I will admit that I am a big coo-coo for coco puffs right now because of my new smartwatch and am going a bit nuts with it and logging everything that I do.
The watch will detect when you appear to be doing exercise and for me this was just me walking to go and meet a friend that was a few kilometers away. This was not exercise, I was not wearing exercise clothes, but it does kind of shine a light on how important exercise is, and how easy it can be to get it just by living your life and skipping taxis that, let's be honest, you don't really need if you have a nice spring day and you are just walking to a nearby friend's house.
I feel like it is worthwhile to point out that I was not trying to walk fast, quite the opposite actually. During the day it has been getting quite hot and I was intentionally walking very slow as to avoid getting sweaty and seriously took it easy. There was also a bunch of sections where I was waiting for the green a crosswalk to cross a busy street.
The watch takes these things into account and knows when I am moving and when I am not. The ending of the activity is really simple as well and you just hold down a button for a while to end it. On this particular walk it was where i found out that my Xiaomi actually asks you if you are in fact exercising when you walk for an extended period of time. I think it is nice that it asks you because my last watch would just record it without actually asking me if I was exercising and one day when I was simply cutting a bunch of vegetables for a massive chili cookout with friends, my old watch recorded me doing half an hour on a elliptical that I didn't actually do... haha
So here is the thing that I am trying to get at in my long-winded talk about this: Just your everyday activities burn a lot more calories than people think and it a lot of people's own laziness that gets them fat in the first place. When you are not on a deadline or late for something, what is stopping you from walking there? If the weather is good and you have the time, why not burn 100 calories and at the same time save yourself a lot of money on overpriced taxis? It doesn't make sense to me not to do that and I started to become more aware of this when my friend who had gastric-bypass surgery wanted to do exercise but because he is so friggin massive, he is very limited on what he can do.
Thanks to our dual recording we are getting good information about how much more calories a bigger person burns simply by walking somewhere.
I also was watching a documentary on how it is possible that competitive eaters who down 50 hotdogs in 10 minutes manage to almost always be skinny. When these people were interviewed about exactly this almost all of them said that they never do cardio, they just walk a lot every day.
Well? If someone that intentionally downs 20,000 calories as a sport or a living even can manage to stay skinny, what is stopping us?
For me, I enjoy logging my walks even though it kind of makes my strava a bit of a laugh riot to anyone that does actual exercise but since I am a bit injured at the moment, there isn't any real runs that I can do. Logging my walks makes me feel a bit reassured that I am not letting my health get out of control again.
It's up to you, but I feel pretty great seeing how these small things benefit me greatly.