Walking your way to weight loss

Dieters work hard to lose weight — and then most have to struggle to keep it off.  In “The Step Diet Book,” the authors, Drs. James O. Hill and John C. Peters, contend that that the best way to avoid gaining weight is to understand your energy balance. Calories come in, calories go out — and when intake is greater than output, you gain weight. The authors recommend using a pedometer to figure out how many steps you take in an average day, then raise the number by 2,000, and eating 25 percent less of your food. Read an excerpt of their book:

Unless you live on a desert island, you are well aware that many of us are too heavy, and that this trend shows no signs of reversing itself. How can this be, you may wonder, with all the “miracle diets” to choose from? Lose 20 pounds in twenty days! Watch fat melt away like magic! You’ve seen the ads, you’ve listened to “diet doctors” reveal their secrets on talk shows, perhaps you’ve tried a fad diet or two. Some of these diets can give you dramatic results, but most focus on quick weight loss rather than long-term weight control. They are not based on sound scientific research. What good is losing

20 pounds in three weeks if you gain it back two months later? Obviously, your real goal should be to maintain whatever weight loss you achieve—and to achieve that loss with a plan that’s good for your overall health.

Most diets ultimately fail because they provide a temporary solution, not a permanent way to live your life at a lower weight. But there is a way to lose weight without giving those excess pounds a round-trip ticket. The Step Diet is based on scientific research conducted by us and by other researchers. We have studied not just how to lose weight, but how to make small, permanent changes in your lifestyle to keep that weight off forever. And it’s easy to get started—all you have to do is put one foot in front of the other.

Count Your Steps
Are you ready to make your first move toward permanent weight loss? Then take out the step counter that came with this book and clip it on your waist (to your belt, pants, or underwear). You have just begun the Step Diet, a scientifically based, people-tested, easy-to-follow program that will take you step by step toward successful weight management. Much more than a plan for simply losing weight, the Step Diet is about overcoming the environmental influences that trigger weight gain so you can keep the weight off. It is about putting you in control of sustaining a body weight that is healthy and right for you.

It is about starting where you are right now and making small lifestyle changes that will put you in control of your own weight.

We know from experience that most people can learn to control their weight. Many of us are capable of losing some weight and keeping it off for good. Others can still learn to avoid gaining the 1 to 2 pounds that most adults put on each year. Whatever your specific goal, keep in mind that you did not lose control of your weight overnight, and you won’t get it back overnight. But with the Step Diet, you can start managing your weight more effectively right now—and from now on.

A Different Approach to Weight Management
It’s actually not all that hard to lose weight; you just reduce the amount of food you eat. Why, then, do so many people fail at long-term weight management? A big reason is that while it is easy to eat less in the short term, it is very hard to eat less for the rest of your life. Is there an alternative to focusing primarily on food intake? Yes, and it’s really pretty simple. To lose weight successfully you need to reduce the energy you consume in relation to the energy your body burns through your resting metabolism and your physical activity. This is not new—most weight management plans work on this principle. What’s new is that the Step Diet does not focus on counting calories or eating particular foods like other plans. Instead, the Step Diet focuses on steps. That’s right, steps, but in this case, three kinds of steps: BodySteps, LifeSteps, and MegaSteps.

It’s really very simple. Diets that focus on calories or carbohydrate or fat grams are difficult. Think about yesterday. How many calories do you think you consumed? How many did your body burn in physical activity? If you are like most people, you have no idea.

Steps, on the other hand, can be easily measured with the step counter that comes with this book. All you have to do is wear it. It will count the number of steps you take each day very accurately. And since your resting metabolism can also be measured in steps (we’ll show you how in Chapter 4), this means you can keep track of the total energy your body burns—in steps. Even more exciting is that we’re going to show you how to convert the energy (in other words, the calories) in food into steps. Once you know how to do that, you’ll be able to monitor your personal energy balance in steps: how much you’ve eaten in steps; how much energy your body burns in steps. Once you think of your energy balance in steps, you can approach weight loss logically. As you lose weight, your metabolism goes down. This is because your body is getting smaller and requires less energy. It happens to everyone who loses weight, and there is just no way to prevent it. And it is the reason that most people fail at keeping weight off. Because your metabolism has dropped, you have to eat substantially fewer calories than you did before weight loss in order to stay at your new, lower weight. In other words, you have to eat less—forever. It is almost impossible for most people to do that for a long time, so the weight comes back.

The Step Diet works for long-term weight management because it shows you how to increase the number of steps you take each day to compensate for the drop in your metabolism. As the amount of energy your resting metabolism burns gradually drops, the number of steps you walk gradually increases, so that the total amount of energy your body burns will be similar after weight loss to what it was before weight loss. When you have finished losing weight with the Step Diet, you will be able to eat much more food than you would have been able to eat with other diets because your total daily energy expenditure will be higher. Now you will have a real chance to keep that weight off forever.

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