Exercise made Easy

Ok now THAT is an oxymoron if I ever heard one .... Exercise made Easy.  We all know that Exercise is NEVER easy and if it is too easy it isn't exercise right?? 

Well I'm here today to tell you THAT is wrong.  Exercise is so easy - if we STOP thinking about it as Exercise and Difficult and Painful.

I found this great article at ivillage that shows how you can use/expend/burn 100 calories in anywhere from 10 minutes to 30 minutes .... doing things we all can do (and should do) every day.  The article can be found here

But in a nutshell - did you realize that you could burn 100 calories by

1)  riding a bike for just 10 minutes?
2)  doing a DVD workout for 10 - 15 minutes a day 4 or 5 days a week?
3)  WALKING briskly for 15 minutes?
4)  SKIPPING - darn that could make you feel like a kid again - for 15 minutes.
5)  JOGGING - add 1 or 2 minutes to your walking, twice a day and you can double or triple your loss
6) STAIRS - now I know why everyone wants to use the stairmaster ... again just 15 - 20 minutes a day (and get this one - you can do it cumulatively - heck I know if I can do it you can)
7)  DANCING - 20 minutes, that's it for 100 calorie burn - how long do you dance?  Bet its longer than that.
8)  HOUSEWORK - make it power cleaning and its 100 calories for every 20 minutes (and it gets you done quicker)
9)  CAR WASHING - and no I don't mean driving to the car wash!  To really clean your car you need to take 20 - 30 minutes and that's all it takes for 100 calorie burned. 
10) GARDENING - as the article says, even a small garden needs to be tending.  In just 25 - 30 minutes of tending to your garden you have burned 100 calories.  And if your garden is anything like mine (ok my "landscaping") you could burn a whole lot more than 100 calories just pulling weeds.  Someone in their infinite wisdom planted some sort of vine type plant LONG before we moved in and I can NOT kill it.  So heck just dealing with all the "shoots" could take me 30 minutes!

So as you can see - it doesn't take long to burn 100 calories and most of us don't even count these "negatives" when we are figuring out how many calories we need to burn to maintain or if you are in my camp, actually LOSE weight!  I know I am going to start looking at things in a different light.

Oh and stop trying to be "efficient" so that I only walk up the steps 10 times a day instead of 50 ........ think of all those calories I didn't burn by trying to be efficient.  Silly me.