You still do not get it. What a pity. All that expended energy when what you say, may or may not be right for your situation, but may be very wrong for my situation.

Someone who has extremely sore feet when walking needs to be encouraged to find ways to expend the energy. You have to expend energy to use up the calories, to burn the fuel.

You cannot face the reality that the pedometer is a tool, a form of encouragement to keep on going. Without the tool there is no way of measuring energy expended during the day.

Are you listening when I pointed out that someone who is doing a sedentary job does not move very far during the day. When you take the time to measure the distance via the steps that are taken, it is an eye opener to learn how little in the way of energy is expended in a sedentary job.

Not everyone can manage to do what you are doing with all that energy that you burn on the farm. I struggle daily with the pain in my feet. I have had that pain since my teenage years. I used to walk more at that time in my life than I have been walking now. The pain makes it very hard to get motivated. The pedometer also acts as a motivator. If I know that I can go to 7500 steps, then I can manage more, and when my feet are not hurting I manage more.

I do not follow any diets. I want to make that very clear because I do not believe in most of the diets that are hawked in newspapers, bookshops and elsewhere. Most of the diets are based upon false assumptions. I am always turned off from diets that depend so much upon the consumption of tomatoes. That does not mean that I do not own recipe books or that I am not well read on the subject. I have a very good book on the subject of metabolism. I am well aware of what needs to be included in one's diet so that one can achieve that weight loss.

How can I make it more plain than this? The pedometer is a tool. That is all. If I want to use it to get incentive to keep on working on the weight loss, then that is my business.


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I really, really, really need an icon right now that shows me banging my head against a wall. But not hard enough to hurt myself.

When you walk, you are moving your mass a measurable distance. The farther you move your mass,and the faster you move (accelerate) your mass, the more force it takes. The more force it takes, the more energy expended, or used up. The more energy used, the less leftover energy fuel can be stored. The less fuel stored, the less the body has on deposit.

So this "the distance does not matter, it's just the number of steps taken during the day" is just so much hogwash. (oh yeah, I read the study where they have now come up with people that just move more during the day can maintain fitness, and I have an opinion of it...)

In conditioning animals such as horses for competition requiring fitness, there are two approaches to covering distance. Long and slow, and interval training of short, quick,and more intense exercise. One type increases stamina, and the other type increases speed and strength, but to have stamina, you must also have the ability to sustain short bursts of speed. A well- conditioned animal actually expends less overall energy travelling at higher rates of speed covering distance because it took LESS TIME and it had more momentum. Please note I said WELL conditioned animal.

Muscular flesh burns more fuel than fat deposit flesh. Muscular flesh requires more basic fuel AND exercise to maintain itself. So, in other words, once you've got a lot of non-muscular flesh storing a lot of fat, your body does not need as much exercise, nor fuel, to maintain that size. But to move that non-conditioned body, it takes more energy/effort because the muscles are weaker and the the cardiovascular system is not as good at moving oxygen.

There's fat, there's protein, and there's carbohydrates. IF you consume more carbs than your body can burn off immediately as fuel, your body stores them the easiest of all.
If you have a hormonal issue, you most likely have a metabolism that is geared towards storing carbohydrates instead of burning them. Go ahead and do some research on PCOS syndrome, for example, and read what diets actually work for sufferers.(hint, it's not low fat) Unfortunately hormones are skewed by already existing in a state of largeness as the larger body cannot produce enough insulin to handle simple sugars anymore. Thus it becomes self fufilling prophecy...."I'm large because of my hormones, but my hormones made me large..."

Dieticians make up diets for the 30% of the human population that do not gain weight on diets that include larger amounts of carbs and lower amounts of protein and fat. And when it doesn't work for the other 70%, they don't have enough brains to be able to explain why.

I am very familiar with larger sized people complaining they cannot eat as much as smaller sized ones and really complaining they cannot eat as much as wiry ones. That's true. They cannot. They've gone and put themselves in a body form, the large form with a lot of storage, that requires almost no exercise nor food to maintain. Most of those wiry ones (not me, but I have 2 siblings and several cousins that fit that description) are actually quite hyper and muscular. They are actually eating a lot more but they are also moving a lot more. But people look at them and they don't acknowlege the extra movement. And the other thing you will see is that they don't pig out on carbs if you watch them carefully. They are frequently are caught "pigging" out on fats and then getting berated for it. "how can you eat that?!"

Yup, life's unfair and then you eat the wrong thing and get bigger. Or smaller.

I've compared diet very intensively (it was fun, really) with a very disciplined devotee of the low fat high carb type of diet regimin. She told me what she ate to keep herself at running weight (she's a hobby distance runner and runs 5k's and 10k's) and I explaned to her that if I still ate like that, I would be regularly passing out in a dead faint because my body did not process carbohydrates the way hers did. She finally, at the prompting of another friend, a professional diet person who was writing some research paper, agreed to, as an experiment, to eat something like an Atkins type of diet for a few weeks, keep a diary, and see what her weight did. She hated it, BUT, what surprised her, is that she wasn't HUNGRY on it. And she did not gain weight. But she was relieved to go back to her usual very low fat eating pattern because that is where her tastes were....but really, not everybody has the drive and discipline to RUN several miles a day and then 6 miles on weekends so they can treat themselves to a sugarless low fat popsicle and a cup of popped popcorn (yuck) daily and not gain weight.

While I applaud Dr. Footy's approach to get his patients to travel greater distances under the guise of "not really exercising, just taking more steps," thus making exercise SEEM easier, or not even formal "exercise"... it's still exercise. I was merely commenting that a more efficient approach to a goal of weight loss would be to up the intensity of the workout, covering more distance in a shorter time frame, which, in training phase, not conditioned phase, needs more fuel expended and would most efficiently use up those excess carbohydrates the body would otherwise continue to send to storage. Almost any form of extra movement is good compared to less movement. Movement is the heart and soul of physical condition.

I was taking a wild guess that you did not eat much fat or oils and I am sorry if you misunderstood my intent, which was to point out that reducing the carbs, increasing fat to promote a feeling of fullness instead of hunger, AND to provide slow burning, steady energy that does not cause spikes in blood sugar (just like we do with some horses and even some...gasp...humans) and moving a bit faster might get you better results. But now I see from your response you didn't believe me, and that's okay too.


Today is the first day of the rest of my life