Latest / Cameron's Conversations: The last weight loss podcast you'll ever need. / Episode 82: Setting your step target
Transcript
- Cameron: Welcome to the Cameron's Conversations Podcast. And in today's episode, I want to talk all about setting your step target. So this is a question that I think a lot of people's at the start of their weight loss journey, right? They they're looking at wh where should I set my steps? How many's good? Should I hit ten thousand? Now, the thing I always like to contextualize is really where we want to start is where you start. So if someone comes to me and they're doing two thousand steps a day and I say, Let's do ten, that is a recipe for failure. For most people. Yeah, one in ten people might actually be able to do that because they really do have scope to up it. They feel great for it. But in reality, most people, if they went from 2,000 steps to 10,000, because they're not used to it, are gonna be pretty shattered for the first week of doing it. They will adjust to it because they'll get fitter for sure. But for most of what I see with clients, is I tend to just nudge things up gradually. We'll start with a target that's maybe one to two thousand more than they were doing before. And then over time, as they get fitter. Sometimes as they lose more weight, depending on, you know, for I have clients that have lost twenty, thirty kilos and like you lose twenty kilos. Turns out walking's a lot easier. You lose thirty kilos, even more so, right? Whereas for some people that would you know, they've only got five kilos to lose. Yeah, it might be marginally easier, but it's not so significant. So it really depends on where you're starting from. But what I would suggest is take your current week's average, if you like, so the last seven days, take the week before that as well, and divide and add them together and then divide them by two. What is it cut? Okay, you're doing 4,300 steps. Right. Well, 16, sorry, 1700 steps more would take you to 6,000. That's a nice round number. Let's start there. That's how I would approach it. I would generally start 1 2,000 steps more, because practically speaking, that's going to be somewhere, depending on how fast a walker you are, from 10 to 25 minutes more walking per day on average. Now, 10 minutes per day is not very much over a week at all. 25 minutes for some people is quite a lot more. They might struggle to fit more than that in, right? But what will typically happen is as you get fitter and stronger, particularly if you're kind of listening to this and you're the start of your weight loss journey or you've got got quite a bit of weight to lose and your weight keeps dropping down and dropping down, you will find that you get so much quicker as time goes on. You really, really will. And you'll find that the distances that you used to find, and this is something I talk about a lot, is one of the other reasons that I kind of almost want to gateway my clients into it, is you know, little nudge, we got by a thousand or fifteen hundred or two thousand. Okay, that was doable. Really, really good at I'm actually managing to hit more than the steps. Okay, cool. Why don't we set a target another 250 more now? Because you've been over your steps for the last six weeks. And all we do is we just nudge up gradually, and it just gets easier and easier because their lifestyle shifts. And this is the thing I often talk about is you get in better habits. Like I often park quite far away in the supermarket car park, much to my girlfriend's despair. For someone who's very active, she hates it when I do that, but I still do it anyway. ⁓ but I'd like to do that because I know. The extra 200-300 steps it takes to get to the doors of the supermarket and then back again adds up, right? I do that once a week. That doesn't sound like a much, but over a year, that's a habit that adds quite a lot of steps in. So I like to do that. I have all sorts of other little habits that I bring in as well. I deliberately have kind of like to an extent built my lifestyle so it's easy-ish for me to, apart from the fact that I work a laptop all day at home, right? Which is obviously not probably a good way of getting steps in, but you know, otherwise. I've deliberately built like like to walk, I move about, I do things like that works really well for me. So I think that's a really important point is you start where you're at, you don't pick an arbitrary number. Like, yeah, sure, if you're on 8,000, going to 10,000 is probably reasonable, but look at the time you have available. Now the balance of that is is something people be ⁓ but I'm quite time poor. I don't think I have any any time to do any more steps. Unless you're doing a lot of steps already, challenge yourself. It's amazing how often people will be quite resistant. To upping steps initially, and I'll say, right, okay, let's start with 500 more. That's not not even five minutes of walking, let's say if you're walking faster, maybe a little bit longer if you are a slower walker. And they will start there and they'll be like, ⁓ yeah, managing that. And it's just like their eyes open, like, ⁓ I can do that. And they find a way and they find a way and it goes up and up. And there'll be a natural point where we kind of feel like, yeah, that's enough. Like that's a good level to be at. But very often people can do more than they think. But Much like with your training, I'm not going to get someone into a gym and ask them to do a 200 kilo deadlift in session one because that's dumb. I'm not going to ask someone to do 20,000 steps a day, because yeah, arbitrarily they would lose a lot of weight if they could do it. If you go from 2,000 steps to 20,000 steps and you manage your nutrition, you're gonna weight's gonna fall off you. Can you manage it? Probably not. It's not in reach, right? It would take too much out of you, be shattered all the time. But you can probably start to nudge up. So that's a really nice way of thinking about it. So when you are going to set your calorie your calorie, your step targets, that's where I would start. So hopefully that's helpful. If you have any questions, please just jump into the show notes, pop me a little message on WhatsApp as well. Otherwise, have a great day. Speak soon.