Riding, walking to work builds fitness into day
Five mornings a week, the 53-year-old mother of three boards a commuter train in suburban Atlanta, Georgia, and heads downtown. She then walks about a mile to her office at the American Cancer Society, where she works as a computer specialist.
“My doctor has been encouraging me to exercise for quite some time,” Fletcher said. “I’ve never been able to fit it into my schedule. Now it is part of my daily commute.”
Like millions of mass transit riders around the United States, Fletcher realizes that leaving her car behind and getting on a train is good for her physical and mental health.
Fletcher acknowledges she’s overweight. When she started walking to and from the train station, she weighed close to 300 pounds. She suffers from diabetes and was taking medication for hypertension.
She was surprised to see all that walking was paying off: “At first I started to see changes in the way my clothes fit, and then when I got on the scale I found I had indeed lost weight.”
“Here’s somebody in her work clothes, granted with tennis shoes on, getting good exercise,” observed Fletcher’s colleague, Colleen Doyle, director of nutrition and physical activity for the American Cancer Society. Doyle herself makes the same trek from the subway station to the office. Going to a gym isn’t the only way to get regular exercise, she said.
Doyle said she sees more and more people who are killing two birds with one stone and meeting daily physical activity recommendations by walking or biking to work.
For those of us living in Puget Sound, working in twenty minutes of walking should not be a problem. With all the hills there are here, it’s no wonder we’re such a fit area of the country!
Browse Encouraging Health for more health tips.
March 20th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
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