WE ENJOYED dipping into a couple of hampers that friends and family had bought us for Christmas and although it was a welcome treat to indulge in the selection of pork pies, patés and home-made chocolates, the result was that we ended up a few pounds over our target weight by the time the new year arrived. 
And we can’t just blame the hampers; we’d been slipping a bit in our healthy eating ever since our holiday in Switzerland last summer. Whatever the reason, new year seems like the right time to make a fresh start.
We’ve been going for food with fewer calories, for instance soups and a kind of rustic stew of seasonal vegetables made with a dash of Worcestershire Sauce but we’re also determined to get out a bit more and burn up a few calories in the process.
Walking can burn somewhere between 100 and 175 calories per hours so on our 1 hour 40 minute walk to Thornhill Park and back this morning we burnt a good 150 calories or more – which I guess was about equivalent to the muesli etc that we ate for breakfast!
However, if we’d sat around all morning, we wouldn’t even have burnt off our breakfast.