Making Physical Activity Part of Your Healthy Lifestyle

We all know how important physical activity is for health.

But it’s not necessarily easy to find the time and motivation to exercise. It took me many years to admit it to myself, and I will now admit it publicly: If the results were the same, I’d rather curl up with a good book and a box of chocolates than go to the gym.

There, I said it (and it felt good).

I envy and admire the fitness enthusiasts -- those who can’t start their day without an hour of running, enjoy a marathon, and aren’t happy unless they sweat a bucket every day. I was told that when I made it a solid habit, I would come to love and depend on exercise for my well-being. Well, it didn’t work for me -- even at my fittest, I continued to struggle with enjoying organized exercise. I love the result, but would still rather do almost anything else.

And just as I’ve come to expect healthy food to be healthy and tasty, since we’re supposed to put so much time into exercise (at least 30 minutes most days), I really want to enjoy my activity, or otherwise get a little added benefit for my trouble.

So this post is for those of you who feel the way I do about the fitness equipment in the gym, and don’t get excited about aerobic and spin classes.

The good news: It is possible to be physically active, fit and healthy without going to the gym.

What constitutes physical activity?

There are so many ways to be active, and they all work. The studies about the positive correlation between physical activity and longevity have not been about marathon runners, or people with gym memberships and personal trainers, but rather about people who weren’t sedentary, and who had a physically active lifestyle because that’s how they got around and got their work done, and because activity was a social norm.

For example, the Okinawa Centenarian Study examined more than 900 Okinawan centenarians and numerous other elderly people in their seventies, eighties, and nineties. The Okinawan people, who live on the island of Okinawa near Japan, are reported to have the longest life expectancy in the world, and -- what’s more important -- older people in this community enjoy good health practically throughout their lives, with very low incidences of cardiac disease, diabetes or cancer. Genetics play a role in longevity, of course, but other lifestyle factors are at least as important: diet (Can you guess? Low calorie, rich in fruit and vegetables, very little refined sugars, plenty of fish, and hardly any meat), regular exercise, moderate alcohol use, avoidance of smoking, blood pressure control, and a stress-minimizing psycho-spiritual outlook. Exercise on the island is not with a personal trainer in a gym, but rather consists of walking, gardening, dance and soft martial arts.

Similarly, there are a multitude of studies confirming the importance of physical activity in prevention of “all-cause” mortality, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, stroke, mental disease, cancer, and obesity (to name just a few). Most of these studies tested the prevention capacity of regular moderate-intensity physical activity (such as walking), and found it effective.

So after years of broken promises to join and commit to many different gyms and exercise classes, I decided to forgive myself for not having what it takes to be a gym regular, and decided to find my personal way toward an active lifestyle.

Making it fun:

Play:

I spend a lot of my time with children, both professionally and personally, and there’s a lot to learn from them. Most kids, I hope, don’t “exercise”; they play.

One of the things I rediscovered is how much fun it is to play: Catch a ball, hit a ball and chase a ball. It certainly beats waiting for the time to pass on a treadmill -- at least for me.

I enjoy tennis a lot.
I am terrible at basketball and soccer, but I play it with my kids in the back yard, and it gets me running. It was a challenge for me to do something I’m so obviously not good at, but I get points just for participation, and it’s a good laugh.

I also recently started loving yoga. It helps that the studio I go to has great instructors, is beautiful, smells divine, and has a store with lovely yoga clothes I like that I can treat myself to. It’s not really play, but it’s so enjoyable.

The social aspect of these activities adds a lot of fun. I like walking very much. But walking with someone I enjoy talking to is a double pleasure. The ideal walking companion is both interesting to talk to, and walks fast, but I’ll settle for either.


Active work:

I really enjoy physical work and a job well done. I get great satisfaction from seeing my day’s labor translate into tangible results. So, I took a good look at the jobs I paid others to do, and reclaimed some of them.

Gardening certainly falls under this. I edge my flower beds’ borders, prune the bushes, weed, divide and dig. Some of it is pretty hard work, but I don’t have the same “wish it were over” feeling I have when I’m on an elliptical, because my goal is not to finish in 30 minutes, but rather to get the job done.

I also get some satisfaction from more active housework. I make a point of doing my housework briskly and going up and down the stairs often. So although I don’t have the time and patience to do all the housekeeping, I do launder and remake all the beds weekly, and have a few competitions with myself trying to break my own record for how many tasks I can accomplish in how much time.

Everyday kitchen tasks can be more active if you pace them differently; you can do the cleanup after dinner almost as actively as a fast walk (this gives me another reason to eat on the porch as often as possible -- the porch is quite a distance from the kitchen).


Active habits

There are so many different ways to move more, and I’ve adopted some of them.

I don’t bring a chair to my kids’ soccer games, and instead walk around the field. I park in a far away spot (unless it’s pouring). I take the stairs whenever and wherever I can. When I’m working in my studio, I never sit, and keep my palette at the other end of the room, so that I need to constantly walk back and forth (this also improves the artwork). And we plan our vacations to be active vacations that involve plenty of walking.


I’ve come to accept that I’ll probably never become an exercise buff, and I will continue to struggle to get enough activity. But I think that I’m finding this way of making my daily life more active more natural, and it actually works: It fits a busy schedule, I’m quite fit, I get a lot of work done, and I only do things I enjoy.

Have you found your own active lifestyle plan? I’d love to hear about it.

Ayala