Chasing Your Kids - Is it Fitness?

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.

Ask a celebrity mom how she stays fit and she'll usually demur, "Oh, I just chase my kids around all day." Insert eye-roll. Unless you've got the metabolism of a mouse, keeping your kids busy isn't going to whittle that waist down to the celebrity-standard size double zero. Either they aren't eating, or they're being less than honest.

But for the rest of us -- those who aim to be physically fit but a little more on the average side -- can chasing your kids all day count as fitness? I think so ... that playground equipment can be surprisingly adaptive to an adult workout, after all.

During this week's Walking the Walk experiment, I aim to find out exactly how much of a workout I can get chasing my kids around all day.