Walking Challenge 2012: A year of walking and reflecting…

~Monday~
 

Go to November's Walking Challenge 2012 Entry | See All Walking Challenge 2012 Entries
And so it ends.

After watching this video on January 2, 2012:

I took on the challenge of making myself walk for at least 30 minutes every day for the rest of the year.

I was successful on 342 days of the 365 days of 2012. I'm blaming 22 of my unsuccessful days on knee surgery that I had in March, and the other unsuccessful day on my back being out.

They say that it takes three weeks to form a habit—albeit this article debunks that as a totally arbitrary number that may have come from a 1960 publication by a plastic surgeon who noticed that amputees took, on average, 21 days to adjust to the loss of a limb and he argued that people take 21 days to adjust to any major life change—but this I can attest to: A habit definitely gets formed doing something almost every day for an entire year.

Walking

In fact, it wasn't until I was on the way to the gym on January 1, 2013 that it occurred to me, "Oh, 2012 is over, so I don't have to get in a 30-minute walk today," and once there, I decided to do 30 minutes on the elliptical machine instead.

With that said, I was pretty much a slug this month reaching only the minimum 30-minute walking requirement every day except one, on which I did a whole ten minutes more. Between that and the calorie intake noted in the eating section, well it's easy to see why what happened in the weighing section did. 

Here are the walking numbers for every day in December (click to enlarge):

Background photo: A street name in Key West that always makes me smile, which I walked past at the tail end of one of my 30-minute walks while down there on vacation mid-December.

Eating

I post this gorge-fest without comment. Oops. Too late.

Full disclaimer: Several of these days, in terms of the "Cals Eaten" numbers, were estimated, as I spent so much of the day eating that there was no time to record it.

Note: The calories burned include those from both my daily walks, and for other exercise I do at the gym, 5-7 days a week, including: 3 stretching exercises, 300 ab crunches (with weights added to the bench), and then either an upper body or a lower body workout.

Weighing

Trust me, it's not pretty naked, either.

Here are the official December weigh-in numbers (click to enlarge):

Reflecting

Here are some reflections about this month's experience and the year-long challenge overall:

• I'm absolutely disgusted, disappointed, and disillusioned with my weight gain again this month, and even more so about putting back on one-third of the weight I'd lost over the course of the year.
• With that said, I'm grateful to be 20 pounds lighter than I was at the beginning of the year, and I'm ready to, as Susan Powter would say, "stop the insanity"—and get back on track.

Concluding

• Over the course of this year:
  • I walked for 13,426 minutes, or just short of 223 hours. Walking for 223 hours contiguously would take 9.3 days.
  • I walked for 697.3 miles. That’s like walking from Raleigh to Providence, RI.
  • I burned off a total of 82,800 calories doing all that walking. That's about 23.6 pounds worth of calories at 3500 calories per pound.
  • My average walk time was for 41.4 minutes.
• I am as happy to be done with this challenge as I am grateful to have done it.
• Ask your doctor if getting off your ass is right for you.

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Go to November's Walking Challenge 2012 Entry | See All Walking Challenge 2012 Entries