Bridget Jones said it best (as she often does) when she wrote in her world-famous diary:
Sometimes you have to sink to a nadir of toxic fat envelopment in order to emerge, phoenix-like, from the chemical wasteland. Now, I don’t think I’m particularly enveloped by fat (and luckily we now know better than to link ‘fat’ and ‘toxic’) and my chemical wasteland is a far cry from Bridget’s Silk Cut addiction but a wasteland nonetheless; a wasteland of too little activity and too many Digestives. I know what the problem is. The early January self-improvement self-deprivation fever passed me by, as I was tucked away in the Yorkshire Dales, and then there were deadlines and exams to focus on and then it was February and we’d all given up on New Year’s resolutions and now it’s March and I’m still in Christmas-hibernation mode. And it’s just far too easy, in this weather, to forget about things like salads and exercise and fresh air, and instead to focus on staying warm and eating toast and drinking red wine from fishbowl-sized glasses. So I’m going to try and walk 10,000 steps EVERY DAY in March (excluding days of genuine emergencies and illnesses, of which “laziness” is not one). “Why not start today?” my dad suggested on February 29th. I emerged from under the hood of my onesie long enough to offer “leap day” by way of an excuse. Who ever heard of starting a new healthy habit at the end of a month, or in the middle of the week? All wrong. So: Day 1, Sunday - breezed my way to 10,000 steps and even smugly went a few hundred over. Simply keeping my phone in my pocket at all times has, I think, added on a few hundred more steps without any special effort - just recording trips to the kettle or to the front door. 10,676 steps. Day 2, Monday - a volunteering shift at the library, trotting around to source Lee Child and John Grisham, followed by a few laps of the big Tesco hunting for lemongrass boosted my steps quite nicely, and after 5pm I could comfortably be entirely sedentary. 10,605 steps. Days 3-10 will follow...
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The official website of Yorkshire-made, Oxford-based writer Isabel Parkinson. Want fewer words and more pics? Follow me on Instagram!
(Header Photo: Radcliffe Camera, Oxford - Isabel Parkinson 2016)
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