Most of us could do with a bit of help to improve our fitness and weight.    A great place to start is NHS Live Well who can provide you with lots of idea and inspiration help us achieve mental and physical wellbeing.

Here are some of the most common themes GAIN get asked about with the links to the NHS Live Well site

5 steps to Mental Wellbeing

Eat Well

Exercise

Sleep and tiredness

Pain

Healthy Teeth and gums

Did you know that NHS guidelines recommend adults aged 19 – 64 do 30 minutes of moderate aerobic activity at least five times per week, plus strength exercises that work all the major muscles on two or more days per week?  There are lots of ways to build exercise into your life without splashing the cash, and definitely without the legwarmers or Lycra. Using MET values, you can even work out how many calories you’re burning while you mow the lawn or do the shopping.

Clearly, in an ideal world, we’d all be breaking a daily sweat and having a good old cardiovascular workout to keep our hearts fit and healthy. The reality is that most of us fall short of the ideal, for a whole host of reasons. However, every time we move, we are using muscle groups and burning calories, so even if your movement is limited, it still counts and it’s still worth doing. Physical activity at any level can not only help keep your body healthy, it can also help you sleep, lift your mood, and reduce stress.

In 1993, The Compendium of Physical Activities was published to approximately code and score physical activity by use of MET values (Metabolic Equivalent Task). A MET is the ratio of the rate of energy expended during an activity to the rate of energy expended at rest. For example, MET 1 is the rate of energy expenditure while at rest, so a MET 4 activity expends 4 times the energy used by the body at rest.

In 1993, The Compendium of Physical Activities was published to approximately code and score physical activity by use of MET values (Metabolic Equivalent Task). A MET is the ratio of the rate of energy expended during an activity to the rate of energy expended at rest. For example, MET 1 is the rate of energy expenditure while at rest, so a MET 4 activity expends 4 times the energy used by the body at rest.

To work out how many calories you could be burning off just by doing what you do every day, take your weight in kilograms, multiplied by MET value of the activity, and multiply that by the number of hours spent doing the activity (multiply by 1 for 1 hour, by 0.5 for 30 minutes, by 0.25 for 15 minutes, etc). There are a few examples listed in the compendium, which is available to search online.