Please watch the video or read the text below. I welcome your thoughts. Thank you!

Welcome to Week 2 of my journey to regrasp my sanity in the civilized woods. The first challenge, daily walks, scored six checks and one X last week. This week, the score is slightly lower. I skipped Wednesday again, chalking it up another mid-week break thanks to the second challenge I put on myself.

I also skipped the 30-minute walk Thursday morning due to rain, but I made up for it by walking for 60 minutes Friday morning. Is that a check or an X for Thursday? Keep reading to find out. I don’t want to cheat but I want to make up for my missed targets. Perhaps I added the second challenge too early in the plan. Sometimes that’s just how I learn.

So, what is this second challenge, you ask? It’s 90 minutes of daily physical activity in addition to the 30-minute walks. 60 minutes on days with 60-minute walks. In other words, a total of two hours of physical activity every day of the week. This includes exercising but, here’s the scary part, I have not yet introduced any exercises into my plan. It’s forthcoming though.

All the additional physical activity was…you ready for this?...housework! Yes, you read that correctly. Cooking and cleaning for 60 to 90 minutes daily. And I thought I was off to an easy start! It’s not as though I stopped cooking and cleaning altogether. That would be filthy. I just lumped most of it into hours of weekend labor, only to sit on my butt the rest of the week.

Walking and housework were part of the first phase to get off my butt and prepare myself for the subsequent phases of this strategy. But here I am. Week 2 of taking mid-week breaks from two hours of daily activity. I can picture my grandmothers, and their mothers, looking down at me, shaking their heads, and saying, “tsk, tsk, so pathetic.”

Unfortunately, Wednesday and Thursday of this past week both get Xs for physical activity. Unless sitting in the car driving before and after a three-hour Thanksgiving meal with dear friends counts. Do talking and laughing burn calories? According to

a search on the internet (totally random), a lively conversation of 10 minutes can burn around 20-40 calories.

By that math, a 180-minute meal with lively conversation can burn somewhere between 360 and 720 calories. That’s probably a sizeable portion of the meal I ate so…not bad…right? Let me know by leaving a comment. In the meantime, Friday was a three-hour physical activity day, and I walked for 60 minutes. But I am going to keep the Xs for Wednesday and Thursday.

Total score after fourteen days? Daily walks: 11 checks, 3 Xs. 60 to 90 minutes of additional physical activity everyday: 10 checks, 4 Xs. That’s a good start, don’t you think? Silver lining is that I got a head start on one key phase of the strategy. Socialization. In my case, RE-socialization. Tune in next week. Thank you for reading!

Disclaimer: This content is neither advice nor instruction, medical or otherwise.