Healthy Living in Connecticut Blog

The results are in for the United Healthcare Walk-A-Thon!

My workplace did not win, as I already knew. But I'm pleased that I had the second highest steps at my job. I reached my goal and then some, by walking 836,560 steps over the course of 8 weeks. I did the same as last year, with over a million steps in 10 weeks.

I just finished the United Walk-A-Thon challenge last month and now I'm in another one. This time, it's the Greater Waterbury YMCA's Ironman Triathalon challenge. My friend at work must be right, I guess I'm obsessed with competitions.

This challenge is more about accountability. It's making sure that everybody is exercising. I'm already using the treadmill 5 days a week, why not just keep track of it for the Y? It will be fun to see how much I actually do at the end of the challenge.

I found out that the Waterbury YMCA is open on Thanksgiving, so I decided I'm going to get my workout in before eating a big meal! Do you know the average Thanksgiving dinner is 3,200 calories? Not that I care so much about the calories, but exercise is important.

I do take a couple days off from the gym every week, but since I usually work out on Thursdays, why not work out since they're open.

It's fun to look back on how far I came. Here's another picture I found, along with a recent picture. I have no idea what my weight was on the left, but I'm sure I was over 300 there!

If I can lose the weight, anyone can. It took me a while to figure out the best approach to lose the weight, but the most practical way is exercise and eating right! I never lost weight until I started to eat better!

I wrote about the dangers of aspartame a few months ago. I wanted to follow up on helpful ways to switch from aspartame to stevia, an all natural sweetener with zero calories that comes from the stevia plant.

First, give up the soda! It's not good for you at all. Diet soda contains aspartame and other chemicals that you should avoid in your diet. It is also considered a diarrhetic, which means it will dehydrate you. A good alternative for this is unsweetened iced tea. Add in your own stevia packets and avoid the Sweet N Low (saccharine), Equal (aspartame) and Splenda (sucralose). Unsweetened iced tea has a lot of antioxidants in it and soda has nothing good to offer.