You’re Steps Away from Losing Weight

Thank you Nokia for sponsoring this post. Invest in your health by purchasing a Nokia Steel HR for yourself!

It’s a New Year and a great time to step it up with regards to your health and fitness.  We all have good intentions to exercise and watch our weight.  But oftentimes, the busyness and stresses of the day cause us to postpone our goals for well-being.

Sometimes just coming up with the time or money to join a gym, class, or invest in equipment (and the fashionable clothes!) becomes too overwhelming to start. 

Walk Your Weight Off

If you have big fitness plans but haven’t started them yet, why not start with smaller plans, like walking. 

Walking is easy because you don’t need any equipment besides a good pair of shoes.  You can walk in shorts and one of your many collected-over-the-years t-shirts.  And best yet, you don’t have to drive anywhere, you just need to walk out your front door!

Besides the health benefits of getting your heart pumping, breathing in fresh air, capturing some Vitamin D, and strengthening your leg muscles, you can actually burn enough calories to lose a pound a week if you walk nearly daily.

Simply adding 30 minutes of brisk walking to your day can help you burn 150 additional calories a day.  Walk 7 days a week and you’ll burn off approximately 1,050 calories.  Double this number by walking 60 minutes a day. 

Ideally walking 45-60 minutes a day (in addition to your normal routine) can help you lose weight faster.  Dependent upon your eating habits, you could lose up to 5 pounds a month.

Of course, the faster you walk and the more hills you climb will increase the number of calories burned.   Health.com recommends:

• Adding hills – whether on your treadmill or outside, this can burn nearly 20% more
• Try hiking – walking on uneven terrain makes your body work harder
• Swing your arms – swing your arms poised at 90-degree angles with your elbows tight to your body, this can increase your caloric burn by 10%
• Increase your stride – work on increasing your walking stride – you walk further during your set time and burn more calories

In addition, try varying your walking pace. Researchers at Ohio State University found that people who varied their pace during their walk burned 20% more calories than a steady pace. 

So walk at a steady pace, then walk at an even faster pace for a few minutes, then go back to your normal pace for 5-10 minutes. Keep this up for the remainder of your walk.

Lastly, walk with a good friend. It makes the time go faster, you’ll be accountable to someone besides yourself, and you’ll have fun doing it. You’ll actually look forward to your time together to chat, solve the world’s problems, or just take in the fresh air.  

If your friend can’t go with you, have her download the Health Mate app and enable in-app tracking so you can challenge each other through a weekly challenge. People who invite others to a challenge walk 25% more than those who walk alone.

Think you can’t dedicate a full 30 to 60 minutes a day to walk? Break it up into 10 or 20-minute segments.  You’ll burn the same amount of calories and now your walking is more manageable.  Take a walk in the morning, at lunchtime, and in the evening.

It’s easy and you can do it anywhere – even at the mall while your teenager and her friends are shopping. Your son has an appointment to have his braces put on? Walk around the shopping center. Your daughter has track or volleyball practice outside?  Don’t grab your phone to check your email, walk around the field or track. If you put your mind to it, you’ll find opportunities to walk.

What About 10,000 Steps a Day?

Should you strive for 10,000 steps a day? If you can, yes! But for many, this is a large number of daily steps. 

The key to get started is to get out of your office or off the couch. Yes, it’s been a tough or busy day and you’ve only walked 2700 steps. Shoot for 6,000. Don’t get overwhelmed with the number of steps to start with, just start stepping.

Setting goals for yourself and monitoring them can help you keep motivated. Activity trackers can be a great tool for this. Some are better than others and believe me, I’ve used a number of them.  

The Nokia Steel HR Activity Tracker

I’ve used a fitness tracker for the past 7 years. It’s either been on my arm, my waist, or my wrist.  Although I loved wearing one on my waist, I have lost too many trackers that have just “walked off.”  Wearing them on my wrist allows me to keep them long term.  🙂

For the past two weeks, I have been using the Nokia Steel HR activity tracker. I shelved my smartwatch to give the Steel HR my full attention. The Steel HR is a striking watch with its white face and silver accents.  

A few things I noticed about it right away. First, it felt light on my wrist, it isn’t heavy like my smartwatch. 

Second, it has two additional circles on the face of it. One circle is an Activity dial that says 100% and has an arm that turns from 0 to 100%. The other circle is a dark digital screen, but illuminates with the time, date, last heartbeat, the number of steps taken, miles walked, and calories burned when you press the side button.

The digital screen circle only lights up when you press the button or receive a notification. This is great for a couple of reasons. 

One, when you want to check the time during a play or movie theater, it doesn’t illuminate the whole area around you. I’ve actually had ushers actually come over to me and ask me to hide my watch when it has turned on during a notification.

Two, I can also receive notifications through this tiny digital screen, as brief notifications scroll across the circle. It is a much more discreet way to see what’s going on rather than the more obvious display on a smartwatch.

So this is cool, but the small activity dial proves to be very valuable, especially when trying to keep to your step goals. In the Nokia Health Mate app (Android/iOS), you can set your own goal with regards to how many steps you hope to take a day.  I put in 6,000 steps. 

The app syncs with the Steel HR to let me know throughout the day what percentage of my daily goal I completed. I love the visual at a glance. So no matter how many steps you put as your goal, the 100% circle will keep you abreast of your progress.

I used to walk 3-5 times a week for about 40+ minutes each time. I began walking after the birth of my second child. I gained 45 pounds during pregnancy and still had much to lose after giving birth to my precious 8 pounder boy. I pushed him in the stroller with me.

I had always seen the hill we lived on as a big disadvantage but found it was a huge impetus in helping me lose my “baby” weight with regular walking and good nutrition. Oh, and I’m sure nursing helped with weight loss too.

My son is now 12 years old and I sincerely believe that walking and watching my diet has allowed me to maintain my body weight all these years. I have recently gotten out of sync with my walks due to the earlier school schedule with my kids. But I’m using the Nokia Steel HR and the Nokia Health Mate app to get me back on track.

Here’s How I’m Using the Steel HR…

Watch

I’m appreciating having a watch again where I don’t have to press a button to see the time. I can see the manual hands with the Nokia Steel HR. I also like that my kids can see that not all watches are digital and yes, I can actually read the time quite easily (they still scratch their heads about that!)

I don’t need to charge my watch every night like I did with my smartwatch. I really appreciate the longer battery life, it can last up to 25 days. Even after 25 days, it will enter into power reserve mode and continue to measure steps and my sleep for another 20 days…just not my heart rate.

Oh, and the time is always accurate, even when I travel across the country…or the world. The Steel HR automatically adjusts to the time zone as soon as I launch the Health Mate app in my new location.

Sleep Tracker

Because the battery lasts longer, I sleep with the Steel HR on my wrist to track my sleep. It tells me how long I was in bed, how long I was in light and deep sleep, how long I slept, and how many times I woke up. It displays this info in a nice graph for me each morning.

The Health Mate app also gives me a rating to tell me how close I came to achieving my sleep goal, which is 7 hours. All of this information is tracked over time.

Nokia is committed to helping their users use this information to improve, so they offer different health modules for you to learn more about the data you are collecting in your app. I recently started one of their Activity Programs called Sleep Smarter. 

After looking at my sleep stats for the week Nokia rated me on my “Social Jet Lag” which tells you how consistent you are in your sleep from weekday to weekend.

My score came in Low, which is good. Social Jet Lag describes our habit of sleeping less during the weekdays and “making up for it” during the weekend. 

This makes our body almost feel like we’re living in two different time zones which disrupts our circadian body rhythms, messes up our internal clock, and decreases the quality of our sleep.

Dr. Till Roenneberg, who came up with this term and the research behind it, found that the propensity to being overweight rises about 33% for every hour of social jet lag. 

Definitely some food for thought, as there’s always that pull to want to stay up later on the weekend and sleep in past our normal waking time in the morning.

Activity Tracker

I am visually reminded every time I look at my watch for the time that I have not completed my daily goal. Nonetheless, every step is counted and sent to the Health Mate app for recording.

But the Steel HR can track so much more. It automatically tracks activities from walking, running, swimming, to 6 more activities. You can even manually log on the app more than 10 activities from volleyball to dancing to playing ping pong, so your all activities can be tracked.

I didn’t realize at first that the Steel HR activity tracker was water resistant.  I kept taking it off when I got in the shower but realized later that it’s no problem to bring it in the shower or to even swim with it. The Steel HR is water resistant up to 50 meters.  Cool.

Heart Rate Tracker

Not only does the Steel HR have a built-in heart rate tracker, it automatically tracks your heart rate throughout the day and night. Heart rate is a good indicator of your overall health and fitness.

According to an article on the Nokia Health blog, your overnight heart rate is a very reliable predictor of all-cause and cardiovascular mortality – which is a good indicator of your overall health. Studies show that better cardiovascular health is associated with a low heart rate during sleep.

The Steel HR continuously monitors your heart rate during your sleep so you can see how it rises and falls at different times of the night. For most people, the lower your heart rate, the better your health.

A heart rate tracker is a great tool while exercising.  Steel HR provides a continuous heart rate monitoring when you run and gives you a detailed report of your workout in the app when you’re done. You’ll see the workout duration, calories burned, and a graphical representation of your heart rate.

You can also manually initiate continuous heart rate monitoring during other activities like swimming, volleyball, hiking, whatever your sport is by pressing and holding the watch button for 2 seconds. Repeat this process to end the continuous heart rate monitoring.

Phone Extension

When my phone receives an incoming call or message, my Steel HR quietly vibrates and displays the info on the digital display. 

Although I can see the message, most people around me won’t even know that I’m reading the info floating across the screen. I also receive calendar events with the event name and time scrolling across the display.

I love the discreteness and not having to go to my phone to see if an important message has come in.  I no longer need to wonder who just called or texted while in a meeting, driving, or talking one-on-one with someone. This gives me freedom…and a longer leash from my phone!

A Mom’s Perspective

Overall, I am very pleased with the Nokia Steel HR. But then again, I knew I would because I am a big fan of their Nokia (Withings) Body Cardio Scale. It keeps track of my weight, body fat, water levels, and more and sends my stats each day to my Nokia Health Mate app.  

With the Steel HR and the Body Cardio scale, I have a fuller history of my physical activity and weight so I can track progress, identify trends, and make adjustments based on this data. 

I can see that when I’m less active, I’m more likely to gain weight. But now I have my sleep data too, so I have more information than ever to act upon.

The Nokia Steel HR along with the Health Mate app can help you reach your fitness goals by either becoming more active or to push your fitness to the next level. 

From Nokia’s Activity Programs to learn from to challenging friends to see how has more steps, Nokia has created an activity tracker and ecosystem to help you attain goals at your level.

While I was at CES (Consumer Electronic Show) last month, I went to the Nokia booth to learn more about the Steel HR.  I was amazed at the variety of band and styles they offer. 

You can buy the Steel HR in 36mm or 40mm, with white or black watch faces, in either a silver or Rose Gold color, and with a variety of silicone, sport, woven, or Italian leather band colors.

The Nokia Steel HR starts at $179.95 for 36mm size watches and $199.95 for 40mm watches and are available on Amazon with free shipping. And, for those of you interested, get 10% off at the Nokia Health store through December 1, 2018 here with this code: NEWYOU-E9N-60I

I was selected for this opportunity as a member of CLEVER and the content and opinions expressed here are all my own.