No Short Cuts

I do most of my walking/jogging in my neighborhood in Matthews. Its a nice well established neighborhood with friendly folks and mature yards and trees to look at while I walk.

I do notice, however, that during morning and evening rush traffic times our quiet streets have extra traffic from people too impatient to wait an extra minute or so at a traffic light out on the main road. Cutting through our neighborhood means many twist and turns, speed "humps" lots of stop signs (which nobody adheres to) etc to get around the intersection in question on the main street.

I've timed both routes numerous times and find that seldom does it really save time to do this cut through abuse of my tranquil streets. I doubt, however, that most of the abusers of my neighborhood ever bother to actually time their impatient pursuit of saving another minute in their day.

Same thing happens to some of us in exercise and diet attempts. We "run" the stop signs and eat more than we admit. We "cut" out some of our planned exercise routines. Meanwhile, unless we are the type who log our calories and miles etc, we try to fool ourselves we are still on track. Or perhaps we wonder why we are not making the progress we assumed we'd make.

You don't have to berate yourself about not being perfect. We should, however, be honest with ourselves for our own sakes. We need to understand the cause and effect of our eating and exercise. Without this brutally honest understanding of what is going on in our lives and our bodies, we run the risk of either failing in our attempt or, reverting back to our old fat ways over time. So eat right, exercise right and keep track of reality. Now get out there and go for a walk. Then enter your time or miles into your exercise log.