The Essentials: A Healthier Meeting (Premium)

A couple weeks back, Paul wrote up the changes in his lifestyle that will help him stay above ground with a smaller waistline. While I do not plan to give up beer anytime soon and a mozzarella stick is an essential game day snack, I have adopted a few changes to my daily routines that have kept me healthier.

Working from home has many benefits such as having a full fridge at your disposal and no coworkers who talk too loudly on the phone. The downside is that if you aren't paying attention to what you are physically doing, you can sit in a chair for 8 hours and never walk around.

This was exactly my issue because on an average day, after keeping tabs for a week last December, I would walk less than 700 steps; this was a problem. While I was going to the gym a couple days a week, I felt like I was slowly killing myself sitting all day in my basement.

What I did to combat this lack of movement is that during every meeting, I would walk around my house. To my co-workers who are reading this, you will now know why my webcam is never turned on, it's because I am hardly in front my computer when we talk.

We have at least two weekly huddles and during every meeting, I walk...I either pace back in forth in my basement or do laps around upstairs. After a few weeks of doing this, I started walking during every feasible meeting including pre-briefings with Microsoft, client engagements, and every other time when possible.

The key to all of this, of course, is that people on the other end don't notice that you aren't sitting at your desk and after 11.5 months of walking, no one ever found out...until this post.

If you are wondering how far you can walk in your own home with an average of 5 meetings per week that last one hour; I have walked over 30 miles. Sometime around the summer, I added in a flight of stairs to my routine to add a bit more vigor to the paths that I created but the idea is all the same, during meetings I need to be moving.

During the course of a year, many recommended standing desks but they don't work for me. I did try standing and working but for someone who primarily writes for a living, it's not an ideal setup.

A few other tricks I have incorporated into my routine is only using the bathroom in my house that is furthest away from me at all times, whenever I use the microwave I do either pushups or sit-ups while it's running, and if I want to drink a soda/pop/cola, 10 jumping jacks. It may sound ridiculous to be jumping and walking all around my house, but it helps keep my energy up and my attitude as well.

I'm 6ft 2in in height and my weight, for the past 8 years, has been between 170-180 lbs. I started using the Withings (now Nokia) scale to track my weight in February and without a serious diet change (although I do drink much less pop/soda/cola now), you can see my weight is consistently around 175, rather than 180.

I'm not exactly a 'large' person to begin with and have typically been on th...