fitness

Lower Your Expectations

Posted on by maggiegrace

I got a Fitbit about a year ago, paid for with some last-minute expiring airline miles. Since then I’ve been wearing it almost every day, tracking my steps and activity levels for the past 12 months.

In the warmer months, I would fairly easily reach the standardized goal of 10,000 steps per day, especially if I went for a bike ride (somehow it knew my legs were moving?). But as I started working again, the combination of sitting at my internship, standing in place at my retail job, and lying around exhausted at home meant that on the average weekday I would only get 6,500 step – sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less. This was significantly far off the goal of 10,000 and there was no way that I would go for a 3,500 step walk after I got home from work. Nope, 6,500 would do for the day.

10,000 steps is the “recommended” amount of steps to maintain weight, but it’s also just one indicator of activity, and a pretty arbitrary one at that. That’s why in January, I lowered the goal on my Fitbit app to 8,000 steps a day.

At first I felt guilty. Couldn’t I just step it up? Was I really so lazy/out of shape/worthless/exhausted that I couldn’t meet this bare minimum? This was supposed to be a key barometer of fitness?

Over time I realized that though I had decreased the expected steps per day, I was actually walking more. Instead of averaging 6,500 steps, over the past month I’ve hit 8,000 every single day. Now when I get home from work with only 6,500 steps, I know that just one quick walk with my dog to the cul de sac up the street will get me to my goal. I’m much more likely to do that quick walk than try and rally myself for a 30 minute plus hike to get to 10,000 steps. And once I started hitting my goal regularly, I found myself even more motivated. now that I’ve hit my step goal every  day for a month I am reluctant to break the chain of success. Now even if I’m 2,000 steps off of my goal I’ll walk in place while I watch TV or pace around the house while I’m on the phone.

A lower goal has actually led to increased activity.

I’m trying to apply this logic to the other goals in my life. Sometimes that means shifting my thinking from “play ukulele for 30 minutes a day” to “play ukulele every day”. Sometimes that means being more realistic about how much money I’m actually expected to make this year and pushing myself to earn just a little bit more than that.

Setting a more attainable expectation means that I’m more likely to achieve it,  rather than giving up along the way, and thus I’m able to slowly increase my goals, meeting them along the way.

The Job Search Is Lonely

Posted on by maggiegrace

I don’t know if it’s the seasons changing and the sun setting earlier or my mom and brother going back to school. I’m sure everyone feels like this sometimes. But right now, for me, the job search feels lonely. Maybe you’re in a similar boat, becoming numb and isolated from afternoon after afternoon of just you and your cover letters at the dining room table. To prevent this from turning into a period of low-productivity/high-anxiety, I’ve been developing some habits to quell the loneliness and keep me connected.

1 . Leave the house

Yes, I know this sounds obvious, but there have been countless days where I notice the sunset and realize I haven’t left the property (maybe I walked the dog up the street). You gotta leave the house. I follow a lot of freelancers on Twitter and Snapchat and I greatly admire their commitment to working in coffeeshops or group work spaces. It gets them out of their apartment and even if they don’t talk to anyone but the barista, being around other people who are moving and doing keeps you from feeling stagnant. Even my grandma does this – while she’s retired, she has a routine where she goes to the diner every morning. Sometimes with a friend, sometimes alone, this routine gets her out of the house in the morning and guarantees human contact, even if it’s just the waiter. Read More

Sport Is Something We Do Together

Posted on by maggiegrace

This week I watched videos by Rosianna Halse Rojas and Hannah Witton discussing Anna Kessel’s new book, Eat Sweat Play: How Sport Can Change Our Lives. Rosianna and Hannah discuss the role that exercise and sport have played in their lives and since watching their videos I’ve been thinking about what it means to do sport together, especially as young women.

Tuesday was the last day of school for public school students in my town and the kids started getting home around 11:30am. My sixteen year old brother got off the bus, quickly ate a haphazard lunch, and then hopped on his bike to hang out with his friends from the crew team at a park near our house. Based on what he tells me as he digs through the garage, they’re going to play some ultimate frisbee and then probably lay around in the grass. They started this frisbee habit last summer, meeting up after practice had ended to be together and run around.

Social experiences for me as a teenage girl were always very sedentary – friendships were built around sitting and talking. We went on some walks at a rail trail or maybe strolled through the mall, but there was never a group of us running around playing. Teenage girlhood meant talking and delicately snacking, not diving for discs in an open field. Read More

Does Having a FitBit Make You Healthier?

Posted on by maggiegrace

Data will save us all! The combination of data and immediate feedback has the power to change our habits, saving us from inactivity! Data! Feedback! Monitor your biostats!

I’ve had a FitBit for a month now and have been thinking about how my mindset and lifestyle have changed as a result of having these biostatistics at the ready.

I got my FitBit Charge HR with some of my dad’s airlines miles that were about to expire. This model is different from the original one in that there is a small display on the wrist-band, which shows the time and date as well as whatever statistics you’ve selected. The defaults are daily steps, current heart rate, miles, calories burned, and flights of stairs climbed.

While I was excited to be counting my daily steps as a barometer for daily activity, I was apprehensive about having my calories burned so readily displayed on my wrist. While I don’t have a history of eating disorders or severe body-image issues, I do know that I have some compulsive tendencies and that having such a loaded statistic so present in the forefront of my mind could easily lead to some unhealthy behavior with regards to restrictive eating or excessive exercise. I disabled that statistic from the wristband display and tried to adjust the settings so that the calorie counter wouldn’t be prominently displayed in the app on my phone.

The part of me that’s a conspiracy theorist (or just conscious citizen of the digital age) is concerned about where this data is going. Is FitBit selling the data and profile stats to insurance companies to get more information about people who fit my description? Are they selling it to advertisers (though I’m not sure what advertisers would do with it)? I’m obviously not concerned enough about this to have done significant research before I got this device, nor did I read the privacy information before clicking accept, but it is something that’s on my mind.

Since then, I’ve been focusing on steps. The recommended daily goal, which FitBit presumably adopted from the American Heart Association, is 10,000 steps. I assumed that I would be easily hitting this goal every day, since I think of myself as an active person who goes for frequent walks and moves around a lot in regular household activities.

Boy, was I in for a surprise. The past few months I’ve been living in my parent’s house while I apply for jobs after college. I spend most of the day alone and don’t necessarily leave the house (besides walking the dog) on any particular day. Despite this, I apparently had deluded myself that my steps to take out the garbage and see if anything new had appeared in the fridge would add up to 10,000. Instead, my daily step count on a weekday hovers around 6,500 and this includes a nightly walk around the block (1 mile).

Weekends are much more active, which is something I think I already knew. I spend Saturdsays and Sundays running errands with my parents and getting in and out of the car and walking around grocery stores adds a lot more steps than you might think. Couple this with an additional walk around the block and I easily hit 10,000 on the weekends, often by mid-afternoon.

The heart-rate monitor has also been interesting to see in action. When I was a freshman in college, I spent a lot of time at the gym, sometimes swimming but often on an elliptical (hey, I didn’t have friends and hated my classes – it was a way to kill time and get out stress). Ellipticals often have heart-rate monitors on the handbars, though of dubious accuracy. The little pictograph on the machine advised getting your heart rate above at least 145bpm to be getting a real cardio workout. I’m sure this goal was based on science, though my heart rate seemed to be 100 bpm or 170bpm with no in between. Now, with my FitBit pressed against my wrist, I can check my heartrate any time. Right now for example it’s 82bpm (obviously low as I am sitting here typing). Most of the time my heartrate is correlated with my level of activity as it should be, but sometimes it is very high relative to what I’m doing. I was showing my uncle the heart rate monitor component while sitting next to him at a post-graduation lunch. It said that my heart was beating 117 bpm. My uncle remarked on how high this was, and I could not tell if this was a defect or if anxiety and stress was really elevating my heart rate that much (for reference, a resting heart rate is typically between 60 and 100 bpm). Perhaps I really am that stressed out and am reluctant to recognize this indicator for what it is.

Around the same time I got the FitBit I also started training in Krav Maga. I was interested to see if the FitBit would incorrectly register my punches as steps. However, the classes are loud and intense and require a lot of focus so I haven’t yet done a lot of testing about whether it is actually making that error. I do know that I get a lot of steps in during that hour long class, and since I’m using steps as a barometer for overall activity I’m happy with that.

I wish I could say that I’ve been using this bioinformation to change my lifestyle and incorporate more activity into my daily life. A bad virus recently knocked me out of commission for a week plus and I’d like to use that as an excuse but I know that even before this illness I was just as sedentary as I was with any other level of information. If I know that I’m close to 10,000 to steps, say it’s 7pm and I’m at 8,500, then I will make the effort to get out for another walk (or play basketball in my driveway or just pace around the house). But if it’s been a low-activity day and I’m still around 5,000 or 6,000 steps I won’t make the effort that evening, nor have I been approaching the next day with the intent to beat the previous day’s stats. This is of course on my long list of ~self-improvement~ goals but we’ll see if I find it meaningful.

I definitely fall into the trap of thinking that one device or app is going to radically better the way I’m living my life, whether it’s a planner at Staples or an iPhone or the to-do list app that I’m currently searching for. The data is not what’s important, it’s what you do with it. As a rational person would expect, the FitBit did not significantly change my lifestyle. This is on me, the data didn’t change my life because I didn’t do anything with the data. I do feel that I now know important information that can guide me in making those lifestyle changes when I’m ready, easily displayed on my wrist.