How Many Steps A Day For Weight Loss?
Q: Someone got me an activity tracker as a gift. I guess they’re trying to tell me something! So how many steps do I need to take a day to lose weight?
A: Your body gets energy from food in the form of calories and what it doesn’t use for immediate fuel gets stored as fat, or adipose, for its future demands. So because there are 3500 calories in one pound of fat and most people burn about .04 calories per step, you would have to take 12500 steps per day to lose one pound of fat per week.1[3500 calories ÷ 0.4 calories per step] ÷ 7 days = 12500 steps/day2That’s mathematically speaking, of course! The actual number of steps may be more or less depending on individual factors like your age, weight, gender, and pace, for instance.
To lose weight, you have to burn more calories than your body needs by way of exercise or take in fewer calories by restricting what you eat. So assuming that you’re eating the amount of calories that your body requires to maintain itself and no more, you would have to take 12500 steps per day to create a calorie deficit via exercise to lose weight. That translates to around 5.5 miles per day for a person of average height and weight walking at a moderate pace of 3 mph. Comparatively, you only have to eat 500 fewer calories a day to lose a pound per week. That comes out to the elimination of a few servings of food at each meal, which takes zero time out of your day to do as opposed to the time that has to be spent walking or engaging in any other activity.
A deficit is necessary for weight loss, whether that be by diet or exercise. But given that it’s easier and less time-consuming to create a deficit by lowering food intake than it is to increase activity, nutrition instead of movement should be more of your concern for weight loss.
It’s much more manageable to lose weight by focusing on what you eat alone than concentrating all your attention on losing weight with exercise by itself. That isn’t to say that you shouldn’t exercise, though. You absolutely should exercise but walking or any activity should be performed more as an accessory to supplement your diet than as a primary facilitator of weight loss if you’re like the average person who doesn’t have the means to satisfy exorbitant activity demands on a daily basis.
On that note that you’re better off relying on a calorie-restrictive diet to lose weight, you can do the following with your step count to complement what you do at the table. All you have to do is wear your tracker for a week then take the average step count over those seven days. From there, bump up the figure by 10 percent and the result is the daily number of steps you should take. Pairing that with your reduced food intake should more than suffice.
Anyway, the activity tracker that spurred this inquiry was received by you as a gift and you think the person who gave it to you might have an ulterior motive other than sheer generosity, huh?
Well, a cigar can be a phallic symbol but, as Sigmund Freud is commonly attributed as saying, “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”.3There’s no evidence that Freud ever said or wrote that quote. The gist behind that phrase is that every so often an object or action is nothing more than what it is and doesn’t need to be psychoanalyzed for an interpretation that can be read into it. So on that front, somebody more than likely gifted you an activity tracker simply because they thought you’d like it rather than it being a secretive way of telling you that you’re fat and need to do something about it, you paranoid fucko!
Now, does anyone else have a fitness or nutrition question of their own that they want to ask?
Glossary: adipose, caloric deficit, calories, diet, exercise, fat, fitness, food, nutrition, supplement
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