From Joe: Retain your fitness gains by changing your sitting habits:
All along we’ve known that sitting all day isn’t great for you but emerging research indicates that it’s not just a poor alternative to spending your day hiking the Appalachian Trail, it actually alters our bodies and decreases our health and lifespan.
Courtesy of HowToGeek
From Joe: In a prior post about candy jars in the office, I urged you to think seriously about the states of mind that characterized people who voiced opinions about whether or not candy jars were acceptable artifacts in an office setting. If you have already done that, you probably noticed that most commentators – no matter whether they approved or disapproved of such jars – framed the issue in moralistic terms: Candy jars are not a problem in themselves, they said. Instead, the problem was in the people who lacked self-discipline, suffered from feelings of inferiority, had issues hanging on from their childhood or, as one commenter put it, need therapy. As far as I can see, this kind of moralistic discourse does nothing to address the practical concerns of people who are trying to devise lasting changes in life habits.
Posted in Staying Fit
Tagged candy jar, fitness, framing, Joe, lifestyle changes, metaphor, Motivation, pre-mortem
From Joe: Now that Mad Men has recreated the office life of the 1950s, even youngsters know that there was a time when smoking in the work environment was accepted as normal behavior. To signal hospitality, some workers kept jars of cigarettes or boxes of cigars on their desks to accommodate visitors to their office. The same thing was done at home to accommodate guests at parties. When smokers met on the street, they might offer each other a cigarette as a sign of friendship and acceptance. Then they would share the experience of taking the tobacco smoke into their bodies as they relaxed together in conversation. In short, smoking was more than normal behavior. It was actually a widely practiced social ritual.
From Joe: The New York Times talks about Illustrating Your Life in Graphs and Charts - For Fitness and Many Other Purposes:
That idea led him to co-found Daytum.com, which makes software to help people tabulate whatever they do and turn it into a chart — a visual depiction of everything from blood sugar levels to how much beer they drink. Mr. Felton said he had even seen a woman use the service to track her irrational fears.
At Lifehacker, readers are asked to share thoughts about whether technology helps you exercise:
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged exercise equipment, fitness apps, Joe, journaling, technology
From Joe: In several posts and a recent column, Gerry nicely illustrates how we fight ourselves when it comes to making serious personal changes. She started her training camp thinking that losing a few pounds would be a surmountable challenge, she says, only to find out that her new regimen was creating many daily problems that were far more complicated than she expected them to be.
So what’s a person to do when a new regimen creates challenges that were never anticipated at its beginning?
Two important practical hints can be extracted from Gerry’s material.
Posted in Staying Fit
Tagged change, cognitive therapy, discouragement, framing, illusions, Joe, maintaining gains, relapse, self-talk
From Joe: How do you know if your journaling is an activity for self-indulgence or self-development? Perhaps the presence or absence of metrics in your writing provides a clue:
One of the reasons we might fail to achieve some of our goals is that we’re not always as objective about our progress as we could be, or sometimes we’re just stuck in a rut using the same approach that hasn’t really led us anywhere. That’s where the metrics come in. Having factual proofs of our progress (or lack of progress) can show us what adjustments need to be made.