10k steps a day? Lies!

All this time I was out here with my Fitbit feeling like a potato-shaped failure. I was not achieving the prescribed magical 10k steps of fitness per day that science says a person must get in order to not be a disappointing human.

Lo and behold, 10k steps a day is a totally made-up number! Not based on science at all!

According to the good ol’ NYT, the 10k steps goal originated in Japan in the ’60s:

"A clock maker, hoping to capitalize on interest in fitness after the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games, mass-produced a pedometer with a name that, when written in Japanese characters, resembled a walking man. It also translated as “10,000-steps meter,” creating a walking aim that, through the decades, somehow became embedded in our global consciousness — and fitness trackers."

Turns out that in order to achieve the longevity benefits of walking, you only need to get about 7-8k steps a day (or about 4400 if you’re over 70 years old).

More than measuring the steps you take over the course of the day, what really matters is getting about 30 minutes of physical activity per day. Which makes sense because it really was a stretch to convince myself that all those trips back and forth to the bathroom counted as exercise…

Mirror mirror on the wall, that’s not what I actually look like at all

Did you know that what you think you look like is not what you actually look like?! Because we look at ourselves in mirrors and we have spent the last million years staring at ourselves in Zoom, we think we look like our mirror image. But… that’s actually not how everyone else in the world sees us.

You can get a sense of this if you go into your Zoom video preferences and uncheck the “mirror my video” box. Prepare for this to scramble what is left of your fragile eggy brains.

So you have a totally different mental image of what you look like than everyone else does who sees you! That is the makings of a sci-fi series right there.