Follow in my steps

Ron Rothenberg
4 Buyers Real Estate

 

 

“Walking is man’s best medicine” – Hippocrates, 3rd Century B.C.

 

When I was 11, a friend’s mother bought me a stopwatch. I timed everything. I timed baseball games, I timed radio newscasts, I timed how long it took me to pee. How did she know that it was such a perfect gift?


 

Just recently I bought a Fitbit Flex™, a little activity tracker that goes around my wrist and measures just how active I am. I bought it after I went to a lecture by CEO of one of the largest biotech firms in Cambridge, and saw him wearing one. This devilish little device has me wanting to please it, making me feel guilty when I don’t walk my 10,000 steps each day. It’s been very effective.


 

I knew I liked to walk, and walked a lot, but I didn’t know how much I was moving the rest of the day. At least part of every day I spend seated, at a desk, not moving anything but my fingers.


 

Another part of most days I spend looking at houses. I walk around, go up and down stairs, survey the yard, walk down the street and talk to neighbors.


 

According to my fitbit, I walked over 3000 steps and burned hundreds of calories today, previewing five houses, and spent almost an hour in light- to moderate activity, some part of it walking up and down stairs, which counts as even more activity. That’s good news, that’s about a third of my daily quota of steps.


 

Now, this is not an ideal fitness plan, because at brokers’ open houses, they also serve cookies and treats as bait, to get brokers to look at houses. That’s devilishly effective, too.


 

Anyway, it’s good to know that house hunting is indeed good for my health.