Hi RedPhoenix
BHcentral gave the absolutely best advice: walking! From my side I’d add eating healthy too.
Stage 1 (the first 1-2 months to get you back in a walking lifestyle)
The key is to start a physical training that is not too hard at the beginning. The easiest way is to go through your mind and buy a step counter (best ones are belt attached and communicate with your smartphone). Then start with an initial goal of 10’000 steps per day. Use every occasion you find to walk: use stairs instead of elevators, “intentionally” forget to take stuff when picking up something in the office so you have to walk several times the same distance, get your lunch outside the office at the nearby diner and walk to it etc. etc.
Then, when back in the evening at home, have a look at your steps and walk the missing steps to 10k in your neighbourhood. Do it every day, weekends included!
Stage 2 (advanced, months 3-6)
Now you are set into a mobility mood again. You know you can do more. Your weekly step goal now raises from 70k steps to 100-110k steps. So you have two options:
A) make additional long-time walks at stiff pace as intentional training units. Like a 5-6 mile walk twice a week. Best is in the early morning before breakfast. That will give you a feeling of energy for the entire day. Think about doing nordic walking by using poles (youtube has some great videos about the topic).
Or make long hikes on the weekend. Like 4 hours and more.
B) start changing your commuting habits. A lot of commuting can be done by foot. Either park your car far away fron the office or use public transportation and get off “too early” and walk the rest. Or even replace the car by the bicycle if possible. I’m doing that regularly on my way home and get off one train station too early and walk the last 8 kilometers. Takes about an hour and all the stress from work is flushed from my brain when I arrive at home.
Stage 3 (from month 7 on)
Now your body is back into fitness for good. It’s time to talk about strength. I recommend basic body weight exercises like situps, crunches, pushups, pull-ups and so on. Don’t set a goal too high in the beginning - but do it every day! Just one minute per exercise and note down the number of repetitions you achieve. Then add one additional minute per exercise per month until you have a 20-30 minute training unit of body weight exercises after maybe 4-6 months.
Stage 4 (the heavy stuff - not before a very solid musculature is available!)
Rucking! That is just basically hiking with weights - yes exactly what every soldier has to do in basic training. Rucking is the most intense exercise we can do for cardio and strength/endurance. You will be astonished how much a prepped body can achieve. I am a slim guy of 6 feet and roughly 160 pounds and will be 52 years in November. My rucking performance is actually carrying a 50 pounds for 2 hours and doing 5 miles per hour in average speed. If that interests you, we’ll talk about details next spring at earliest :-)
If your joints are saying no to rucking (can be a hard limit to be respected - I’m lucky on that one) then try rowing or long distance swimming as alternative.
You will probably not get the super-toned body with defined and heavy muscles - but the strength will be there, more than visibly suspected.
Other things:
Drinking: drink a lot, but only water! In hot summer, a full gallon over an entire day is not too much. It will help your brain to concentrate and you will feel fitter too. And it will automatically cut down alcohol consumption as you are never thirsty. In winter, consumption can go down to half a gallon per day. Just water, forget coffee or black tea and especially forget sweetened soft drinks! The backside? Sure, your visits to the lavatory will be a little bit more frequent :-)
Food: eat more and eat better. Eat 3 meals and 2 intermediate snacks per day. Religiously! Don’t let your body develop hunger feelings - you will soon notice you will eat less per meal, skip the second plate and have more energy for work and joytime. Avoid sugars and industrial processed food. Quality is king - eat organic food, a lot of veggies and fruit and if you eat meat or fish, only the best please. Start buying and cooking your food from raw products. Biggest meal should be breakfast, then reducing quantities over the day and the smallest meal being supper. By the way: by cleaning your teeth (even without toothpaste) after a meal the hunger feeling gets reduced too.
Alcohol: well, that is a hard one, but try to limit yourself to two beers per day. No liquors and hard spirits. The best alcohol is red wine as it has a lot of antioxidants, and drinking ONE glass of heavy red wine as nightcap is even recommended by the meds as cardiovascular prevention if there is no other alcohol consumed during the day.
OK, that’s a lot to ingest. Bottomline message: buy a step counter and start walking. The rest will probably follow automatically as you will rediscover the joys of having a fit body.