Walking

I was flipping channels last week and came across the show I Can Make You Thin, with Phil McKenna. It's about 75% hoakum but I TiVo-ed it and went back and watched some of it later because he was talking about "super charging your metabolism" and I was curious about what he would say about it.

Well, thank God for TiVo, since I had to fast forward through most of the show (and his visualization crapola) before I got to it, which was basically what I have already talked about with respect to increasing the daily activity levels vs some kind of formal workout program.

He said that overweight people tend to only take 4000 steps a day, where thin people tend to take 6000 or better. McKenna would then hand out a pedometer to some overweight person and tell them to make sure they get at least 6000 steps a day (never mind that it's a bit of a simplification and there is certainly more to it than that).

Just out of curiosity, I bought a cheap-o pedometer to see where I was at. I couldn't believe it when I got home from work in the evening and was only at 2500 for the day. And that was with a walk down to the corner store that I don't normally make. I have found that I will add about 1000 more in the evening, so normally I am lucky to be at around 3000 steps for a work day. For all of my talk about increasing activity, I sure wasn't doing it.

I am working on bumping that up but it is hard when I sit on my butt at work for 10 hours a day. Weekends aren't nearly as bad and I found I hit that 6000 steps pretty easily.