Walk 10,000 steps every day
It’s nowhere as daunting as it sounds
There’s no magic to the 10,000 step number. It’s just a nice round number for a reasonably healthy walk. Our brains love round numbers. You’ll feel a lot happier hitting 10,000 than say 9,523 steps, so let’s go with 10,000.
It takes the average person one and a half hours to walk 10,000 steps. That sounds like an insane amount of time, right? Not really.
You’re awake for at least 16 hours each day, and you spend eight of those plonked in a chair at work. What are you doing for the other eight? Surely there’s at least a few hours of being up and about? How hard could it be to consciously move around for 1½ of those 8 hours?
Apparently really hard. The average sedentary desk jockey only manages about 3000 steps a day. That’s less than half hour of moving around. You can fix this today. Install Google Fit (Android) or Apple Health (iOS) on your phone, set it up, and put it in your pocket for the rest of the day. Open the app during your breaks and look at the step count number. If you’re not on target for 10,000, go for a walk. Walk around the block. Get into a daily routine. Take the time to get some fresh air, listen to an informative podcast, or just think.
If it helps your motivation to have that step count on your sleeve, get a Fitbit, Garmin Vivofit, Apple Watch, any Android Wear watch, or even the humble Xiaomi Mi Band. But do not use a cheap standalone pedometer from the local pharmacy. You want to log these numbers for your metrics. Some, like Fitbit, even let you compete with your friends for the most steps each week, which is surprisingly motivating.
Step counting is imprecise technology, so you could wear two bands and have them report a thousand steps apart. Don’t sweat it. The number only matters in your head, so pick one device and trust it. Ignore any calorie count estimate your band gives you because that is pure garbage.
10,000 steps a day is 70,000 steps a week. You’ll be surprised at how low the bar for being physically active is:
Hey, wait a minute! What about those new year resolutions? Aren’t you supposed to slog it out in the gym? Shouldn’t you pump iron or run marathons to shed the belly fat? Nope. Here’s a little secret:
There is very little correlation between exercise and weight loss, especially weight from excess fat. You could spend years working out and have little to show for it. Don’t waste your time.
Exercise has many benefits, but losing body fat isn’t one of them. The only way to do that is by fixing your diet, and if you want to do that without facing the terror of “going on a diet,” you need to understand what food is and how to eat well. That’s the next set of posts.
Olympic coach Christopher Sommer believes you should fix your diet before you embark on a new exercise regime (listen to it for three hours of mostly incomprehensible but utterly fascinating exercise talk). Typical advice is to eat a diet that matches your exercise requirements, but Sommer says this will only mask a bad diet. The moment you stop exercise, your diet will go haywire and you’ll start gaining weight.
Diet first, exercise later, but you still need some activity, so get walking those 10,000 steps. And hopefully you’re getting that blood test so you’ll know how to correlate it with your food in the next couple of posts.
Kilter is HasGeek’s humble attempt to provide a space for reasoned debate on how your body actually works, and how you can find your own path to good health via better nutrition, fitness and habits.
Tickets for Kilter are available. Buy them here:
If you want to propose a talk at Kilter 2017, submit your talk here.
