At the mo I can boast that I am coasting along nicely with a series of applications that are all part of my Kickbiking journey. The kickbike --and my journey with same -- is a metaphor for the whole package. It's a marker of what's cooking in way of my physiological makeover.Biking
I do of course kick -- I own a neighbour-made dogscooter and I've been kicking it along for a few years. I'm also only a few weeks away from obtaining a Kickbike (as can be seen to the left above --that colour too) which will take me up another major notch as the Kickbike is a lot easier to kick along than a dogscooter.
But I try to get out and about on my dosgscooter every day if I can manage it. The problem is that it offers journeys that are not as long nor as easy to execute as what the Kickbike promises. So if I shop I do it with the dogscooter -- but I'm not scootering it for the sake of a relaxing ride.
But as a shopping tool -- the dogscooter is grand. Its' my mule.
Boxing
The other core element is the boxing/box exercising. Typically I'm engaged so much that I doing background research on the sport, which is also called Fitness Boxing. I used to do Tai chi -- I even helped teach the form -- and somewhere within me is a memory of the complete form...but I think 'fitness boxing' is much better as a exercise medium because it pushes the physiological envelope and can selectively work on or rehabilitate focused regions of the musculo-skeletal and cardio-vascular systems.
It is also eclectic, flexible and pragmatic enough to be relevant to a whole spectrum of other engaged activities or sports -- from kickbiking to sitting at a computer work station.
What strikes me as very radical is the way that boxing fitness is harnessed. Its strict time quotients and surges of demand engineer a very intense and holistic work out. It may niggle you a bit in regard to the pain barrier but like all boot camps you soon get to graduate.
Eating
My sentence has been that as I age with my illness to accompany me, worsening ill health has progressed in tandem with weight gain. While I've always done daily exercise and kept to a reasonably good diet without much in the way of over eating -- genotype(my father was a diabetic) and the so often sentence of immobility has conspired against me and I'm pre-diabetic.
I would tear my hair out because despite my lifestyle I was being encased in a layer of blubber that in turn only served to further limit my mobility.
Over the past five years as my health got worse and especially over the last two -- it appears I have been sentenced to not only suffer big time but also to be further sentenced to increasing handicap and probably of a shortened time on earth.
I've hardly ever been an 'ideal weight' in regard to those codifying markers such as the BMI. Even when I was running close to 50 kms per week every week I never got below 75kgm and later I touched that weight only after spending a year on the Pritikin diet soon after I fell ill.
So my illness in serving to restrict my activity -- despite my exercise activities -- has also sponsored weight gain.
Since I've been a bit of a cynic when it came to weight reduction diets as they do indeed make you fat my life,nutritionally, has changed radically since I embraced the principles and logic of the GI Index.
And finally, albeit slowly, I'm beginning to lose it--despite the fact that in following the exercises I do, I am replacing fat with muscle -- which is heavier than fat.
So it is slow.
But the GI "diet" is a way of seeing food. It's a qualitatively very different approach to the nutrients you put in your mouth. And it's all backed up by scientific research and not crude caloric quotients.
The GI Diet is not only a way to lose weight but also a means to protect yourself from the toll or threat of Diabetes Type II because it has a kick arse approach to carbohydrate metabolism.
It is, as the rhetoric says: a GI Revolution.
10,000 Steps
Pulling all this together is the 10,000 steps program. This is a walking program that you run for yourself with a pedometer and daily use of the very interactive web pages. It is a program sponsored and promoted by the Brisbane City Council here -- especially through items -- like pedometers and videos-- you can borrow from the BCC library system.
Thats' how I got started by you don't need that entrez point if you live elsewhere.
But the good thing about 10,00 Steps is that it offers you the leeway to trade off walking effort -- in way of number of steps -- with intensity of activity. So I can enter my boxing workouts and my kickbiking journeys along with my walking as elements contributing to my present average of over 12,000 steps per day.
This anchors what I do a lot and generates a feeling for the big picture of all that I do in way of physical activity.
So the 10,00 Steps and the GI diet are a sort of orchestration of the total package I'm pursuing -- and, to my mind, the Kickbike is its symbol of the lot because a 'kick' is a totally holistic physical act.
Later on I want to see what I can do, despite my many handicaps, with such a machine -- the Kickbike --as a measure of my success.
