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Cabin Fever
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This time of year it becomes increasingly difficult to get the proper amount of exercise. The Beginning of the year finds us sitting on our collective couches more and more. With the days just starting to get longer, it is still dark most of your home hours. Another road block, that actively prevents your exercising, is the cold weather.
These are just some of the reasons (see also: excuses,) that people use to avoid exercising, or really doing much of anything for that matter these first few months of the year. As I mentioned in a previous article, gym's around the country are busiest the first two weeks of the year because everyone makes their new years resolution. Whatever the reasons/excuses, this is the time of year whenever we need exercise most. Why you ask do we need exercise so much now? There are many reasons.
The first is that we have just finished the holidays, where everyone basically gets a free pass on eating anything resembling healthy. Second, since the days are shorter, people are more susceptible to Seasonal Affect disorder from the lack of daylight. Exercise can counteract this phenomenon due to the increase in endorphins related to exercising. There are countless other reasons, but the third one I would like to point out is that we simply tend to be lazy this time of year.
This sort of cabin fever syndrome starts around the end of January and can last until April for some. You can look at this like our hibernation period. We tend to eat more, do less and build up fat for the upcoming spring and summer months where we will hopefully burn all of it off. Since more often than not, we actually do not burn off all the weight we put on during these months, it is important to limit the fat increase. 
There are many things you can do, all of them very easy, but the main objective is to simply get up off the couch and do something. One thing I tell my patients to do quite often during these months is that if you feel as though you must watch TV in the evening while at home, get up and walk around the room during the commercials. Just by doing this you will get a very light amount of exercise for about 7 minutes out of every 30 watching TV. If you watch an hour and a half of TV each night, that is a little over 20 minutes just in walking.
This may seem like a trivial amount of exercise and really not that beneficial, but it sure beats sitting for all that time. If you want to make it a little more difficult, you can add standing squats to your walking. With each lap around the room, stop and crouch down till your thighs are parallel with the ground, come back up and start again. You can implement push ups or sit ups if you are feeling really energetic, but lets just start with the walking during commercial breaks.
