The exercise roller coaster

According to my provider, I should be working towards walking 5-6,000 steps per day by the time I finish the puree phase and towards 10,000 steps per day once I am three weeks into the 'normal' food phase. In practice, my daily exercise is something of a roller coaster! I've been wearing my Digiwalker pedometer (available from Weight To Go for about £23) every day - and one day it will read only about 3-4,000 steps, and another day it's over 6 or 7,000! Most of this is achieved by walking around at work - I've been trying to deliberately fit short amounts of walking in, like parking my car further away from my building than I need to so I have further to walk to get to my office! I've also been taking the 'long way round' when I have to move from place to place within my building! At the weekends when I get more time to walk, I can usually get in a couple of hours walk at least. Yesterday, I walked nearly 12,000 steps - on a lovely walk up Winter Hill in the Pennines (near Rivington for north westerners among you!). When I work out the average number of steps over the course of a week it's currently coming to about 5,500 typically. Given that I am supposed to increase this to more like 10,000 steps per day in a few weeks time I have a lot more walking to do.

I am not really sure how I am going to achieve this - because of the time factor. It actually takes quite a long time to walk 10,000 steps - it's the equivalent of about 7,000m or 7km, or 4 miles. If you walk briskly, this should be achieved in about 1h 20 minutes. However, if you're anything like me - walking briskly will produce quite a sweat - so you have to factor in the time it takes to change into some 'walking' clothes, have the walk, and have a shower and get changed when you get back! In practice, this kind of walk would take a couple of hours. I don't know about anybody else, but seriously, I will find it impossible to find this amount of time on a daily basis.

So what are the alternatives? Well, I am thinking of going back to swimming once or twice a week to provide some equivalent activity to 'steps'. I also have a mini stepper and might take to doing a bit of stepping while I'm watching the TV in the evening! One other option I haven't really explored yet, and that's using the stairs at work....... I think I would use the stairs more often if I was on the second or third floor - but I'm on the fourth - which is a bit more of a challenge.

Talking of which, I have only done 3,600 so far today so I have another challenge already - to increase to a more respectable level before I go to bed!!! Perhaps I should march on the spot while I'm cooking my dinner!! Ha ha! Hup two, three, four, hup two, three, four.....