Fitness goals: What are they and how do I reach them?

I used to have a lot of goals regarding fitness. Now, my only goal is to keep going. I do have a goal of a minimum of three days per week exercising, and a goal to eat nutritiously. All of this in order to maintain my health for as long as possible, or rather to do everything in my power to live a long, healthy life.
Every once in a while, I calculate how all of that is going. I decided to do that for the month of May. Examining my eating habits was rather easy. I asked myself how often I eat healthy versus unhealthy. Most days of may, I had a very nutritious smoothie for breakfast. My smoothie includes the following: plain whole milk yogurt, goat milk, spinach, carrots, blueberries, eggs, banana, turmeric, and now nearly daily--chia seeds. Often I include, kale, broccoli, cauliflower, or some other veggies. That's a very healthy smoothie and I have it for breakfast nearly every day. I would say I skip it once a week and on those days I have something else healthy, like oatmeal with blueberries, yogurt, turmeric, and real maple syrup for sweetening.
I take a few supplements as well, mostly to help with blood pressure control. L-Argenine, CoQ10, some super Resveratrol combination thing, and a multi-vitamin. I drink a cup of green tea at least five days per week.
For in between meals, I have Clif Bars, which are packed with nutrition. Sometimes I break down and get some street tacos or other fun stuff for meals. Sometimes even cheesecake or pie. I don't believe that anyone should forego everything tasty and wonderful.
So I think I'm doing far better than the average person on eating well. I am meeting my goals there.

As far as exercise goes, I do a variety of things to try and maintain a healthy body weight and good fitness levels. I make it to the gym, usually around four times per week. I take a walk on Sundays. I go hiking when I can.

My gym routine includes exercises for cardiovascular fitness, that is, aerobic exercise, and also strength training. My main aerobic exercise right now is stair climbing, but sometimes I am too exhausted and finish up with treadmill walking. Every so often, I start on the stair climbing machine and within 1-2 minutes realize that it's just not my day and head over to the treadmill to complete the allotted time. I generally exercise from 30 to 45 minutes on the stairclimber/treadmill, depending on the day. Each piece of equipment has the capability to estimate how many calories are burned depending upon a person's age and body weight.
When I finish the aerobics I will go and do about 15-20 minutes of strength-training on a particular part of the body--chest and shoulders, legs, arms and back, abdominal/core. I rotate through one of these strength areas each time I go to the gym. Except when I don't. Sometimes it's all I can do to get through the aerobic workout. It is exhausting. I find though, that if I go more than a week without tackling a particular body area, the next time I do it, I am hurting much worse the next day. It never used to be like that in my youth. Sometimes I skip the strength-training part because I have worked late and I need to get home, either to make dinner, or to pick it up along the way.
That being said, I manage to kill it at the gym

Here's what I found out about my exercise results in May.

On the stair climber when I averaged both the days when I go to the gym and my days off, I do 67 floors per day, or 1139 steps. When I add in the calories spent on the stair climbing, the days of walking both on the treadmill and outside, and hiking (the one 6.8 mile hike I went on in May consumed 2750 calories alone) I burned off 13,722 calories during the month, an average of 443 per day, not counting the calories burned in the strength training.

I think I'm doing about as well as I can. And if I can do it, you can too. It takes very little time to eat better. You can improve your fitness by walking a little each day, but if you have access to an apparatus, like a stair climber, you can burn more calories in a shorter period of time. You can even do some great workouts in under five minutes with no equipment. Check this out:  I've tried it and it's killer!

So, no excuses! You'll feel better by doing something about your health. Go for it!

Fitness: It's much easier to get out of shape, than into shape

I have found, through sad personal experience, that it's much harder work to get back into shape, once I lapse and let myself get out of shape. Here's my real life example. I had posted some pics as I reached or nearly reached my fitness goals last fall. I was in very good shape, physically. As a mail carrier, last fall, like every fall in the history of the U.S. Postal Service, business picked up because of Christmas. Beginning about mid-November, I personally became so busy, that I was making it to the gym only 1-2 times per week, when prior to that, I had been going a minimum of three, and more usually four to five times per week. By December, it was down to 0-1 times per week.
As the only bread winner of our family, as the year ended, I found myself needing to get more hours at work to help with some upcoming expenses. So I signed up for the overtime list. I knew going into it that doing so would have an effect on my ability to exercise, but I felt that our needs were more crucial and that I could withstand the three months that I'd be on the list (we are able to sign up each quarter). My trips to the gym followed the same trajectory as they had done during the Christmas season.
Sometime in March, it became unbearable and I removed my name from the list with two weeks to go in the quarter (though we can only sign up on the list at the beginning of the quarter, we are able to remove ourselves from it at any time). I thought that this would create the opportunity for me to get back to the gym on a much more frequent basis. At first, this is exactly what happened. But starting the next quarter, I got back on the list for my own work assignment. There are basically two levels of O.T. that we can sign up for. One is to work only the O.T. on our own routes, and the other is to work O.T. on any route. Since I am a T-6, I do five different routes on their days off, thus, any one of those routes constitutes my own work assignment should there be a sick call, or one of them on vacation etc. Generally, when I have been on my own work assignment, I have gotten far less overtime than when I've been signed up on the other list. That wasn't the case this time.
Our office has had a veritable cornucopia of vacancies over the past few months and this has moved people who would generally have filled in the gap on sick days and vacation days to other routes, and left me (because I am on the "own work assignment" list) to do those routes when needed. The bottom line is, I'm still going to the gym quite a bit less than necessary to get back into shape, let alone reach the fitness level I had achieved back in October.
All these months of not being able to workout like I should be have taken their toll. I'm experiencing physical ailments that I should not be experiencing and wouldn't be if my health regimen was in place. It has not only physically effected me, but mentally, as I have recognized what's happening, but been powerless to change it. I spent several months a few years ago unable to do vigorous exercise because of a shoulder surgery that wouldn't heal properly. So I know all the signs of poor fitness.
I have a solution to that. I have put in a bid on another route, a single route this time. I will get less overtime if I get that route, but I will have much more time to get to the gym and I will take advantage of it. I should find out sometime next week if I get that new route. Likely, I will and I will need to make adjustments on spending and/or retirement withholdings in order to make ends meet. But the peace of mind I feel will be well worth the sacrifices.
Just so you know, my exercise of choice is walking or hiking. I do a lot of running only because of limited time and I can get a lot more calories burned and cardio done in a far less amount of time. Actually, hiking burns a lot of calories fast too, but I don't have mountains close enough to do it frequently enough. I don't like running, and never really have other than when I've been in really good shape, it was fun to run and test myself against other runners. So, I'm doing something I don't especially like, because of the results I get by doing it. It's quick, and it does the job. But if I had the time, I would walk or hike for fitness.
My advice is this. Find an exercise you'll do and do it. Get in shape and stay there, but if you find yourself in a situation like mine, don't lose hope. With determination, you too can get back in shape. I'll be waiting for your pics once you do.

Thoughts on leaving the house with the wrong keys

I got up early this morning, intent on writing an email, getting breakfast, and heading off to the gym. All part of my vacation week regimen, part of which was a vow to get a workout in every day. I got the first two done and headed out the door, only to find that I had the wrong keys in my pocket. You see, yesterday, in my carport cleaning activity, I had placed the keys to the shed in my pocket along with my car keys. Inadvertently, I had hung up the car keys on the hook and left my shed keys in my pocket. Then I had not gone out again last night, so the car keys remained where they hung, and the shed keys slept peacefully in my coat pocket.
That wouldn't have been much of a problem except for the fact that I had locked the door behind me on the way out. That wouldn't have been much of a problem either except for the fact that it was near 7:30 in the morning, very cold outside (it was 30 degrees, and good thing it wasn't last week when the temps hovered in the teens at night), my wife had just gotten back to sleep, and the rest were still downstairs. I would need to wake up Ann (my wife) in order to have her let me back in, which I definitely did not want to do, or I would have to wake up those who still slept in the basement.
After a few minutes of thinking it through and enjoying a nice sunrise in the process, I thought that I would call Justin, my son-in-law, who lives in the basement with my daughter Rebecca and their four kids. I got no answer when I called. I tried again. I walked around the house hoping that I'd somehow awoken them and that they would appear at the top of the stairs. I phoned again, this time leaving a voice mail. Nothing.
Fifteen minutes had gone by and I was getting colder. The beautiful colors of the sunrise were beginning to fade and I was contemplating getting a couple of sleeping bags out of the shed in order to stay warm. I still didn't want to wake up Ann.
By then I had decided that it was unlikely I would make it to the gym. I made the decision to go for a walk thinking to raise my body heat. It would be a short workout, but it would fulfill my requirement for a workout every day. The walk took about twenty minutes and by the time I made it back, Rebecca, Justin, and the kids who go to school were up and let me in. I was cold, and needed to warm up. Justin explained that his phone was turned off. Ann who woke up later told me that I could have woke her up to let me in.
It wasn't the first time I've locked myself, and I doubt it will be the last. I just chalked it up to life getting in the way of plans. I won't miss the strenuous workout all that much, and the morning was nice, even if it was brisk.