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12 Months of Fitness and Wellness
By Patrice Powers-Barker, OSU
Extension, Lucas County
The Truth Contributor
If I mention the song, The Twelve Days of Christmas
will you have that tune running through your head? As I
write this article, my mind jumps back in time many decades
ago to my childhood. We had a record of holiday songs, sung
by Disney characters and The Twelve Days of Christmas
dissolved into a silly mess by the end of the song with
Donald, Goofy and all the other singers. This year, Ohio
State University Extension educators, Donna Green and Beth
Stefura, introduced a new spin on the song called The
Twelve Months of Fitness.
Twelve months? What
happened to 12 days? Twelve months equals one whole year and
you are encouraged to build a holistic, healthier lifestyle
all year long! Also, the line changed from “my true love
gave to me” to “I gave this gift to me.”
This new song describes
all the personal benefits from sticking to healthy goals
throughout the year. In addition, don’t forget to give
holiday gifts to your true love that include healthy food
options or gift cards for equipment or membership for
physical activity. Think about the value of this gift of
good health for yourself as well as for your loved ones.
SPOILER ALERT: If you are
participating in the OSU online Zero Weight Gain Challenge,
you will be seeing additions to this song each week. This
article includes the entire version of 12 Months of Fitness.
If you want to wait for each new line of the song to come
out in the emails, skip the next paragraph and read the rest
of the article.
Here is the final verse of
The Twelve Months of Fitness: On the twelfth month
of fitness, I gave this gift to me: Twelve months fitter,
Eleven pounds lighter, Ten thousand steps, Nine fruits and
veggies, Eight cups of water, Seven hours sleeping, Six
tighter abs, Five min-ute breaks! Four leaner limbs, Three
inches lost, Two stronger lungs, And a toned, trimmer,
stronger bod-yy.
A few fitness and health
ideas to go along with some of the verses:
·
Looking for ways to add more water to your day? Are you a
tea drinker? Hot beverages hit the spot in the winter, but
iced tea is refreshing as well. Why choose tea? Green and
black teas have 10 times as many antioxidants as fruits and
vegetables!
·
Watch portion size to help maintain weight or to achieve
weight loss. It only takes two to three days for your
stomach to adjust to smaller amounts of food. Use the
Japanese mantra “hara hachi bu” (eat until you are 80
percent full) at every meal.
·
Winter is a great time to “play” outdoors. Go sledding, ice
skating, or for a walk in the snow. Bundle up and let your
inner child break free! Invest in a pair of flexible cleats
to attach to the bottom of your boots to give you good
traction. If it’s too cold or icy, find a favorite indoor
spot to exercise. It could be a community building to walk
in, a new gym membership or an online exercise program to do
in the warmth of your own place.
·
Need a way to count your ten thousand steps each day? A new
technology tracker for monitoring your steps makes a great
gift idea. You only have to be competitive with yourself!
·
Make a New Year’s resolution to eat at least one more fruit
and/or veggie each and every day. Want a change from the
same old, same old? Winter selections include lots of
interesting citrus fruits.
If the winter weather isn’t too harsh, take a walk on one of
the trails at any of our local parks. Have you visited
Wildwood Metropark at 5100 West Central Avenue, Toledo, Ohio
lately? Ohio State University Extension, Lucas County is
excited to be one of many community groups to decorate one
of the rooms for Holidays in the Manor House, a community
tradition for almost 40 years.
Hundreds of volunteers help decorate the home in different
themes for the community to visit. Our office is excited
to showcase One hundred years of Extension at this public
venue. The title of our room is “Celebrating the Holiday
Season. One hundred years of food, farms and families.” We
appreciate the Metroparks of the Toledo Area letting us be
part of this community tradition and we encourage you to
enjoy it! Holidays in the Manor House runs December 6-14
from 10:00 a.m. – 8:00 p.m. and it’s free and open to the
community.
The Twelve Months of
Fitness and fitness and health ideas were written by Donna
Green and Beth Stefura, Extension Educators, Family and
Consumer Sciences, Ohio State University Extension.
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