Step Diet

(Will) Like many adults, I gradually became less physically active in my late 20s and early 30s as the demands of work and other commitments led to an increasingly sedentary lifestyle and poor diet habits. Between 1996 and 2005 I climbed from 165 lbs to a peak of 238 lbs in early 2005. Also like many people, I had tried various diets and had lost weight on programs like Atkins (lost 18 lbs in 30 days on that one), only to see it go right back on and then some. My friend Lisa came across a diet book that became a breakthrough in the diet cycle for both me, her, and other people we know -- The Step Diet

The principles of the Step Diet are pretty simple and even common sense. You increase you physical activity (exercise) and monitor it through the daily use of a pedometer (step counter). The goal is to get a minimum of 10,000 steps in each day, which is approximately 4 miles for the average person. You initially take a "baseline" where you don't do anything different for a week other than wear your pedometer and record your step counts at the end of each day. I knew I was fairly inactive with a job that has me sitting at a desk all day, but I was surprised that I was only getting 2000-2500 steps a day on average. The book gives a number of ideas for things you can do to increase your totals. For me, the main change I made was to incorporate a daily walk during my lunch hour at work. My friend Gary and I eat lunch at our desks, then spend an hour walking. We aren't the fastest walkers, but we knock out about 3-3.5 miles in that hour (we built up to that, we initially started at about 2 miles). For me, that's about 8000-9000 steps. On days that I get my lunch walk in, I usually get around 12,000 steps total unless some other activity comes up that has me walk a lot.

The other element of the Step Diet is related to eating. The main principle of the book is to create a balance by increasing your activity through walking at the same time you decrease your food consumption by 25%. The nice thing for me is that initially the book doesn't have you change *what* you eat, only how much. The hardest thing about sticking with a diet is that they usually have you make such a radical change to your eating habits that it is very difficult to sustain it. With the Step Diet, you just eat 3/4 of your cheeseburger and fries instead of all of it. Now, you'll do better if you do fix your eating habits, but you can introduce those changes gradually while still getting the benefit of the Step Diet program.

The Step Diet puts you on a 12 week cycle where you are in "losing" mode, and then you go through a period of maintaining your new weight before starting another 12 week cycle. So, this is not a crash diet where you're going to lose 20 lbs in a month or anything like that. However, what I found is that it enables you to make a real lifestyle change that is sustainable, dramatically increasing the odds of long term success. I have lost 40 lbs following the Step Diet, and while I stalled out on losing weight about 6 months ago, I have maintained my weight loss rather than gaining it back. Now I am ready to start another cycle and continue on working towards my goal weight of 150.

Step Diet Tracking Program

To help me track my progress, Melissa wrote me a small database application. Basically I enter my step count each day, as well as any minutes I spend doing alternate activities (riding my stationary bike or swimming). The Step Diet book has "step equivalents" of common exercise activities, and her program converts the minutes to steps on the fly. I also weigh myself most mornings, and record that in the database for each day too. Melissa wrote a number of reports that I can access just by clicking buttons she set up. So, I can see charts of my progress and identify any problematic patterns (such as a particular day of the week when I don't do well on step counts) when I'm doing bad, and get encouragement when I'm doing well. I find the feedback to be helpful.

You can download Melissa's Step Diet Tracking Program for your own use. This program is free, and as such does not really have official "support" per se.

Installation Instructions

1. Download and execute http://www.inside-corner.com/StepDietProgram.exe.

2. When prompted, extract it to the default folder C:\stepdiet. It is important not to change this directory, because the shortcut and the working directory the database references points to it. If you know how Paradox works and how to set these things, then have at it :-)

3. Open up My Computer and navigate to the c:\stepdiet directory. Execute pdox11run.exe. This will install the Paradox Runtime software necessary to support the application.

4. Copy StepDiet.lnk to your desktop or Start menu. This is the shortcut that will launch the program and automatically open it up to the Step Diet data entry form.

5. Run the program with the shortcut, and begin tracking your data.