10,000 Steps a Day

10,000 Steps and Dark Chocolate

The dark chocolate diet doesn’t require you to go to the gym, get special exercise equipment or anything like that. If you like to exercise, great! Do as much as you enjoy. The only equipment you need is a pedometer and a blender. Make sure your pedometer has a step counter, but other than that you don’t need anything special.

All you need to do is 10,000 steps a day. That’s your target. You do not have to start there. The average person already does about three to five thousand steps per day. It’s not really that big of a stretch to get it to 10,000.

Here are six tips to get you closer to your goal of 10,000 steps:

• Park further away from your job or the mall or groceries for more steps
• Change your coffee or lunch break into a walking break. If your building has stairs, use them (at least every now and again). If you are on a really tall floor, consider going up one or two floors before you catch the elevator. BTW taking stairs burns ten times more calories than an elevator.
• If you have to sit for long periods for your work or your lifestyle, get up and walk every 30 minutes (even if it’s just to go to the bathroom and back)
• When the phone rings, get up on your feet to answer the phone. Pace back and forth or walk through your house or office as you talk. (You’ll sound better and you’ll get in some of your 10,000  steps)
• If you drive a lot, stop every 30 minutes and just walk around the car. Just check your tires as you walk around and keep driving.
• Take a walking lunch break. If you have a half hour lunch, find a place that’s a five minute walk from your place to eat your lunch. That way you walk five minutes, eat for twenty and walk five minutes back.

10,00 steps a day will not only help your to lose weight, it will also help speed up your digestion, deliver nutrients and reduce the impact of the toxins in your food. Increasing your blood flow passing through your lungs while we breathe normally helps us lose more weight by raising our metabolism, decreasing insulin levels, shifting blood sugar into muscle and away from fat and promoting better elimination.

Engaging in oxygen promoting activities such as walking following a meal, offers us the similar benefits enjoyed by naturally thin people. When thin people eat, their metabolism kicks in, their body temperature raises and oxygen is burned as they naturally burn the calories taken in. By increasing your body’s overall oxygen intake, you will also experience sexual virility (a nice side benefit.)

If you’re wondering about calories burned while walking, here’s an engineer’s rule of thumb. Divide your weight by 18.5 and that’s the calories burned per minute. If you weigh 200 pounds divide that by 18.5 that equals 10.8, so you will be burning between 10 to 11 calories a minute. This is a rule of thumb, not exact science, so it will get you in the neighborhood.

The one drawback to increased steps and more oxygen is more free radicals, but don’t worry about that, you are on a high antioxidant diet. That will take care of any of the extra free radicals. You may wonder why other diets have trouble keeping off weight when you are doing the same amount of steps and calories as this one. The key is the combination of high antioxidants of the cacao and the 10,000 steps a day.

The other piece of equipment, the blender, you’ll use for the healthy chocolate high antioxidant protein meal replacement shakes. Getting it out and setting it up is a couple more steps towards your 10,000 steps.