I never once hit 10,000 steps consistently. Not across a week, not across a month. Some days I barely managed three thousand. Most days I was somewhere around four. For years, that felt like failure, like I was always behind on the thing that was supposed to be the baseline, the floor, the minimum you had to hit before you could claim to have done anything.
Then I lost four and a half stone. Came off six medications. Resting heart rate dropped to 58. DEXA scan confirmed muscle was preserved.
The step count hadn’t moved much. Something else had.
The 10,000-Step Myth I Couldn’t Shake
For years before Boxing Day 2023, movement was the thing I kept meaning to sort. Every week, same story. Life got in the way. The business. Family. Evenings that disappeared. I’d manage a decent run of days, fall off, and then spend the next week quietly feeling like I’d failed again.
My starting point when I actually looked at the data: roughly 2,000 steps a day. That’s what the phone pedometer had been logging silently in the background. Getting to the kitchen and back a few times. A slow circuit of the supermarket car park. That was it.
The cultural benchmark is 10,000. I’d heard it so many times it had become background noise, the number that separated doing something from doing nothing. And every day I came in at four thousand, the story I was telling myself was the same: not enough. Even on a day where everything else had gone right.
That’s the trap in the number. It strips out every other variable and reduces the whole day to one figure. Four thousand steps when your insulin is low, you’ve fasted through the morning, and your body is running on stored fat is a completely different thing from four thousand steps after lunch with insulin elevated and your fuel system locked in fed-state. But the phone doesn’t know that. The number looks identical.
What the Data Actually Showed Across Thirteen Months
Boxing Day 2023. Eighteen stone. HbA1c of 46 millimoles per mol, pre-diabetic range. Cholesterol at 8.0. Six medications. Daily step count around 2,000. That’s the baseline.
From there, I changed the fasting and food quality first. That was deliberate. The WMTWL system sequences things for a reason: sort your sleep, then sort your food and fasting, then add movement. Movement is the multiplier, but you need something to multiply. So I did that: extended fasts, real food, cut the ultra-processed stuff. The weight started moving. The blood tests started improving.
The step count stayed low. Still averaging somewhere between two and four thousand on most days.
March 2024. First blood test post-intervention. My GP looked at the results and said: “What’ve you been doing?” Cholesterol had come down. HbA1c was moving back toward normal. He was genuinely surprised. I hadn’t been hitting five thousand steps on a good day, let alone ten thousand.
But here’s what I noticed, and this took a while to see. The steps I was doing were different steps.
Before 2023, two thousand steps meant slow, reluctant movement. The shuffle between rooms. A car park crawl. The movement of someone whose insulin was elevated most of the day, whose body was locked in fed-state, running almost entirely on glucose.
By mid-2024, four thousand steps meant fasted morning walks. Moving in a fat-burning state. Insulin low. The engine warm before I started, not cold and reluctant.
Same number on the screen. Completely different thing happening underneath.
The Fast That Changed How I Thought About Movement
June 2025. A twenty-day fast. I kept walking throughout, some days five thousand steps, some days eight thousand. No weakness. No dizziness. Nothing like the “don’t exercise while fasting” crowd would have predicted. The body was running on what the data suggested was well over 180,000 calories of stored energy. The savings account was fully stocked and movement was drawing from it cleanly. Not marathons. Not gym sessions. Just walks. Daily, consistent, and completely unforced.
Then September 2025, day three of a separate five-day fast. GKI below 1.0. Ketones at 3.9. Properly deep in the fasted state. I hadn’t set a step target that day. Wasn’t thinking about the number at all. Mid-afternoon, I just wanted to move. Not to hit a goal. Not to burn anything. The body was asking for it. I went out and did a ruck, 25-kilogram pack, because it felt right.
That was the moment something fully landed for me. I’d been training 25-kilogram rucks while fasted, multiple sessions across 2025. Heavy exercise in an extended fasting state. The muscle data said preserved. The DEXA confirmed it. The resting heart rate was 58.
The number on the pedometer had never told me any of that was happening.
Why Metabolic Context Changes What Movement Does
Here’s what I’d been missing for years. The 10,000-step target was designed as a proxy for movement volume, and volume does matter. But it’s a proxy that strips away all the context that actually determines what the movement achieves metabolically.
When insulin is elevated, when you’re eating frequently, running on glucose, in fed-state most of the day, movement does something. It burns through glycogen. It creates some demand. But the fat stores are largely locked. Insulin’s job, when it’s present, is to keep fat in storage. You can walk ten thousand steps with insulin elevated and the fat burning is minimal. The steps happened. The deeper metabolic work, much less so.
When fasting changes the baseline, when insulin drops, when you’re running on ketones, when the fuel system has switched, movement does something completely different. The muscle starts pulling glucose from the bloodstream independently of insulin. That’s not a small distinction.
There’s a researcher called Javier Gonzalez, a human physiologist at Bath. He explained this clearly. The exercise itself means the muscle is taking up more sugar out of the bloodstream independent of insulin. And then a second effect follows: the muscle’s sensitivity to insulin is heightened over the next one to two days.
Two effects compounding. Immediate glucose clearance without insulin being required. Then 24 to 48 hours of elevated insulin sensitivity afterward.
When you’ve already lowered your baseline insulin through fasting, and then you add movement that clears glucose independently of insulin and heightens sensitivity for the next two days, you’re stacking benefits. Every walk is doing more metabolic work than the step count suggests.
Think about it like compound interest. Your daily steps, done consistently in the right metabolic conditions, are ten pounds dropped into a savings account every morning. Doesn’t feel like much on any given Tuesday. But 4,000 steps a day for 400 days, done while fasted, done while insulin-sensitive, done while your fuel system is actually working: that’s a sum you hadn’t noticed accumulating. I’d been trying to make large withdrawals by chasing 10,000 steps from an account that was nearly empty. Once the account was full, the modest daily deposits started compounding properly.
What I’d Actually Change, and What I’d Watch For
I want to be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying 10,000 steps is wrong. Six thousand is probably a better minimum target than four thousand, and that’s where I aim now. What I’m saying is that chasing the number while ignoring the metabolic conditions underneath it is like polishing the outside of a car with a knackered engine and wondering why it won’t move.
If I were starting again: I’d stop tracking steps as the primary metric in the early months. Steps are fine as a secondary check. But the primary metric early on should be: am I fasting properly? Is the eating window clean? Those two things change the metabolic conditions that determine what movement actually does when you do it. I spent years feeling like a failure at movement because I couldn’t hit 10,000 steps. Turns out I was measuring the output of a system that wasn’t set up to work yet.
If you’re already tracking and nothing is shifting: look at the context, not the count. Are you walking fasted? Are you walking after a longer overnight window? Are you walking when insulin is low, or two hours after lunch? Same steps, different metabolic state, different effect. It might be worth asking your GP, given where your insulin sensitivity currently sits, what your movement is actually doing.
If you’re at the early stage, moving, trying to move, sometimes managing it, and it doesn’t seem to be doing much, and you haven’t looked at the fasting picture yet: this might be why. The body’s metabolic conditions determine what movement can achieve. Not just willpower. Not just effort. The underlying fuel system.
I was 2,000 steps a day at eighteen stone with pre-diabetic blood sugar. The problem wasn’t that I wasn’t moving enough. The problem was the conditions that made movement feel hard and produced poor returns from it. Once those conditions changed, the movement got easier, more natural, and started compounding. If movement feels like a punishment you keep failing at, it might not be a willpower issue. It might be a conditions issue. Worth knowing before a diagnosis, not after.
Key Takeaways
- Steps are a proxy, not the whole picture: Volume matters, but the metabolic conditions underneath determine what movement actually achieves
- Fasted movement is different: When insulin is low and the fuel system has switched, the same steps do more metabolic work than in a fed state
- Two compounding effects from movement when fasting: Immediate glucose clearance independent of insulin, then 24 to 48 hours of elevated insulin sensitivity afterward
- Fix the system before tracking the output: Improving fasting and food quality first changes the conditions that determine what movement does
- 4,000 steps in the right conditions beat 10,000 in the wrong ones: The number on the screen doesn’t tell you what was happening underneath
Ready to Start Your Own Rhythm Reset?
If the step count puzzle resonates, if you’ve been hitting the numbers and wondering why nothing’s shifting, the 14-Day Rhythm Reset Guide is a good starting point. It covers the fundamentals: fasting windows, what to eat, how to structure your days, and how to build the system that makes movement actually compound. That’s where the conditions get set before the steps start mattering.
👉 Get the 14-Day Rhythm Reset Guide (free)
💪 Want ongoing support? Join Rhythm Club for £30/month (includes FREE app access, community, and weekly accountability calls)
⚠️ Important: This is educational content based on evidence and personal experience. It is not medical advice. Speak to your GP before making changes to your fasting pattern, diet, or medication.
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