Moms Should Make Fitness Important

As a mom of two little girls, I know firsthand that staying fit can sometimes be hard. It’s not that we don’t want to look good and be healthy, but we have a lot of demands pulling us in all directions. Sometimes, we end up at the bottom of our to-do list. After doing everything for everyone else, we run out of time for ourselves.

I actually preach the importance of exercise weekly as a leader of Weight Watchers. But how can we fit exercise, or what I like to call “activity,” it into our busy schedules?

When my kids were younger, I liked to take them on walks. I would push them in their stroller or wagon around the neighborhood. This made them happy, and I felt like I was getting in a good workout. As they got older and could ride their bikes, we started going to the parks. We like to go to Lake Seminole Park, which has a shaded trail for those hot days. I will fast-walk and my girls ride their bikes. We also like going to the Millennium Park. There is a beautiful boardwalk that you can walk and a tower that you can climb. My girls enjoy going to the top of the tower and looking at the water.

Sometimes I want a good cardio workout, so I go to the Seminole Recreation Center’s gym. If you are a resident of the city of Seminole, it is free and a great place to workout. I like to use the bike, treadmill and elliptical machine, but there are also free weights. A lot of people don’t realize that we have this beautiful facility. If you haven’t already checked to see if your city has a gym, you should check into it. If it isn’t free, usually it’s available at a pretty reasonable rate.

One of my favorite gadgets is my pedometer. Not only do I love it, but my kids love it. We try and see who can get in the most steps. Health and fitness researchers recommend that the average person should get 10,000 steps (roughly 5 miles) in a day. The pedometer helps count the steps and helps me make sure I am reaching that goal. I found I will take the longer way to do something just to get in more steps. For instance, I will park further away at the store, just to rack up the steps. My kids will use my pedometer and think that they are helping me get in steps if they run around the house or wear it while playing tennis. It’s pretty funny, because they actually will move more on the court while wearing the pedometer because they are trying to get the counter to go up. The pedometer makes fitness like a game.

My best advice is to make yourself and your health a priority. If you don’t make it happen, no one else will. The bottom line is we need to be healthy not only for ourselves, but for our kids. We are their role models; if we aren’t fit and healthy, how can we expect them to be? And we need to take care of ourselves so we can be around to take care of them.