Why You DON’T Need 10,000 Steps To Lose Weight

Do you feel like getting 10,000 steps per day is almost impossible and preventing you from seeing progress on the scale?

You may feel like once you hit 10,000 steps per day that fat would start melting off your body easily, yet this task also feels overwhelming & difficult to plan.

Well, I am here to let you know that you do NOT need to get 10,000 steps per day in order to lose fat, and what to focus on instead.

For many years I made the mistake of painstakingly trying to get my clients to get to 10,000 steps per day because I had believed it was the holy grail for daily movement standards.

But, the more people I worked with, the more I realized how difficult it was for the average person to accomplish this.

It’s not because they were lazy or unmotivated.

It’s because time each day was limited and it is difficult to get a specific plan in place to increase steps to 10,000 unless you are willing to make a spreadsheet of how many steps are achieved during each individual action you implement.

The truth is that 10,000 steps is not a magic number that drastically increases fat loss.

What DOES increase fat loss is the HABIT of moving more.

And “MORE” is relative to the individual person.

Fat loss comes down to:

Metabolism Support

Muscle Building

Meals > Snacks

& More Movement

So if right now, you work from home or an office and you are only getting 3,000 steps per day, increasing to 10,000 can understandably be overwhelming.

You would need to more than triple your movement while also balancing work, workouts, kids, etc.

This is what I have had my clients switch to in order to avoid overwhelm, save mental bandwidth, and make fat loss more achievable.

Whatever your current step count is, just add a 1 mile walk to your day.

A 1 mile walk is about 2000 steps.

This means by just adding 1 mile of walking (which is only like 20ish minutes) you will increase your steps by 2000 each day!

This can be a BIG increase for most people, which means you will notice results!

Also, this is easier to understand and create a plan for.

Saying “I am gonna increase my steps” is very vague and hard to actually plan for.

But, saying “I am going to go for a 1 mile walk everyday at 6pm” is very specific.

You can schedule this into your week easily.

It can be done at anytime of day and can even be broken up into ¼ mile chunks if needed.

Once you start to implement this, you will also create a domino effect that leads to more fat loss.

How?

1. You build momentum with daily wins
2. You will lose weight which motivates you
3. You will start finding opportunities to move more
4. You may start to cover MORE distance during each walk, leading to more steps. 

If you walk a mile in 20 min, and you do this daily, you will naturally start to get better at it.

Now that you already have that 20 min habit built, you may start doing 1.1 miles in that time.

Maybe after a few weeks you realize that doing 25 min is realistic and you bump it up.

Maybe in a few months 2 of your walks each week become 20 min jogs which leads to more steps.

See how a simple habit can create momentum for bigger and better habits naturally?

But if you were obsessing over getting 10,000 steps that whole time, without any plans, you would have created weeks of frustration and perceived losses.

This is why people quit!

Coaching programs tend to prescribe arbitrary tasks based on unrealistic research and then make clients feel like shit for not being able to accomplish them.

This is exactly why no 2 client programs are the same on my team.

Having an individualized plan with support from someone who gets to truly know you will beat a general program 10/10 times.

There is no comparison.

It would be like walking into a hair salon and just saying “Haircut please”.

Then the hair dresser just clips your hair without asking you any questions about what you want or even taking a moment to go through what you like/dislike about your current haircut.

You would never do that with your hair!

Yet you do this with your health and body?

Stop signing up for general, broad weight loss programs just to save a buck.

Get some individual attention and the results you deserve.