Throw Away Your Pedometers! Ten Thousand Steps Is A Lie

After years of all of us being told we should take Ten Thousand Steps every day of our lives, it turns out we don’t need to do that at all.

You see, the actual medical community never asked us to do this. It was a company that makes pedometers that started touting this idea back in the 1960’s to sell their product!

It seems we can’t blame the Internet for untruths being taken as fact. Literally for my entire life I’ve been told that 10,000 steps a day is the way to go. In the 1990’s I wore a pedometer and faithfully trudged up and down the hills of Los Angeles doing the deal like so many other fools.

It turns out that for women, a mere 4400 steps a day will be just fine for cardio fitness and heart health. Think of all the senior citizens that traipsed around shopping malls in sensible shoes to get to 10,000 steps! That converts to around five miles. Every day.

Is no one out there as outraged as I am? It’s not that I regret the hours spent in the lovely sunshine of the Los Angeles hills. It’s the fact that in the end it won’t make a lick of difference in my heart health.

From this day on, I’m scaling things back. Google claims that 2,000 steps make up a mile. So instead of five miles, I now am required to trudge two lousy miles or so to meet this newly posted requirement.

Think of the hundreds of dollars I’m going to save in walking shoes alone. Instead of wearing out five pairs a year, I bet it’ll only be two. I wonder how many other myths out there are still being perpetrated. Remember drinking ten glasses of water a day? When will this madness end? When we stop listening to all the things we “should” be doing and just start doing what we want.

Throw away your pedometers and be free, America! How’s that for a step up?