Healthy Living in Connecticut Blog

Don't be so hard on yourself if you fail with your dieting efforts.  You were setup to fail before you even started. Saying this is NOT a free ticket to raid the closest pizza joint.  But no matter where you come from or what walk of life you have chosen the fact is we live in a nation that drives us toward perceived success in all things but health.  Our society is built to fail when it comes to living healthy.

That is why more times than not, diets fail. This is the overview of a multi-part blog post to help you see the big picture as to why it is all too easy to give up on living healthy. The goal is to bring about awareness of the influences on your daily lives where desensitization prevents us from succeeding at living a healthy lifestyle.

Back in April of 2012, I was in my first Wellness Challenge at the YMCA in Torrington. I had already started to lose weight... I was 299 pounds at the start of the challenge, which was actually down from 345 pounds in November of 2011. After losing 45 pounds, my weight loss had slowed down. I decided to try the Wellness Challenge and figured it might kick start the weight loss again, as I still had a long way to go in order to get to a healthy weight.

The kickoff meeting at the first challenge changed my lifestyle completely. After that, I followed the guidelines that I learned and still follow many of the guidelines. As they say, it's about a lifestyle change more than it is about a temporary reduction in weight.

I would like to congratulate New York on a new law I wasn't aware of until today. New York now has a Fruit and Vegetable Prescription plan. This means that New York now acknowledges that fruits and vegetables have the power to cure disease, something the FDA doesn't exactly agree with.

A doctor in New York can now prescribe "Healthy Bucks" to those who are obese, and they in turn can use them to get fresh fruit from the farmer's markets there. I think it's so cool that New York acknowledged the health benefits of vegetables. It's like a big advertising campaign to wake up the obese people to start eating better. The idea might be slightly over the top, but it's a step in the right direction. It's refreshing to hear of doctors not writing prescriptions for drugs for a change.

Three months ago, I wrote about how I got 10,000 steps a day since April of 2012. I'm still getting the steps in and three months later, I figure I have walked approximately 990,000 steps since April of this year. When combining the steps with last year, I have walked a total of 4,640,000 steps. That converts to approximately 2,197 miles, almost as many miles to get to Los Angeles from Connecticut. That's a lot of steps!

It's not that hard to get the steps in. I still use the treadmill 5 days a week, but less time on it. However, I did set a new record with the treadmill. I am now able to do a 5K on there in less than 25 minutes. When I first started the treadmill, I couldn't go faster than 4 MPH. Now I average about 7.5 MPH. The treadmill gets me about 4,000 steps. The other steps come from walking my dog, going to store, etc. The steps really do add up.

It has been so hot in Connecticut, I'm sure I don't need to remind you that you need to drink more to cool off. The heat causes us to sweat more and we lose a lot of water in this heat.

But how much of what you're drinking is actually water? Soda and beer do not count. It's best not to get your calories from your drinks. There is so much empty calories in soda, it can really pack on the pounds. Diet soda isn't much better… some research shows that diet soda drinkers might actually hurt their metabolism and increase risk of obesity and diabetes.