As mentioned a few weeks ago, my sister was in Uganda on a business trip for BabyLegs. While there, she met a young woman called Alice who, after enduring several tragedies in her life including the loss of her parents to AIDS and a motorcycle accident that nearly cost her a leg, was trying to find the money to continue her education at Nkumba University. Spring has decided to help this brilliant student complete her education in Development Studies so that she may help others in her country emerge from poverty and go on to live happy, successful lives. To that end, I’m helping her raise $2300 for Alice to finish her studies. Please use this link to donate as much as you can, however large or small. 100% of this money will be sent to Nkumba University to cover Alice’s tuition, books, room and board.

My sister Spring, ever the global trotter, is wrapping up her trip in Uganda. She’s been there for the last three weeks with her company, BabyLegs, visiting, educating, aiding and otherwise inspiring the locals and in turn being inspired, aided, educated and visited by her gracious hosts. She’s posted a wealth of stories and photos and in only a brief moment, captured a lifetime of memories. Read her blog here.

I was thinking about how messages in the media affect our ability to maintain or loose weight, get in shape and eat right. Virtually all ads, regardless of the product they’re pitching, paraphrase “as part of a balanced diet and regular exercise” in the fine print. For the highly motivated, that may be enough to get going and keep up. For others, they ignore the part that involves hard work and go straight for the quick fix. My thoughts turned more and more to finding indirect ways to accomplish fitness and weight loss goals and the small habits that can be changed relatively easily. I mean, I work out an hour every day. I made a big lifestyle change to accomplish that task. But what else can you do? My advice: Change some “little” habits. Like these:

• If you’re going up less than 5 floors in a building, take the stairs. You’ll get there in about the same amount of time considering you usually have to wait for the elevator.
• Make your lunch and/or dinner and take snacks with you from home. Take 1 main meal and 2 snacks. You’ll be less tempted to eat all of the too-large portions you get from dining in your cafeteria or local restaurant.
• Eat food that is as close to its natural state as possible. Eat a banana instead of chips. Eat fresh cooked chicken instead of frozen dinners. Avoid highly processed foods as much as possible. There are things in there that would turn your stomach. But that’s another post.
• Eat. Don’t starve yourself. The rule of thumb that I follow is this: To loose weight, eat 25% fewer calories than normal. To gain muscle, eat about 25% more. Of course, follow the advice above for best results. And follow the advice below to get a true measure of what you’re actually eating.
• Be honest about your caloric intake. Until I got absolutely in-my-face honest about what I was ingesting, I always significantly under-estimated how many calories I was actually consuming. I’d easily forget the latte in the afternoon or the beer after work. If you have to, count every single calorie you eat and drink for 1 week.
• Sleep. Getting a good night’s sleep makes more difference than you might think. Your body is very efficient at repairing itself and it does this work best at night while you’re asleep.
• Listen to music while you work out. And stop reading books or magazines on the treadmill! This is a favorite of mine. Reading makes you slow down. I mean, it’s hard to read on the stair-stepper. Listening to music helps you increase the intensity of your workout because it’s easier to concentrate on your movement and keep pace.
• Replace juices and sodas with water. All sodas are bad - I’m not afraid to make that generalization. Not all juices are bad but many contain high amounts of added sugars. Efficient cells are ones that are properly hydrated and they’re less prone to disease and abnormalities.
• Eliminate desserts from your daily meals. This was a tough one for me. My rationale was “I work out so I can have a nice piece of cake after dinner.” Eventually, I changed that to, “I’ll have a piece of cake on a special occasion but never after a normal meal.” Fruit became my daily desserts.
• Shop more frequently. This one wasn’t obvious to me at first. Until I realized that I was eating the worst stuff after the good stuff was spoiled or gone. Now I try to shop twice a week for fruits and vegetables and once a week for meats. I’m less likely to eat junk if I have fresh food in the fridge that I know will go bad if I don’t eat it.

These are but a few of the myriad of things you can do. They’ve worked for me. I don’t think I could ever quantify the results I get from these new “habits” but I know they’re helping in some small way. I also know that even though they’re small, they’re not insignificant.