10,000 steps

I once believed the right attitude was the most important factor in living a healthy lifestyle. To keep moving and stay fit I cultivated a preference for walking to driving. I got in the habit of doing errands on foot, walking to the grocery store, the post office, to visit friends.

About three years ago I bought the Fitbit, and found my mindset and habits didn’t keep me on track as much as I thought. The Fitbit represented my first foray into quantified self, evaluating aspects of my life by the numbers instead of subjective experience.

My first weeks targeting 10,000 steps with the Fitbit were such a surprise. Hours spent cooking and cleaning seemed like constant motion, but yielded almost no steps. I could be found at 11:45 pm, pacing back and forth in the hallway to get the last hundred steps to 10,000. I memorized paths around my neighborhood by number of steps and calculated the extra laps needed to meet my target.

For me steps became such a natural and intuitive measure of my activity. The measure taught me an active day sometimes means driving to the post office so I have time for a run or cardio workout.

This week I happened upon the origins of the 10,000 step goal. It’s cool to learn that something so integral to my daily life began way back in 1960’s Japan. Here’s the story:

After the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, Japan was enthused about physical fitness. Researcher, Dr. Hatano, was ready to put that enthusiasm to use. Hatano studied the number of steps an average Japanese person took in a day, then calculated the additional steps needed to burn an obesity-reducing extra 500 calories per day, and came up with 10,000 steps as a daily total. Hatano successfully marketed a pedometer called the Manpo-kei, which quite literally means counter to 10,000.

10,000 steps still holds sway in the global consciousness as a healthy activity target. I check my step total throughout every day, even though my current fitness tracker sets calorie goals instead of steps.


I learned all about Dr. Hatano and the Manpo-kei from a newsletter sent by one of my favorite apps, Coach.me. They cited the article: Why 10,000 steps?

Pictured from bottom to top is the Fitbit Ultra, the first model made, which I used until it died, and its immediate replacement, the Fitbit One.

Cultivating compassion and my weird feet

I’ve always had weird feet. As a baby, I slept in this crazy device: saddle shoes attached to a metal bar that forced my feet apart. As I grew the bar went away, but I still had to wear orthopedic saddle shoes. My gym shoe options were restricted to the few models available in wide width, always the ugliest shoes in the store.

Barefoot, my feet are fine and never bother me. Trouble starts when I put on shoes. If I find a pair that doesn’t cause pain I wear holes in them, then keep right on walking.

A recent trial of new athletic shoes left some of my toes more blister than not. Tortured feet or the ugly shoes of my childhood? I wasn’t thrilled by either prospect.

Ever my hero, my hubby got on the Nike website and found a way to custom design a pair of shoes just for me. Not only could he make decisions on the structure of the shoe, he could fine tune the aesthetics. He designed shoes so cute I’d want to wear them.

A special pair of shoes custom-made just for me. Wow. But as soon as we placed the order I had questions. Where were my shoes being made? Who was making them? How were those people being treated?

Maybe I have a weird brain in addition to weird feet…or…maybe I’m not the only one who thinks more about the laborers making my stuff when we become collaborators building something I helped design.

I’m not a thoughtless consumer. I limit myself to vegan footwear and bags, and whenever possible look for eco-friendly products. In the grocery arena, I buy a lot of fair trade chocolate and tea. Yet until I pictured someone in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam making shoes specially for me, when it came to shoe buying I was far more worried about the wellbeing of my four-legged friends than I was about factory workers.

There are many advantages to custom-made products. Custom clothing and shoes fit better, fewer blister-inducing shoes and unflattering jeans to discard. The idea of buying what we actually want, instead of a rough approximation, sounds satisfying and fun. What if it also improved consumer consciousness about the conditions of laborers in the garment industry?

Custom design retail sites alone aren’t going to solve the problem of international working conditions, but I do think it’s worth noticing that collaboration on a unique item creates a connection between consumers and laborers. Feeling connection is how we learn to care.

If you’re happy and you know it

This month EdX is running a Massive Online Open Course offered by the University of Washington called: Becoming a Resilient Person- The Science of Stress Management. Life can get rough when I least expect it. Becoming a Resilient Person sounded like a good idea. I signed up.

My takeaway from the first week of video lectures is that resilience is not simply a matter of reducing stress. Yes, as the title of the course indicates, stress management is a key component of resilience, but it’s only half the equation. When it comes to being able to handle life’s ups and downs, enjoying a high quality, happy life, is just as important as stress reduction.

I would refine the insight even further and suggest that recognizing when you’re experiencing happiness is a critical component of a good quality life. In my cognitive science and psychology reading I keep coming across the idea that people tend to remember the negative more than the positive. Our psyches are hard wired to need the bare minimum emphasis on “don’t stick finger in flame” to get the message. Survival reinforced our instinct to run away from danger more than our instinct to run toward joy.

A few years ago I signed up for Happier, a website with app that acts as an online gratitude journal. Happier was fantastic, but its emphasis on social (sharing your happy moments) didn’t quite work for me. I began to edit the happy shares I posted, thinking I must be boring people to death posting yet again: snuggled with my kitty, read the same awesome book I talked about yesterday.

So I stole all the great ideas from Happier, such as the option to use photos as happy moments, and creating tags to categorize types of experiences that bring me joy, and recreated my private version of a gratitude journal in my Day One Journal. I aim for recording three happy moments every day, use photos when I can, and always give each moment a category tag. Thanks to Day One I can check in and review what made me happy that week. I can also get a view of category tags by frequency used, so I can begin to see what things in life bring me the most joy. Yes, animals are high on the list, but happy moments with friends top the charts.

For the majority human beings, including me, experiencing happiness is not enough, you need to recognize the happiness. Recording at least three good things every day means I’m happy and I know it.