 How many steps should I walk per day to stay healthy? Oh, I gotta get in my steps. I'm sure you've either heard this before or said it to yourself. And while it's great to be active and track your movement, is 10,000 steps really the amount of steps you need to make a difference in your weight and health? So I'm sure you've heard it all before. The 10,000 steps a day is the magic number of steps that you should reach every day in order to be healthy and lose weight. Well the truth is that this number came from a Japanese pedometer company to sell pedometers. It was completely fabricated with absolutely no experimental basis. All they wanted to do was sell pedometers. So while it is good to get your steps in, you do not need to take that many steps specifically particularly once during the day. Now Google it and every blog I see out there says we need 10,000 steps a day to lose weight. That's exactly not true. I'll give you my own example. As you know, I used to be a big fat obese guy. Even though I was running a minimum of 3,000 meters per day and 30 miles per week going to the gym one hour every day and I was gaining weight. So the idea that we should be walking to lose weight is in my experience patently not true. So how many steps should you take? Well studies show that you really only need about 2,700 to 3,900 steps per day to get the benefit of walking. That's certainly nowhere near 10,000 steps per day. Now the other thing that people should realize is this does not have to be on a continuous basis. In other words, you don't have to walk 3,000 steps at a single time. That's also not only not true but may actually be better ways to get that amount of steps in place. So as you know from my book The Energy Paradox, there are multiple ways to break up getting your steps in and I call them exercise snacking. One of the things that a lot of us recommend for very good reason is an early morning walk. Getting sunlight in the early morning particularly as sun is changing into that from orange to yellow really activates this crazy receptor behind your retina called the supercliatic nucleus and that actually sets the rhythm of your circadian rhythm and really all you need is like 10 to 15 minutes of this sun exposure to set your circadian rhythm properly and what better way to get that than to take a 10 to 15 minute walk. I'll say it again, I say it all the time, one of the easiest ways to accomplish that is to get a dog. The dog will be more than happy to accompany you on your morning stroll to set your circadian rhythm and it always works. The dog will demand it and my dog's demanded it this morning. So that's a great way to do it. The other thing that I think that's really useful to get in those extra steps is take a walk after dinner. One of the studies that I cited in my first book, Dr. Gunders Diet Evolution which was very impactful for me is they looked at people, human beings and they had half the group walk 10 minutes before dinner and the other group walked 10 minutes after dinner and they actually looked at their weight and lo and behold the people who walked 10 minutes before dinner didn't lose any weight. The people who walked 10 minutes after dinner actually lost weight even though they actually ate the same amount of calories. Now I conjectured that what happens is if you had been out hunting all day and you then ate dinner and sat around, your body says, oh, he's not going anywhere the rest of the night and we might as well store these calories as fat. On the other hand, if you've been hunting all day and then eat dinner and then get up and start walking again, your body says, wait a minute, we don't know whether he's walking for 10 minutes or he's walking for 30 miles. We better not store this food as fat. We should make it available and I think that's actually one of the important reasons why particularly when I'm in Europe and actually over in Japan that I see so many people walking after dinner and the other thing that's interesting is nobody's out power walking after dinner. They're strolling and they're communicating with their family, with their loved ones, with friends. So walk in the morning, walk after dinner. It's going to be amazing for you to get your steps in and quite frankly you don't need very many steps. There's more evidence of this. Studies have been done comparing people who live in cities versus living in suburbs and quite frankly city dwellers are much thinner on average than suburban dwellers and one of the reasons for that is that people who live in cities walk a great deal compared to people who live in suburbs. As many of us know, suburbs were designed to make walking very difficult to do and it was designed to make car travel extremely easy in general. Cities on the other hand, even if you, number one, most people don't have a car. Number two, if you use public transportation, you are often let off quite a ways from where you really want to be and you have to walk the rest of the way. Let me give you an example. As many of you know, I did some of my training in children's art surgery in London, England and lived in downtown London without a car for a year and shockingly I actually lost 40 pounds that year. In one year, what did I do? Well quite frankly, I walked all over the place. We walked to the grocery store. We walked to the green grocers. We walked to the theater. We walked wherever we had to go. Even if we took the tube, the subway, it would let us off quite a ways from our final destination and we walked. It was a real wake up going from suburban Ann Arbor, Michigan to downtown London, England how effective walking is for weight loss. Many people go on vacation to Europe and they eat all the phenomenal food and they gorge on carbohydrates and yet they come back and they've actually either maintained their weight or surprisingly they've actually lost weight. One of the reasons is particularly if you're in the towns of Europe, whether it's London or Paris or wherever, you're walking significantly farther distances than you ever would have before. I think that explains a lot of the miracle of eating all that food and still losing weight. Now let's suppose you live in the suburbs where most people do. It's actually pretty easy to get those steps in. One of the easiest things to do, and most of us don't think about doing it, is walk around your office every time you take a phone call rather than sitting at your desk. Most of us take our calls now on our cell phone just get up and walk and please put it on speakerphone so that you don't have your cell phone near your head. Second thing is, like I mentioned before, get a dog in the suburbs. The dog will make you go out. This sounds stupid but it works wherever you're going at the grocery store, at the mall, at the strip mall, at the post office, park your car as far away from possible from where you're going. The other benefit is usually those spaces are pretty empty for obvious reasons and you won't get the dings in your car if you're trying to park close. Lastly, consider taking public transportation to work and get off a few stops early and walk the rest of the way. If you work in an office building, this is what I've talked about in the Energy Paradox, don't beat yourself up. Don't think you have to walk up the four or five flights of stairs to the office or how many ever. Take the elevator up and then walk down the stairs and do that several times a day. Take an exercise snack break. Every hour, just set your watch for five minutes. Go out, walk down the hall, walk down the stairs, take the elevator back. You'll get those steps in that you need and you'll actually get a fantastic workout. Alright, those little steps that you can do throughout the day are really good but there's other things you can do. For instance, you don't just need to walk to get exercise. One of the things that's amazing when you look at super old people who are thriving in their late 90s and early 100s, they also actually do housework. And housework back in the good old day was actually hard work. We have so many conveniences now that we forget that housework was actually really good for you. I'm old enough to remember when we actually had to get up to change the channel on a TV. Now we only had three channels but why not play with this game? Take your remote when you want to change the channel, get up, walk over to the TV, then click the remote and walk back. While you're still up, why not do some squats on the couch? Why not just lift your legs up while you're watching TV and hold your legs up for a minute while you're watching TV? It's free exercise. Think of it as your seated yoga class and just hold your legs up. You'll notice that your thighs are getting a fantastic workout without you seemingly doing anything. Every time I brush my teeth for two minutes in the morning and two minutes at night, I'm doing squats. You don't do anything else. If you've got a bathtub, grab the edge of the bathtub and do planks or pushups on the bathtub. It'll be a lot easier than doing pushups on the floor and you'll find that you can actually do pushups reaching over a bathtub instead of on the floor and you'll actually get a lot of confidence and you'll find that you're going to do more and more and they're a lot easier than torturing yourself. So all sorts of ways to get in little exercise snacks. You don't have to walk a single step to lose weight. Just look at bears during hibernation. Bears do not move for four to five months and bears lose a tremendous amount of weight. How do they do it? They don't eat. Always remember that when all else fails, you don't have to walk to lose weight. You just don't have to eat. Finally, remember that the famous Italian cyclist study that I talked about in unlocking the keto code. These cyclists were put on a training table. They had to eat the exact same amount of food. They had to exercise the exact same amount. One group had a 12 hour eating window where they got to eat food. The other group had only a seven hour eating window where they ate food. Only the group that had the seven hour eating window lost weight. The other cyclists didn't lose any weight. Why? Because they compressed their eating window and they uncoupled their mitochondria and burned through fuel. The point is the exercise was no different. It was how they manipulated eating their food. So all sorts of great tricks, but you do not have to walk 10,000 steps a day to accomplish your health goals. I think you're going to love this one. If you've got low energy, chronic fatigue, it's not in your head. It's in your gut. You need to find someone who will listen to you.