Welcome to Walking the Walk, a feature that takes a deeper look at commonly shared diet and fitness advice. Every other week, I'll choose one piece of advice and practice it for seven days. Then I'll report back on what I discovered about making it work in real life and how it affected my own personal fitness -- and how it ultimately can affect your own efforts.

When I returned home from driving my daughter to school last week, I found my husband waiting for me. "You drove?" he said, his eyebrows up. "We were late!" I argued. He rolled his eyes. "It's coooollld," I whined. This got nowhere with the man who rides his bike through blizzards.

I couldn't argue with him because he had a valid point. It's silly for me to fire up our minivan when, if not for a few houses, I can practically see the school from our front porch. (But we were late!) Walking my daughter to school and home again is an easy way to get an extra 20 minutes of physical activity into my day.

According to WalkScore, my neighborhood scores a 60 out of 100 for walk-ability. By walking 15 minutes or less, I can reach video stores, convenience stores, a fruit market, multiple parks, a pharmacy, restaurants, a hair salon (though not my hair salon), school and extra-curricular activities, my husband's workplace, and our city's downtown. We already sold one of our cars, and if I want to be honest with myself, there's often little reason for us to use our other vehicle.

It's easy to become sedentary when you work from home. I was shocked last winter when I put on a pedometer to count my daily steps, which experts say should add up to a minimum of 6,000 a day, and optimally 10,000. Walking just makes good sense -- it gets me moving, keeps me healthy, and saves on gas. So my rules for this week's Walking the Walk are this:

• If I can walk to it in less than 15 minutes, I will.
• If I can't, I'll try to bike it. If not, then I'll park in the farthest parking spot possible so I can still benefit from the extra steps.
• No elevators or escalators allowed -- it's all stairs for me!
  
  

Click "next" to find out how the week went.