Guess what - your health is important!
People weren't made to sit at a desk for 8 hours, then sit on the couch for 5. Our bodies need to move.
As someone who has struggled to get enough exercise my whole life, I get the difficulty. It's real life. I won't deny it. And it's even harder when your life requires you to be in only a small handful of places most of the time. So I went ahead and did something about it.
I had been chewing on the idea for a while. I was afraid that, as is often the case, I'd buy a treadmill that would sit unused for one reason or another. Real reasons like the fact that it might be difficult to do my work while walking, or excuses that really just boil down "I don't want to". But I had been thinking about it for a while, so I decided to take action. I decided to buy the cheapest one I could find. It might be loud, clunky, and generally not ideal, but I could at least prove out the debate of if I would actually want to use it, and if I do, I can upgrade later.
It was a success! I use it! Here are some observations based on what I expected:
1. I went in thinking I might use it for meetings. I can walk and talk. I ended up hating how I looked bobbing and swaying on camera. I never use it on meetings.
2. The cheapest one I could find works great! It's not that loud, and it's not clunky. It's easy to move and store to the side of my desk.
3. I can actually type while walking on it. I can't walk very fast (1.6-1.8 mph), but it's waaaaaaay better than nothing, and it's easy to walk a couple of miles a day through the work day.
4. Using a mouse with it is actually much more difficult than typing. Since a mouse is movement-sensitive, point-and-click is actually quite a bit more difficult when my full body is moving back and forth. But hey, all the more reason to get better with keyboard shortcuts.
One of the core tenants of building habits is "Make it easy/convenient". Now that I can walk while working, being active is much more easy and convenient. The answer to our problems isn't often "if I bought this thing, it would be fixed", but if you can take an honest look at yourself and know it would, or even buy the cheap version to prove it out, it just might be worth while!