michael Pollan called "food-like substances" that have been processed beyond recognition.

Sometimes, I daydream about what it would be like if everyone on the planet was able to be involved in growing their own food. I've never met a miserable gardener, so I suspect the world would be a much simpler, happier, healthier, better place.

Simple pleasures... and walking

I've been going to work almost daily for the past week and a half. While I've been missing my quiet thinking time at home, and seeing my friend, Charleen, on Tuesdays, and going to the SSVP clothing room on Thursdays, I have enjoyed the work I've been doing and my time with my L'Arche friends. I've also really appreciated walking home.

I'm not a morning person, so getting my kids out the door to school and hustling the twenty-one blocks to work isn't really an option -- especially on the icy morning sidewalks. After the girls leave the house, I have just enough time to make myself a lunch and head down the alley to catch the 8:15 bus. I'm starting to know the faces of the passengers, and seem to have regular conversations about our Novemberish weather with a woman from Finland as we get off the bus at the mall. Then I walk the last four blocks to work, arriving at 8:30 on the button most mornings.

After a day in front of a computer screen in a stuffy office, the walk home is really wonderful. I keep a fairly good pace so that I can feel my muscles complaining just a little by the time I'm within a block of home. I love to take careful steps where there's ice and then to stride along where the sidewalks are clear, to breathe deeply, to feel the weight of my backpack and the slight perspiration between it and my back. I revel in the endorphins and the healthy feeling of a good walk, where I can moodle about things as I go, say hello to the people I pass, and appreciate that I'm not contributing to climate change though I am contributing to my cardiovascular stamina. When I see an elderly woman gingerly walking her dog, I am suddenly reminded that I will not always be able to swing along like this, unconcerned about the threat of slick ice beneath a skiff of snow, and I am grateful for present solidity of bone and strength of sinew. I appreciate it even moreso when I think of a friend my age who is awaiting a hip replacement because she was born with hip dysplasia. Cristina, I'm walking for you, too. I hope that surgery comes soon!

Walking has become such a marvelous simple pleasure, it's getting so that I hate to drive. Unsurprisingly, I don't hear the planet complaining...

Coffee and me

I have a love-hate relationship with coffee. I guess that's probably not unusual -- many people tend to come down on one side or the other when it comes to the strongly flavoured beverage, though with more recent developments in flavoured and iced coffees, even coffee haters have made exceptions.

I probably would have been a militant coffee hater if it weren't for the fact that I ended up with Type 1 (Juvenile) Diabetes at age 17. Suddenly, juices and soft drinks were taboo, and even milk had to be factored into my caloric intake. No- and low-cal alternatives in the fluid realm were required. Water? Too boring for a teen aged palate. Diet soft drinks? A person can take only so much aspartame, ugh. Tea? Too old-ladyish. Coffee? Too predictable, too bitter... or so I thought.

I started university seven months after my diabetes diagnosis, and discovered the world of flavoured coffees at Second Cup and Java Jive. Rare was the day that my best friend and I didn't end up at one counter or the other for a morning coffee... and the flavours were enough to tempt my taste buds. Butter Pecan, Hazelnut Creme, Columbian Supremo, Dark Roasts, Light Roasts, and Roasts in-between. It wasn't long and I was hooked.

After four years of coffee addiction at the U of A, I was fortunate to spend a year with a travelling performing troupe. The coffee was pretty dismal in the US, but our cast spent a lot of time in Eastern Canada that fall, and I introduced my cast mates to the joys of Second Cup, where, the Europeans said, cappuccinos were almost as good as the ones they had at home. They weren't much into flavoured coffees, but espresso passed muster in Canada. When our cast got to Europe, there wasn't any flavoured coffee to be found, so I delved into the espressos and cappuccinos that my European friends enjoyed... and loved them! What's not to love when you're sitting on the piazza overlooking Firenze with a frothy cappuccino in hand after a day of checking out Michelangelo's David and wandering the winding ways of the old city? Cappuccino is still my favourite caffeinated beverage.

But my love affair with coffee of any variety is coming to an end. I feel it with every cup. Caffeine affects me now in ways that I can't control. My hands have a perpetual shake due to a hereditary condition known as Essential Tremor, and the shake is even worse with coffee. I could take medication to eliminate it, but that means taking a relaxant that might make for driving drowsiness. (I could give up driving entirely, but that's another moodling for another day.) Besides, I'm not much for taking any more medication than I already do (six shots a day).

What's worse than my shakes or the meds to control them is that it's hard to justify the drinking of coffee when there's so much wrong with the coffee industry. True, Fair Trade sorted out some of the inequities in some places -- and made me feel better about my morning habit when I changed from Maxwell House to Kicking Horse -- but now that Fair Trade coffee has become an industry unto itself (with even Starbucks and McDonald's serving "ethical" coffee, and Walmart jumping on the Fair Trade bandwagon because it's a profitable enterprise), if a large retailer chooses to support a particular Fair Trade cooperative, it can freeze smaller, morally driven coops out of the market altogether. I'm scratching my head and wondering. How fair is my Fair Trade beverage?

As strong as these issues have become in pressing me to find another beverage of choice, there is one more that holds more weight than personal health or ethics. It's that the earth's atmosphere can only take so much pollution before things get extremely messy for all its inhabitants. I'm already contributing to that pollution enough by heating my house. I can't get through our Canadian winters without creating some fossil fuel emissions, but guess what? I can get by without coffee that has to be transported halfway around the world by fossil fuel-inefficient cargo ships.

I don't have to drink coffee. I grew and dried a lot of wonderful French mint this summer, and my best friend introduced me to homemade lemon balm tea (and gave me a plant) so there are alternatives from my backyard. Old ladyish teas, maybe, but I'm getting there. Backyard tea mixes are healthier for the planet, and for me. I know this is true. I know I should want this if I'm living simply. Honestly, though, I don't really want to give up coffee. I love its aroma. I plain old like it. Maybe I need to wean myself off it by halves, cutting back from my 14 oz mug first thing in the morning, to seven oz. Then from seven to three? Three to 1.5? The first sip is always the best, so maybe I could get by with 0.75 oz? And heck, if I cut it back that far, I can probably live without it, right? But not without a healthy planet.