How To Increase Your Everyday Physical Activity This Holiday Season
By Linda Tremer

Did you know that you can eliminate weight gain over the holidays by just increasing your normal everyday physical activities? Unfortunately, it’s often difficult to keep up with your exercise routine over the holiday season. Consequently, you should increase your everyday physical activities to make up for the reduction in exercise.

Everyone knows that you should park as far as possible from the store and walk. But most of us don’t do it. Do you pull up to your mail box in your car and remove the mail via your car window? Park the car and walk to the mailbox. Even if it is only 50 feet it all adds up.

Hide your gifts as far away from the wrapping table as possible. When wrapping gifts, bend and stretch. Put the gifts on the table and sit on the floor and wrap them. Get up to retrieve each gift from the table. Or wrap at the table and leave the wrapping paper across the room on the floor. Walk to the paper and bend to pick it up.

Needless to say, at the mall, take the stairs. Take the long way through the mall. If you need to go to the second level of a store, come into the store at ground level and take the stairs to the second level. Or if you need ground level, come in on the second level and walk down. These steps will not add significantly more time to your shopping but will add significantly more activity to your day.

At the party, don’t sit, stand and circulate. Move as much as possible. If everyone is sitting, you should be the one to refill glasses, get dishes, find the napkins etc. Move your body as much as possible.

Sing to the Christmas carols. Tap your foot. Snap your fingers. Sway with the music. Sing, move, dance. In your car you can move your body. At the stop light twist and turn your upper torso. Shrug your shoulders while driving. Tap you left foot.

Instead of sitting and eating the snacks at a party, pick out the one snack you are least likely to eat and pick up the serving dish and walk around offering it to everyone. Opt for talking and walking instead of sitting and eating.

Think, what else can you do? Trim your own tree. Shovel snow. (Be careful if you have heart problems.) Walk around your yard and check out the winter changes. Add one more flight of stairs to your day.

Sit down with a piece of paper and write down fifty ways you can increase your everyday activities. Once you begin to think of ways to increase your physical activity during the holidays, more and more ideas will come to you. These things might not seem like much but all the little bits add up. Everything counts. And the good news is that the result will be no weight gain over the holiday season. And if you are lucky you might even lose weight this holiday season.

Happy holidays.

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