10,000 steps a day is supposed to be the required amount of walking required per day to keep healthy and fit while no other exercise is required. The program was first mentioned about 40 years ago in Japan and supposedly was not based on any research, but just a number they came up with. Now it’s being promoted by many health professionals as a way to combat obesity, improve weight loss and heart health.

There is no question that walking is good for you and my earlier research showed that walking can be more beneficial than running. The idea was that our ancestor’s bodies developed a method of efficiency to use stored fuel (fat) before it used glycogen (quick fuel). It takes a long time to evolve, so there’s no reason to think that anything has changed over the past thousands of years.

My sister told me about the 10000 steps a day program just the other day. She’s a doctor working with immigration Canada and works overseas. She’s been in Vienna Austria for the past 4 years and just got a new position in Singapore. She was in Canada for a few business meetings and flew into Edmonton yesterday to visit while making her way back east and then on to Vienna.

I began my walking program at 375 pounds and walked 20 minutes a day or twice a day. I incorporated ankle weights, starting with 1 pound and then worked up to 2.5 pounds on each ankle and even started using 5 pound dumbbells as I walked my route. I walked rain or shine and one day I came back from my route during a -40 degree Celsius (-40 Fahrenheit) and my neighbor said “nothing stops you from your walk, does it?” [Read more…]