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Low Tech, The New High Tech

It's funny how we've grown so accustomed to having modern conveniences do things for us that doing things the old way becomes an unheard of, revolutionary act. We get so wrapped up in the ways the health industry has told us how to live healthfully - usually involving big cash outlays for gym memberships, expensive in-home exercise equipment or premium health foods that we develop a tunnel vision to their self-serving fitness paradigm and cannot understand why it barely works or not at all. We keep blasting away at the square peg in the round hole because brute force is how you achieve your goals. "Hey, no pain, no gain, man" - or so they tell us. And, I say this as someone who currently owns 3 workout machines and who once bought an ab-roller.

Now, don't get me wrong: like any activity, workout machines and gym memberships can be great supplements to the Cheapo lifestyle if you apply all the other blocking and tackling principles of nutrition management that the Fitness Industrial Complex (FIC) deliberately glosses over. The FIC knows that you cannot outrun your fork, but exercise is always more of an appealing sell because it sounds less restrictive (and therefore more marketable) to add activity into your lifestyle than telling you to make some subtractions from your food intake. Even my ab-roller came with a nutrition guide  - they knew the stupid roller was pointless.

Besides, athleticism is just more glamorous. We watch hours and hours of collegiate and professional athletes exercising on TV every year. The only food competition we watch is the hot dog eating contest on Coney Island where the goal is to maximize your calorie intake. There's a reason why Gold's Gym has 3 million members to Weight Watchers 1 million.

I have a couple of relatives on a little island off the coast of Italy called Ischia. They're older now but still as fit as can be and not for a lack of eating, as you might imagine. And, the foods they eat wouldn't exactly fall on a cheapo power foods top 10 list. Also, the idea of joining a gym or bringing home a workout machine would be so alien to them that once you explained what exactly is that contraption that you're wheeling in the door, they'd still be utterly befuddled as to why such things exist in the first place let alone understand why they'd ever need one. So, what's their secret? They freaking walk EVERYWHERE!

Now, granted, Mediterranean island life is not exactly like living in most places in the US where neither the weather nor distance to most destinations is always conducive to walking over driving. But, that isn't always the case, and if you live in an urban area, you have even less of an excuse. Otherwise, sometimes you have extra time, the weather is nice and the place you need to go to is quite a walk but still somewhat reasonably walkable.

Such was the case for me Saturday night where we had a party to attend, and my wife was to meet me there since she was meeting up with some of her friends right before. I had some time to kill, it was 60 degrees outside and Google maps said it was a 3.5 miles away or about an hour's walk. So, I decided to hoof it, and by the reactions of people I told when I arrived, you'd have thought I just told them I hang-glided in there.

I guess people have become conditioned to thinking about what's a reasonable distance to walk before you need a car - my guess is it's probably about 20-30 minutes. However, if I told them I walked 3.5 miles on the treadmill before I hopped in an Uber to get over there, people wouldn't have given it a second thought.

Most of the exercise part of this plan is just learning to leverage your body for completing tasks into the fitness routine you call life. Without even thinking about it, we turn to machinery to make our mundane tasks more efficient only to turn to machinery again to try to burn most the calories we would have expended just by doing things the old fashioned way. Every single task that you do that requires something more than clicking a mouse represents an opportunity for more calorie burning.

This isn't an absolutist system. Some people only really have time for a 30 minutes of a fast burn on an elliptical machine, or the only free time they have they still need to keep an eye on their kids or something. That's cool and totally understandable. The biggest key with this plan is nutrition tracking anyway, but I've found that the more ways you can sub in walking or doing things yourself without a motor vehicle or hired assistance, the more personally rewarded you feel and the less it feels like work in the form of exercise, which means you're more inclined to stick with it.

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