Join Me In Walking 8,000 Steps Every Day in June

Hey, Lux Cypher. I have a time-sensitive announcement, hence the bonus episode of this podcast. I learned recently some very new research that is going to change the way that you move through your day. It really, uh, when I learned it, it really just shocked me and I was like, whoa, this is something I need to take care of for myself. and then I need to tell my clients and my community about it. So here's the scoop. You may be the person that was— is working out, you know, 3 times a week. You make sure you get to cycling class, you make sure that, you know, you work with your personal trainer, or maybe you're just a little bit infrequent with your workouts. And that's, you know, life happens. I get it. I just— I'm, I'm recovering from a 2-month— 2 months of not being able to work out because of an injury. So I get how easy it is to be sedentary. But here's the thing, if you think that your 3-day-a-week workout schedule is enough for you to be healthy and to lose weight, this is going to shock you because it certainly shocked me. There is brand new research, and I will put a link in the show notes for those of you who like to geek out on research. This research was done, uh, in March of this year of 2024, brand new research that we need to pay attention to. Here's basically the summary of the research. A new study found that walking less than 8,000 steps a day can make your body resistant to exercise. There's a thing called exercise resistance, y'all. So even though you're getting the spin class, and even though you're going to Pilates, you are not reaping the benefits, the fat burning benefits, the heart health benefits of doing that exercise if you are sedentary and inactive. And they qualify being inactive as walking less than 8,000 steps a day. So I know how easy it is to be sedentary. Like I said, I'm on the mend from recovering from an injury where I could not work out. I could barely walk for a period of time. So I know how easy it is to be sedentary. So I was like, oh, let me look at my step count. Because you all know I have all the gadgets. I have an Oura Ring. I have an Apple Watch. I had everything tracking my steps. I never really paid attention to that number. Go into my app, start scrolling, and I was like, whoa, 2,000 steps, 3,000 steps a day, definitely less than 5,000 steps. So it's very easy, especially since I work from home, to be sedentary. So this is a very interesting study, and I really was shocked to learn this, that even though you're working out and you think you're doing the right things, if the rest of your life you're considered sedentary, and sedentary is 8,000 steps or less, then what you're doing is not working. I should say it's not working. You're not reaping the benefits of it. The sedentary lifestyle is basically outweighing the benefit of your workouts. So it's kind of a wake-up call. This is a wake-up call for you to look to see how much activity you are getting into your day. Now, this study, there's like lots of different ways that you can measure your daily activity, right? You can do pushups every— and when you get up in the morning, you can, you know, do this if you're watching the video, right? That's considered being active. However, in the study, they track steps. And I think steps is like the easiest way to track your activity. So your lifestyle could be working against you even though you have really good intentions of making sure you get in 3 to 4 times workouts a week. So again, I realized how sedentary I was. So guess what I am focused on? I literally read this study this weekend. Guess what I'm focusing on? Immediately, I was like, OK, 8,000 steps. My physical therapist gave me the green light to begin walking. I've been walking 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes without pain. So I'm like, thank God for that, for the healing. So now I'm like, all right, 8,000 steps a day, we're doing it. I'm increasing my activity and being intentional about it because, again, I was never really paying attention to my step count. So I tried to get my husband on board and he's like half in, half out. So then I had the idea of like, oh, I'm going to like involve my community. I want everyone to join a challenge. And for those of you who have been rocking with me for a while, you may have been in a previous challenge that I've offered. I love doing challenges. They're so much fun. So I was like, we're going to turn this into a 30-day challenge beginning on June 1st. So beginning on June 1st, I'm leading a 100% free 30-day challenge. I'm calling it Stop Dieting, Start Stepping 30-day challenge to help you increase your activity with daily step snacks. What is a step snack, you ask? I'm so glad you asked that question. Instead of snacking in between meals, what we're going to do is we're going to begin stepping. So 8,000 steps, right? That could take you an hour if you did it all at one time, 45 minutes, maybe over an hour for some of you. I don't want you to think, "God, I got to like get myself together and I got to carve out an hour a day to go walking and it's starting to get hot outside and I don't have it." Like, no, that's not how we're approaching this. I want this challenge to be the beginning of a new habit that becomes part of your everyday. I want you to begin to increase your activity just because. I want you to get to the point after this 30-day challenge where like 8,000 steps you can do in your sleep. So what we're going to do, we're going to meet our 8,000-step-a-day requirement by doing these daily step snacks. And this is a short burst of activity that you can fit into your day at any time. We— you can do a thing that we call habit stacking. So instead of, again, trying to get all your steps in at once, we're just going to break them up into smaller, more manageable segments. So here's an example. Using the stairs instead of the escalator, right? If you go to the mall, instead of like riding up the escalator, you're going to take the steps. I was in Whole Foods yesterday and they have steps on one side and the escalator on the other side. I took the steps. I announced this challenge to my group yesterday inside Stop Dieting Forever, and people were sharing some of their step snacks. So shout out to Amy. Who shared this step snack with us. Oh, Amy's— Amy has reached her forever weight. Like, this is her identity. She's a healthy person inside and out. This is what she does. So when she's in the office, she goes into another building every time she has to go to the bathroom. So she's walking down the steps, walking up the steps, going into another building to get those steps in. When she's working from home, she doesn't not do that exercise and get that those extra steps in, what she started doing is she goes to the bathroom and then she walks around the block where her house is. Okay? Walks around the block where her house is. So she's still habit stacking. So every time she pees, she's getting some activity in. Doesn't matter where she is. Another example of a step snack, as I shared with the group yesterday, is that I have a travel protocol and I talk— I teach about creating your own travel protocol inside Stop Dieting Forever in the Food Focus curriculum. But one of the things that I do when I travel by plane is I never ever sit at the gate waiting to get onto the plane. I always walk. And I came up with this rule for myself when I was traveling very frequently for work and I was trying to figure out how to not gain weight every time I got on the plane. So one of the things I decided I would do is that when I'm in the airport terminal, I'm not going to sit down and wait an hour and a half to get on a plane to sit again for another 2, 3, 4 hours while I'm flying somewhere? No, I always walk up and down the terminal. I'm like looking and seeing, you know, being nosy. Well, where are they going? What flight is that? Where are y'all headed to? I like get my phone calls in. I'm not speed walking. I'm just walking, right? I go peruse in the bookstore, look at magazines. I'm just not sitting. So that for me is a step snack. There's lots of different ways that you can get activity. So when you join this challenge, we're going to exchange ideas and we're going to post and share what the other— what other people are doing so you can get some ideas and incorporate more step snacks into your day. So it will be easier for you to reach your 8,000-step requirement every single day, especially if you are crazy busy, like I know a lot of you are. So when you go to jenniferdent.com/step to participate, to register for this challenge, again, we're starting June 1st and we're going all the way through the end of the month. This is every single day, weekends included. Here's what you can expect. So the first thing, when you register at jenniferdent.com/step, I'll put the link in the show notes, you're going to get a welcome email from me. Inside the welcome email, is a survey. So we're going to do a survey at the beginning, and we're going to do a survey at the end of the 30 days. The point of the survey is I want you to think about what you want to achieve during this 30 days and why you're doing this goal. So not just, you know, going willy-nilly like, oh, Jennifer said we're doing this thing, and you're kind of like half committed. When you actually think through and document, say, okay, this is what I want to achieve in the 30 days. This is why I'm doing this 8,000-step plus a day challenge, and it like sears it into your brain. You're committing to yourself. Then we go. I'm also going to use that information to tweak what I teach during the weekly planning sessions. So this is the second part of the challenge. Every single Sunday during the month of June at 7:30 PM Eastern time, we're all gonna hop on Zoom as a community, hop on Zoom, and I'm going to— we're going to go— I'm calling it weekly planning sessions. I'm going to maybe do a little bit of teaching, a little bit of coaching. But the most important thing is we're going to plan for the week ahead. I'm going to give y'all a sneak peek of our planning process that we use inside Stop Dieting Forever, the things that I teach my clients, how do we plan for the week. So that's going to be happening for 5 Sundays in the month of June at 7:30 PM Eastern time. Those calls will not be recorded because this is a public challenge. The recordings aren't going to sit somewhere. We're not going to send out a Zoom link for you. I want you to make time to come live to join those planning sessions so you can get your week straight and get, get started off on the right foot. The other fun part is, if this is like one of the things I love to do when it comes to challenges, is to give away stuff. So if you've been in my challenges before, you know that I like to give away really fun things, exciting prizes, usually things that I enjoy using. And I don't plan ahead of time. I'm not like, okay, on week 2, I'm going to give this away. It It really is like an intuitive hit. I was like, ooh, I think I want to give this away. I think I want to share how I use this particular product and, you know, give it away to us, to an engaged person. But we're going to have lots of opportunities, 4, 5, 6 opportunities for you to win prizes during this 30-day challenge. The first opportunity for you to win a prize is if you fill out that first survey. So as soon as you join, you're going to get that link, fill out the survey. You will be eligible. So I'm going to randomly pick everyone who filled out the survey, put y'all in a big basket. It's actually an online random picker thing that we use, and somebody's going to win a prize because you filled out the survey. We're going to, um, do prizes for people who attend the weekly calls every single week. And here's the other thing: daily accountability check-ins. So we're going to also reward those of you who check in on social media every single day. Now, this is something new that I am doing with the challenge. Usually when I do a challenge, we all go into a private Facebook group and we all interact with inside the group. But I think this study is so important and so pivotal. And a lot of people, everybody who I've shared this with so far, they're like, really? I didn't know that. Like, this is brand new information that everybody needs to know. So what I am doing is I'm taking this challenge and we're going to do it on social media. So every single day you will go to one of my 3 social media channels, my Instagram, I, uh, to call it LinkedIn or Facebook. So I'm meeting you wherever you are. You have to be, you know, a follower or subscribe to me or whatever, whatever you do on those pages, um, because every single day there's going to be a post, a check-in post. And you are going to check in with your stats, like how did you do? What are you learning? What are your wins? Do you have any like new creative step snacks that you want to share? We're going to use that post. And so Shelby, who's my ops assistant, is going to help me see, and we're going to take note of everybody who's posting every single day. And if you post and you're most engaged, we're going to throw your name in the pot. And you could be eligible to win a prize for that week. And I will announce the winner live on the call on Sunday. So it's going to be a lot of fun and there's going to be a prize at the end of the day, at the end of the challenge. So the first call on Sunday is kind of like our kickoff call. And then the last call on June 30th will be our celebration. What are we going to do next? How are we going to keep building upon this habit that we've created. And the other thing that I want to just make sure I mention that this challenge is sponsored by my group program, Stop Dieting Forever. So in the middle of the challenge, there is something special that you all will be invited to, to attend inside this 30-day challenge. So it's going to be another opportunity to win some prizes, right? It's going to be so much fun. I am looking forward to it. I don't have any trips planned in June. I'm going to be 100% focused on making sure I get my 8,000 steps in a day plus, right? You can always do more and promoting and helping and keeping y'all encouraged because honestly, y'all, you guys are going to keep me encouraged too. I have been sedentary for over 2 months at this point. And so this is me getting back in the swing of things, getting back into that routine. So I am helping you just as much as you are helping me. So Again, this is 100% free. I want you to go to jenniferdent.com/step to join the Stop Dieting, Start Stepping challenge right now. And I want you to invite your squad with you, right? So your crew, your girlfriends, your BFFs, your cousins, your coworker, your sorority sisters, your spouses, right? Invite everybody. Anybody can do this. Everybody needs to be more active. And we're just using this baseline of 8,000 steps a day to bring a awareness to our level of activity. That's it. That is it. You can use whatever tracker you want to use. You can use your Oura Ring, you can use your smartwatch, you can use a regular old pedometer, your Fitbit, whatever you have. If you don't have anything, you have time to go get something before we start on June 1st, um, to start tracking. Okay. All right, y'all, this is the bonus episode. I will see you in the next regularly scheduled episode, but make sure you check the show notes for all all the links, um, to sign up, um, for the challenge. Okay, I'll see y'all on social media. I'll see you in the Zoom. I'm so excited. If you're watching me on YouTube, you can see me doing a little dance right now. All right, y'all, live lux. I'll see you in the next episode.