Well Fed Network

Posted by Patricia DiGiacomo Eddy on Fit Fare.

I hope you’ve been reading Sarah’s tales of her time with the BodyBugg. If you haven’t, go on and read a bit now. I’ll wait here for you.

Done? Great! I admit, I’m a little jealous. I rented a BodyBugg-type device for 5 days last year from my gym so that I could see how my body was doing at burning calories. You see, I’ve had an extra 10-20 pounds on me for the past five years.  I know that there is one very simple way that I could lose that weight. I could get seriously strict with my diet. However, I love to cook. Cooking is even one of my jobs. So while it would be possible for me to stick to a 1200-1400 calorie/day diet and get my fat consumption down to around 15-20% of my daily calories, it wouldn’t be fun.

So in order to bump up my weight loss, I’ve started wearing my pedometer again. I know that 10,000 steps per day is the goal and we’ve all read about how it’s really helping Sarah reach her goals. I work in an office at least 8-9 hours a day though. Is 10,000 steps a day really feasible? Here’s a week’s worth of step logs to see how I did. I was definitely motivated to walk more while I was wearing the pedometer, but I admit, for this log I didn’t push myself too much to get my steps in. I just tried to be more active during the day. There are a few caveats to this log.

1. My pedometer is old and not exactly perfect. So for this experiment, I will consider anything over 9500 steps a success. I’ve tried counting steps and checking the pedometer and it is regularly off by a step or two every hundred steps.
2. I wear my pedometer from the time I get dressed in the morning until I get into bed at night. I probably get a hundred steps in the morning before I get dressed between showering, feeding the cats, and picking out clothes from my closet.
3. I wear my pedometer when I go for a run.
4. I will round to the nearest hundred steps.

With those rules laid out, let’s see how I did for that week days.

Day 1: I’m stoked. This is going to really help me lose weight. Hey, it’s noon. Let’s see how many steps I’ve racked up. What? 600 steps? That’s ALL? Ok, time to go for a walk. I wonder how  many steps I take going back and forth to the restroom at work? I’ll start taking the long way to add a few more. Daily Total: 3500

Day 2: Ok, THIS is the day I’m going to hit 10,000. 4pm check-in yields a total of 1000 steps. Ugh. This is harder than I thought when I’m working all day. Luckily I can leave work early. Time to go for a 4 mile run. Daily Total: 10,600

Day 3: It’s Saturday, a day in which I typically get a lot of walking in. Except this isn’t a normal Saturday. I had to skip going to the farmers market. I did take a walk to the grocery store though. That should help. Daily Total: 4300

Day 4: How do people do this? Today I walked around the farmers market, did at least 10-15 flights of stairs cleaning the house, vacuumed, worked a bit in the yard, and was in general VERY active. Daily Total: 4400

Day 5: All right. I am going to hit 10,000 today if it kills me. Today’s strategy is to drink a lot of water and use the bathroom on a different floor from my office every time. That, a nice 45 minute walk in the afternoon, and a few bouts of marching in place while I waited for my computer to do various things and that yielded at least better results. Daily Total: 7300. 

Day 6: Another long day at work. Even with numerous trips to the bathroom and at least 10 flights of stairs while I waited for my husband to pick me up from work, I still didn’t make my goal. Daily Total: 6100
Day 7: What is the recipe for failing to make your step goal? Easy. Have 4 meetings in one day. Despite a 30 minute walk in the middle of the day, I still only barely scratched the surface. Daily Total: 3700.

So, after a week, I only managed to hit the 10,000 step goal once. Wow. Sarah has my ultimate respect for being able to get her 10,000 steps in on a regular basis. I just got back into a good workout routine, so I’ll give it a week or two and see try again.