Ej Ogenyi: If Your Life is So Busy, Why Aren’t You Losing Weight?

You wake up very early and start your day at breakneck speed. Regardless of how you spend your day, it starts with activity and ends with you wondering where the hours went. It feels like you didn’t have the time to put your feet up all day. As you get ready for bed, you look yourself in the mirror and wonder why being this busy day in day out isn’t translating to losing the weight that you’d like to. In fact, you might find yourself gaining weight.

If this sounds like you, the first thing you need to understand that might help ease your frustration is that being busy and being active are two different things. Being busy is having a lot of things to do in the fixed time you have while being active takes some conscious effort to move your body within that busy schedule. Also, you might be ignoring how you eat if you’re relying on being busy to lose weight. So let’s look at being active and how you’re eating in more detail.

Are You Really as Active as You Think You Are?
Being busy and being active are not the same things. Being busy might mean that you spend a lot of time answering customer questions on the phone or at your computer doing your job. Being active means actually moving your body in space and using your muscles in ways that burn calories while you do these activities.

The most effective way to determine how active you are is to use an activity tracker. You can do this by getting your hands on a pedometer or another type of activity tracker to see if you are actually spending time moving around all day or if the exhaustion is a result of things like not getting enough sleep, staring at a computer for too long, or dealing with stressful people at your job.

If you’re interested in getting a tracker, click here to read how to select the best activity tracker for your goals and your lifestyle.

Are you Eating in a Way to Support Your Weight Loss?
When you spend so much of your time attending to the work you have to do and the other people in your life, what you eat might be the last thing on your mind. This is especially true if you think that being so busy should mean that you’re getting all the activity that you need to compensate for your diet.

Even if you’re getting all the activity that you need, that doesn’t condone a bad diet. The alternative – a healthy diet – isn’t something that you do for a few weeks and give up when you see the results that you want. A healthy diet includes a good mix of whole grains and healthy sources of carbohydrates, lean proteins, fruits, and vegetables. More importantly, a healthy diet that’ll help you lose weight includes all this in moderate amounts and in a way that you can sustain for the long-term.

Now – Are You Ready to Get More Active?
If you are, I’ve written a handy post that can help you get started with fitting exercise into your busy schedule. But if you can’t even see yourself making time for that right now try something as simple as taking several 5 – 10 minute walking breaks everyday. It might not drop the weight off you immediately, but it’ll start injecting some actual activity into your busy day. Plus, it might get you thinking about what more you can do to be active when you see yourself doing this successfully.

And to help you eat healthier, stay tuned in the coming weeks to learn the components of a healthy diet and how to adapt these components into your busy lifestyle. For now, answer me this: are you actually active or are you just busy? And if you aren’t active, do you see yourself taking steps to fit formal activity into your schedule?