Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Physical Fitness for Preparedness

One of the more important things for emergency preparedness is physical fitness. By this I don't mean you need to be able to run a 10K or bench press 200 pounds. However, you should be in decent enough shape so that if necessary you can walk at least 5 miles, or perform damage control to your home after a storm.

This is an area in which my preps have been lagging.

The men on my father's side of the family tend to develop guts, and I inherited the trait. In fact, it's been a bit of a joke topic among my friends. Compounding my natural tendency to put on weight around my gut was a bout of poison ivy I had last year, for which I had to take steroids to reduce the inflamation to barely tolerable levels. A side effect of the steroids was that I put on about 13 pounds of pure flab in the space of two weeks, and it never went away.

This week I decided to do something about it. On Monday I walked two laps around my neighborhood (each lap is a mile). I missed last night due to having to stay home with my kids and then a thunderstorm, but I got out and did another two miles tonight. Brisk walking is a good low impact exercise that gets your heart rate up. My wife started it a month or so ago and has already lost about 10 pounds, doing one lap each day.

As for dieting, every single person I've seen who diets has eventually regained any weight lost, and then some. So, I don't plan to diet, but I will try to cut out drinking any soda. I'm hoping that if I can keep this up that by the end of the summer I'll at least lose the 13 extra pounds I packed on last year.

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