How I Used My Pedometer To Lose 6kg in 6 Weeks
Due to a recent injury, I found myself inactive for six weeks. During that time I managed to continue eating the same way that I was eating previously. Leading to me putting on a few extra kilos , that I wasn’t entirely happy with. So I set about challenging myself to lose the weight I had gained and find my sense of health and wellbeing again.
I thought it would be interesting to try and do this using Samsung health step tracker on my watch. Prior to the injury I had been tracking at about 20,000 steps per day, due to the work that I do, and generally just being an active person. Whilst I injured my step count fell to about four and a half thousand per day. Surprisingly, not too far off what the 5000 steps a day the average person does according to this study.
Why I chose to measure my steps
Steps are a simple and easy thing for me to measure, due to my watch doubling as a pedometer. Dr. Catrine Tudor-Locke found that in this study that people who walked more steps each day, on average weighed less and had lower BMI’s. Generally to lose weight, it is recommended that energy expenditure increase or energy intake be decreased. YOu can read all about energy balance here. By increasing my steps I was going to be increasing my energy expenditure. Assuming I did not change my diet (which I tried not to do) then through this self experiment I can attribute my weightloss to the increase in energy expended by walking more steps each day. Although I am sure many of you will recognise that this experiment might not hold up to the rigours of peer review. However, I persevere.
How I measured my steps
What I discovered in the Samsung health dashboard was it tracked not only my steps, but also my active time giving me a number of kilometers walks and a relative number of calories burned during that time. I am also able to use my watch to track my workouts connects Samsung health to My Fitness Pal to track my food could track my sleep or my white water stress and weight management, to name just a few others, but I was primarily focused on the step counter information and weight tracking for this challenge.
How I used weekly averages to ‘step it up’ each week
I’ve been able to use the step tracker, to give me a weekly average for each week, and then set that as a target for the following week, allowing me to focus on achieving a certain step target each day. Once I achieved my daily target I stopped counting and focusing on my steps. Often I found that I would achieve my target early in the afternoon so I still managed to do a few hundred or so steps, over and above my target. At the end of the week, I might have done a total of seven to 10,000 steps more than the previous week total (about 1300 extra steps per day). This new average then become my new target for the following week, letting me ‘step it up’ each week with an achievable number of steps as I already proved I could do it the previous week.
What happened over the course of the 6 weeks
Over the last four or five weeks I’ve been able to increase my steps from four and a half thousand back up to 15,000 steps per day this week. The interesting thing I noticed during this exercise is that I didn’t find a difficult to increase my steps. I didn’t really have to change much about what I did. Occasionally I found I am went on an extra little walk or something like that. But for the most part, I just focused on being mobile and active and then once I hit my steps it didn’t matter if I sat down and watched TV or did nothing for the rest of the day. I’d already achieved my goal, and I didn’t feel guilty about not doing anything.
The great thing I found about this was that I was able to actually relax and not think about being healthy because quite often I’ll achieve my steps as I said earlier in the afternoon, and therefore, the rest of the day I could completely switch off my focus on health and improving my well being, or losing weight. With that said, I was also tracking my weight every day that my weight was dropping proportionately with the increase of my steps with each week. Therefore, I can say that the increase in my steps, and the amount of calories that I was burning each and every day was causing me to be in an energy deficit. The energy deficit is shown by the weightloss on the scales. Meaning that I was able to enjoy more foods, which I might not have been able to enjoy previously. Well, let’s be real here. I was already enjoying those foods, even though I was being very inactive. Hence the 6kg weight gain in the first place.
Obviously, the strategy has limitations. There’s only a certain number of steps you can do each day before you end up walking all day every day. Increasing my steps did show me the power of focusing on doing what you can do, plus a little bit more, and how you can almost unconsciously, continue to progress and progress without really noticing the struggle or feeling like you’ve gone from zero to hero and really push yourself over the edge. I certainly found that it wasn’t a challenge at all to meet the new targets each week, because I already knew that I could do them. I’ve done them the previous week.
When it comes to making improvements with my health and fitness. The key lesson I take away from this whole experiment is that small incremental change is really, really easy to implement. And over time will lead to large and significant improvements and my health and well being.
Originally published at https://www.chargehealth.co.nz.
