Pokemon GO, Ten Thousands Steps, and Health

[lydy]

So, I'm back from my second Pokewalk of the day. According Pokemon GO, I clocked about eight kilometers, total. This is approximately ten thousand steps, that magical number of steps that people were so enamored with a bunch of years ago. When I was working for the university, they gave everyone a very cheap and crappy pedometer, and gave us brochures on how easy it would be to incorporate those ten thousand steps into our daily routine. Park a couple of blocks further away from work, take a short walk on your lunch hour... and so on. The promises of health benefits mentioned cardiovascular improvements, but most of all, they stressed weight loss. So much with the weight loss.

I have Thoughts about this. First of all, I'm whacked. Tired and foot-sore. The idea that this is something I could easily incorporate into my daily life is fucking nuts. And the idea that this is something that everyone has the time and physical capacity for is deeply insane on so many levels. The brochures they handed out claimed that people take about 5,000 steps naturally during their day. However, I doubt this claim. My best estimate is that I get maybe two to three thousand steps in in the normal course of a work day. That leaves between five and six thousand steps. If a kilometer is about thirteen hundred steps, we're talking four to five kilometers. Average walking speed, according to the Google, is five kilometers an hour. That means finding an hour of extra time in a day, every day, to walk. I don't know about you, but that's kind of a lot of time during my work week. I can usually manage two kilometers a day, about a kilometer before and after work, but more than that is hugely difficult to manage just on time.

The claims that this will improve your health are... well, I dunno. I've been walking every day, sometimes as much as ten kilometers in a day, but usually at least two, for two months. I have seen exactly no change in my weight. My tight navy scrub pants do fit a little less snugly, which suggests that I may have traded a little bit of fat for a little bit of muscle, but not by very much. I may well be doing my heart and lungs all sorts of good, but I've also given myself several fairly small asthma attacks, and heart stuff you mostly don't notice until you have catastrophic symptoms or death.

Which leads me to BMI as a measure of health. Medicine, as a discipline, has this problem: it really has no good measure of health. Medicine is much better at measuring disease. If you have, say, Stage II Breast Cancer, that actually means an actual thing. It tells you useful things about your probable life expectancy, and provides a useful gauge for how aggressively you should be treating your disease. And while it is perfectly possible to make mistakes, if they kill off the cancer, they generally know that they have done so. If you've got pneumonia, they can usually figure out if it's viral or bacterial, and design a treatment program for it.

Health is largely measured by absence of symptoms or disease. And that's because health is holistic, and man are bodies complicated. At this point, the medical profession is pretty sure that health is enhanced by avoiding carcinogens, being physically active, and eating nutritious food most of the time. Exactly what is a carcinogen, how active, and what exactly is nutritious is under debate. And that is partly because all of those things interact complexly within the human animal, and with the unique biological machine that is each person. None of this is measurable. However, activity and food consumption correlate with weight, and weight, weight is measurable. It's nicely objective. This height, this weight, this BMI, man is that something that fits nicely on a chart. And, it's bullshit. It doesn't measure health. It doesn't even correlate as well as they say it does. I think that doctors rely on it so heavily because that's the only thing they have. They can't actually measure health, at all. But they can put you on a scale. And so they do.

In sum, I did my 10,000 steps today, and I am happy about the Pokemon. So there.

Comments

[naomikritzer]

They're pretty sure that moderate exercise is good for you, but this comes with a whole lot of caveats. Some people have specific conditions that are made significantly worse by many of the readily accessible, common forms of exercise, like if your knees are crap, you will make them worse by running. If you exercise too much, this may also be bad for you, and exactly how much = too much, they're not entirely sure, but probably marathons are not actually a great hobby, as one might actually gather from the fact that the first marathon was noteworthy for the death of Pheidippides.

I think they picked the 10,000 figure because it's such a nice, round number.

The health outcomes for my parents and grandparents and Ed's parents really illustrate to me just how goddamn little they actually know. (All the lengthy details deleted because you probably aren't that invested in my complete family health history. I'll just say, some of these people died old and some of these people died shockingly young and there wasn't nearly as much correlation between healthy lifestyle choices and long lifespans as you might expect from the propaganda.)

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

I guess some people lose weight through exercise alone, but I never have. If your appetite apparatus is doing its job you will naturally eat more calories to balance out the calories expended (and my appetite is right on task where that's concerned).

However, I definitely feel healthier and happier when I exercise on a regular basis. Unfortunately, the older you get the longer it takes to make improvements in fitness and the more it hurts. I used to see noticeable improvements in strength and stamina in a week or two, but not any more. I still see a very small improvement at about 3 weeks, but nothing really obvious until about 3 months.

You're right, it is hard to measure small improvements in fitness. I do it by keeping track of how much I can do before I'm really tired, and how long I have to wait before I can do it again. So I figure I'm at Level 1 if I can do 30 minutes of moderate exercise without extreme distress but would have to rest the next day. When I can do 1 unit every day, I've moved up a level. 2 units every other day would be up another level, and so on.

It sounds like "1 unit" for you might be about 5k. When you first started, could you do 10K in a day? If not, then you have clearly improved, even if you have to take it easy after a 10k day.

I've started playing PokeGo too. What level are you at? Where are your favorite hunting grounds?

[lydy.livejournal.com]

There is clearly improvement. My stamina is improved, I can walk much longer distances than I used to be able to. My feet hurt a lot less. Over all, I suspect that there is less "chronic discomfort," although I still hurt when I stand up from sitting. I suspect that I'm sleeping better. I have been waking up, easily, after seven hours of sleep, rather than the nine to twelve that I used to get on weekends. However, I don't give a crap about the stamina for stamina's sake. I like the fact I can get more Pokemon that way, but just adding steps is completely uninteresting to me. The better sleep is great. The actual reduction in pain is not particularly noticeable, although there's the thing where it may stave off greater pain later. But there's no way to experimentally prove that. And I'm not so sure it's entirely off-set by the pain in my feet from walking.

People are demonstrably crap at counting calories. Not only do they mis-estimate (is that a word?) portion size, they frequently miss little things, like a teaspoon of sugar in tea, or a couple of stray chips, or a dozen other things. I'm told that people are frequently off by more than 100 calories a day. So, with that large shaker of salt: I don't think my calorie input is much higher, over all. Yesterday and today I did eat rather more than usual, but I take frozen dinners to work, which are a fixed portion size, I don't snack, I don't drink soda, I don't put stuff in my coffee, and I've actually sometimes skipped my morning meal in favor of a Pokewalk. I think my calorie intake has been roughly within normal variation. The only time I lost significant weight it was while I was in school, and I basically wasn't eating due to stress. I dropped a frightening amount of weight, but that was almost entirely not eating. My basic activity level was not significantly higher.

I'm currently level 26, and half way to level 27. (I have accumulated more than one million experience points. Whew!) I have a standard Pokewalk, from my house down to Vicinity Coffee at Nicollet and 43rd. This is just under two kilometers, one way, and with a little meandering, about 20 Pokestops. (There used to be Electrobuzzes in MLK park, but I haven't seen them lately. I gather there was a nest migration just recently. I did catch a Magnemite there, today.) If you sit at the front of the coffee shop, there are three Pokestops, so it's a wonderful place to sit and spin Pokestops while drinking coffee and gathering up strength for the trip back. Add a little extra down 38th to the gyms at Pillsbury and Grand, and you can hatch a 5 K egg. The other place I often go is from the top of the Trial and Rose Gardens, down the Roseway (so many, many Pokestops), and then around Lake Harriet to the Bandstand. There are a couple of gyms there, which sometimes I play in. Harriet has lots of water Pokemon, Staryu, Golden, Polywhirl, and Magicarp. I saw a Dratini there, today, but failed to catch it, despite Razzberries and an Ultra ball. I was unhappy about that. I have 370 Magicarp candy, soon I shall have a Gyrados!

What are your favorite hunting grounds? And who's your walking buddy? I'm currently walking my Snorlax, since that seems to be the only way to get candy for him.

[guppiecat]

"I think they picked the 10,000 figure because it's such a nice, round number. "

That one in the front is kinda pointy.

8,000 would be a rounder number.

;)

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

It sounds like you are getting great benefits from walking so much! Increased stamina means that your cardiovascular system is healthier. That really is something that you want, even if the only immediate application in your overly modern life is walking around catching more Pokemon. And the sleep improvement is really amazing! Congratulations! In my experience the only thing that helps with that "hurts to stand up" problem is remembering to stand up and move around once or twice per hour.

I'm pretty new at Pokemon - just turned Level 14. I have a relatively good variety of Pokemon, but none strong enough to fight with. Eileen got me into this and we discovered the Three Stop Coffee Shop. Of course, stopping at coffee shops is one of the things that counteracts any possible weight loss effect of the added walking, but the overall fun factor is higher.

Lake Harriet is my go-to location: Roseway for Poke-shopping and around the lake for hunting. I caught a Dratini there, and have seen two more that got away. I was over there last night and there were Clefairies all over the place! I just caught 2 or 3, but they were constantly showing up in the sightings box. That seems to be new - never saw them there before. Is a "nest migration" a general phenomenon that happens all over or is it specific to individual sites?

Loring Park is good for what Eileen calls "Rock Rhinos." I caught one of those in South Dakota, and was delighted to find a location where I could pick up additional Rhino candies. My Rhyhorn isn't especially strong (CP 155) but the appraiser declares it "A wonder!" so I guess it's worth evolving. I have 18/50 candies now.

I was walking my Dratini for a while, but realized it was going to take forever to level it that way since it takes 5km to earn one Dratini Candy. Now I am buddy-ing my Charmander, which only requires 3k per candy. 370 Magicarp candies is impressive. That's a lot of flopping fish to deal with. Gyrados are cool!

[soon_lee]

Ah, but did you catch any good Pokemon?

(Playing Pokemon GO has worked for me - I feel better & have lost a modest amount of weight. I agree that it takes commitment, so the time I've spent walking around hunting Pokemon is less time for e.g. surfing the web & making pointless blogposts...)

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

kilometers? When did you go metric?

[lydy.livejournal.com]

You are a terrible person and I would like to subscribe to your news letter.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

I'm walking my Snorlax, even though it takes 5K per candy, because that's the only way I can get more candies to power him up. Walking for enough candy to evolve is...a lot of walking. But three candies is only 15 K, and I often manage that in less than a week. I was walking my Growlithe for a while, just because I liked looking at him when I checked my status.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

I've always liked metric, and was sad when the US didn't switch. But Pokemon GO is in metric, so now I measure my walks in kilometers, like the entire rest of the world. Also, kilometers are shorter than miles, so that's nice, too. Sound more impressive.