Tattletale

Yes, I have a little tattletale that follows me around all day, telling me how active I’ve

been and whether or not I need to get my butt off the couch. It’s my Fitbit One. It pulls no punches and tells no lies (except if I forget to have it on me!).  I’m glad it doesn’t actually have the ability to speak because I’m sure it’d be throwing insults like “hey lazy!  yea, you, sloth! get off your butt!” at me all the time (which would be embarrassing, I’d think).

Before I got it, I thought I was at least somewhat active. That the little bit that I walked around the office constituted some sort of activity level.  Um, yea.  No. Definitely no.  My office is so small and my getting off my duff so infrequent that I’m lucky if I leave the office with having gone a total of 2000 steps, which is about a mile or so.

To give you a sense of scale, Fitbit tells you to shoot for 10,000 steps a day. 10,000! That’s about 5 miles, give or take and I’ve barely finished 20% of that by the time I get home from work. That’s a little pathetic, don’t you think? And I’ll tell ya – hitting the other 80% after a long work day?  Not gonna happen.

But I will say that since getting this little tattletale gadget, I’m much more mindful of how much (or how little) I’m moving.  I know that during the week, I shoot for 5000-6000 steps — just because my job is so sedentary, that’s about what I can hit without starting to walk/run miles after work.  On the weekends, my goal is 10,000+ steps, which I can usually do without too much trouble as long as the weather cooperates with me being able to walk the dogs.

I wasn’t sure I’d like it, but as it turns out, it’s just another tool to keep me mindful of my health and body.  And being mindful?  Well, that’s half the battle, as I’m finding out.