Living the tips I write about every other week -- plus the healthy habits I haven't yet had a chance to discuss -- has really had a positive effect on both diet and fitness for me. Below are five of my favorite Walking the Walk tips. With January 1st just on the horizon, it's the perfect time for you to start walking the walk too!

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.

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.

Common diet advice tells us that we should be able to have our cake (or cookies or brownies or ice cream) and our healthy weight, too ... as long as we remember that treats are treats and are to be only eaten occasionally.

This works for a lot of people. And then there are the rest of us, the ones who buy a bag of snack-sized candy bars, intending to eat just one now and then, and then manage to devour half the bag in one sitting.

With friends like sugar, who needs enemies?

In every single weight loss attempt I've ever made, sugar was the thing that eventually tripped me up. But this time around, it's different. I've had a great deal of success, and I'm doing everything I can to keep those diet derailers from stopping my "downward" progress.

Since my biggest diet derailer is sugar, it has to go. Not for good, but for the long haul. Until my new healthy eating habits are firmly in place, letting myself indulge in even a little treat here and there is playing with fire.

Join me on this week's Walking the Walk, where I learn to live without my favorite vice. No processed or added sugars, period. Buckle up, because it promises to be a wild ride.

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.

It's weird to think that eating something that your body never actually digests can improve your health, but that's the story of fiber. Fiber is the part of a plant food that can't be absorbed by the body, so it virtually just takes a ride through your intestines.

But just by being there, fiber does your body good. It improves the health of your digestive track by moving things along. Soluble fiber, or fiber that dissolves in water, can absorb sugar before it's digested by the body, which can help prevent and control diabetes. Insoluble fiber prevents constipation and may lower the risk of colon cancer. Fiber can even help lower cholesterol levels.

In addition to all that goodness, fiber-rich foods help you stay full, a definite benefit when you're trying to lose or maintain weight. And since foods that are rich in fiber are also full of antioxidants and other healthy nutrients, you're getting a double whammy of good nutrition.

Most experts recommend that we get 25 to 35 grams of fiber a day. My challenge this week is to do just that.

Source

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.

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.

Part of my incentive for Walking the Walk is to better my personal health, and that includes weight loss. I'm already on the road, but I've got plenty of work to do. Being at home all day -- I'm a work-from-home mom -- makes it a little harder for me. I've got 24-hour access to my refrigerator, and it's easy to find myself grazing when I'm not really hungry.

Counting calories might seem old-fashioned, but balancing calories in/calories out is key to maintaining or losing weight. Limiting calories is only one half of the equation, of course; exercise is essential too. This week, I'll count calories every day, recording them in a notebook on my kitchen counter.

Here's the disclaimer: I plan on doing a doctor-approved 1500 calories a day, which works for me at my weight and current activity level. This should get me to my goal weight, losing 1-2 pounds a week. Your mileage may vary. So if you decide to count calories at home, be sure to see some of the basic calculators in the Making it Work For You section of this post to determine how many calories you should be eating every day.

Day 1: By lunch today, I've hit 800 calories. Though I have plenty left to get me through the day, I feel a little flutter of panic, not unlike my college days when my student loan money was always at risk of running out before the semester ended. OK, maybe not exactly like that, but what if some big emergency happens, like say, a double fudge brownie?

I think this is what they call an "a-ha moment." By learning how many calories are in the foods I eat, I can regulate how much I eat and therefore lose weight. Still, I can't help but look at my allowed calories column get smaller and feel a little nervous.

Day 3: I was shocked this afternoon to discover that a mere 11 tortilla chips equals 180 calories. No wonder I was having trouble taking off the weight, because I was eating way more than 11 chips at a time. I didn't count, and I ate them right out of the bag -- a recipe for caloric disaster. That puts this snack over the allotted 300 calories I've given myself for snacks, so I count out five chips and measure out my hummus. I'm totally satisfied, though, so that's a good thing.

This is definitely incentive to eat my favorite afternoon snack with cucumbers and bell peppers instead of chips. Better nutrition, and way more food!

Day 5: So what does 1500 calories look like? At my house, something like this:

Breakfast:
2 eggs, scrambled with 1/2 red bell pepper -- 230 calories
OR
Oatmeal, milk, and blueberries -- 250 calories

Snack:
Carrots and hummus -- 150 calories
OR
Apple and peanut butter -- 290 calories

Lunch:
7 oz. tuna on a bed of salad greens with a tiny bit of my favorite (sinful) salad dressing -- 290 calories
OR
A frozen low-calorie entree (like Lean Cuisine) with a small side salad -- 450 calories

Snack:
Kashi Pumpkin Spice Flax bar -- 140 calories
OR
A piece of fruit and a small handful of nuts -- 230 calories

Dinner:
Baked salmon with dill sauce, whole wheat couscous, dinner salad with garden veggies -- 600 calories
OR
Homemade pesto on whole wheat pasta -- 500 calories

And if I have calories left over, I enjoy an evening snack!

Day 7: You know what? I've decided to quit counting calories when it comes to non-starchy vegetables. The calorie content is negligible at best. Take the following foods, for instance:

• 1 cup of broccoli -- 40 calories
• 1 cup of cauliflower -- 48 calories
• 3 stalks of celery -- nine calories ... I mean, come on. Is that worth writing down?
• 1 cup Swiss chard -- 32 calories
• cucumber -- 30 calories, for the whole thing!
• 1 cup eggplant -- 38 calories
  
  

You get the idea. These foods are jam-packed with nutrition and carry little weight when it comes to calories, so to make my life simpler, I've decided not to write them down. Will it make a difference in my weight loss? In the long run, I doubt it. This is about teaching myself life long healthy habits, not about obsessively tracking every last calorie.

The best way to figure out how many calories you need to eat in a day is to know how many you're burning. Aside from your daily workouts and activity, your body burns calories just going through its daily processes. This is called BMR, and you can figure out what yours is here.

Once you know your BMR, then you can figure out what your daily caloric need is. Once you know how many calories you need to eat to maintain your weight, you can choose to eat fewer calories or burn more calories through exercise to lose weight.

To lose a pound, you need to burn 3500 calories. So if you subtract 500 calories from your diet every day, you should lose one pound a week. Exercise will speed up the process, of course, and you can figure out how many calories you've burned using this handy calculator.

Everyone has different calorie needs based on their weight and activity level. It's generally accepted by health experts, however, that no one should eat less than 1,200 calories a day. Though it's motivating to lose weight quickly, it can be harmful to your health. You'll lose muscle mass along with fat, and when you put the weight back on (and you will put it back on if you crash-diet), you'll put on fat, leaving you worse off than you were before.

Counting calories is only one part of a successful weight loss effort, but it can be an educational experience that can help you shape your healthy eating habits for the long haul. If you decide to count calories, be sure to check out our How Many Calories? feature here at That's Fit. In addition, there are several sites on the web that you can use to look up the calorie content of certain foods, like Calorie-Count, The Calorie Counter, and My-Calorie-Counter, among others.

Do you count calories? What kinds of tips and tricks can you share with our readers to make this healthy habit stick?

Got a Walking the Walk idea you'd like to see Bethany try for seven days? Share it with us in comments!

It's time to decide -- is this a healthy habit that can be realistically worked into day-to-day life?

• Piece of cake! I can definitely work this into my daily routine.
• Not my cup of tea. This is harder than I imagined. Still, I plan to stick with it and do my best.
• Nuts! This seems nearly impossible to keep up. But I'll definitely do it whenever possible.

Counting calories is not my cup of tea. If I wasn't working so hard at weight loss, I wouldn't do it. It's tedious and boring, honestly. BUT, and this is a pretty big but, it definitely helped me stay on track this week. Not only was I able to stick to my goal and lose 2.5 pounds(!), but it also taught me about making good food choices. I know which foods give me more volume for fewer calories, and by eyeballing my portions (I'm not a measure-your-food kind of girl), I'm learning more about appropriate portion sizes.

So until I hit my goal weight, I'll be counting calories. But I suspect that as time goes on, it will be far more of a mental thing and less look-it-up and write it down tactic.

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.

My healthy habits took a slide this summer. Maybe more like a nosedive. Maybe even more like a quick, slippery dunk into the deep end of the junk-food pool. There's something about long days spent at the beach that makes me think more potato chips and chocolate cookies than fresh, green salads. This fall, I'm working hard to reclaim those healthy ways, one step at a time.

Though fruits and vegetables are always part of our daily diet at my house, I've caught myself frequently grabbing a simple bowl of cereal for breakfast or throwing together a sandwich for lunch, rather than slicing and chopping to add those delicious, nutritious fruits and veggies to my meals. Standard nutritional advice says that we should all be eating a minimum of five to nine servings of fruits and vegetables a day, a goal that can be difficult to reach unless you incorporate these nutritional powerhouses into every single meal and snack. This week, that's exactly what I'll do.

To prepare for the week, I made a quick run to the store today. I loaded up on some favorites -- cucumbers, colored peppers, watermelon, and fresh cantaloupe. In a couple of days, our CSA crate will arrive, full to the brim with tomatoes, kale, corn, salad greens, more cucumbers, green peppers, summer squash, and green beans. And a few days after that is our weekly trip to the farmer's market, where I can load up on more favorites like leeks, and those tiny little gold tomatoes we love so much. If there is ever a season to reacquaint yourself with fruits and vegetables, this is it.