March On!

I bought a pedometer recently. It seemed like a good idea to measure whether I was walking enough to burn off the calories I'm forever consuming. I used to do masses of exercise at one time, and never needed to worry about how many calories I was stuffing into my body – but more recently, I've become somewhat indolent. I was reading somewhere that to maintain a decent weight, one has to take at least 10,000 steps each day. A magazine devoted to country walking recommends doing 12,000 steps if one wants to lose weight. How this is calculated, I don't know – I mean, doesn't it depend on the number of calories one intakes per day? Some people eat more than others – I'm sure you've noticed that.

So, innocently thinking that my pedometer would be for research purposes only, I joyfully clipped it to my belt. But now, I have become its unwitting slave. Everything I do is in mind of adding to that mischievous little counter. I find myself almost deliberately forgetting things from the bedroom so that I have to walk back in there to collect it. I take the stairs whenever I can (the lift in my apartment building is often breaking down anyway); I rush to the shops when I don't even need to buy anything. I invent reasons to walk from one end of the office to another; I go for a walk around the lake in my lunch hour. I pace my apartment whenever I'm on the phone; I pound up and down on my little stepper when I get home from work. I'm a walking god!

So, you can imagine my disappointment when I check my pedometer at the end of the day and discover that at best, I've done about 8,500 steps – sometimes much worse; as low as 5,000 one day. No wonder I'm getting fatter by the minute. It really is quite a blow. I don't know for sure quite how the damned thing works, but I'm assuming that it must require some kind of rhythmic jolt before it flips the counter over to the next number. I've tested this by swinging it backwards and forwards, but nothing seems to happen. Only a firm stride will tease it into inceasing that magic number. This means that riding my recently re-discovered bike won't help increase my daily count either. Oh dear, what's to be done?

I have this elusive goal of 10,000 steps to reach and I'm running out of ideas of how to do it. What should be a simple task is proving to be more difficult than I thought. I must not lose the fight. Sitting here writing this is no good either – the counter remains as still as the chair I rest my fat arse upon. I must up and away! How many steps to my bed, I wonder? Will I be able to waddle there at all?