The Step Diet Book: Count Steps, not Calories, to Lose Weight and Keep it Off Forever by James O. Hill, John C. Peters et al. – Workman Publishing Company, 2004, ISBN 0761133240, 302p. Frankly speaking, I am fan of walking and hiking. Especially, just walking. Driving to some God-forgotten place just to walk does not strike with me as especially fun idea, but walking feels good. So, not much seems to be wrong with the idea. What puzzled me is the cover. It includes a boxed pedometer to count your steps, and the box of the pedometer has a little chart at how many steps you need to counteract some bad foods or save by downsizing them. For example, cover says:
Small Order of Fries vs. Large Order – Save – 6,520 stepsMy god… Most of us don’t make so many steps in day! I did not looked inside the book, but I remember the previous edition of this book without a pedometer. It was pretty decent, not much off the truth, and not swarming with mind viruses like some other diet book. Of course, inside they asked for a little more than just steps: you had to have enough sleep, drink a lot of water, and make few other adjustments to your lifestyle other than just walking a lot, but that’s rather a positive side, as we all know that there is no single weight-loss factor, it’s always a combination of factors. But the box was clearly prepared by marketing people, and that’s a completely different crowd. Long story short, if you look into the book, it says that normal number of steps per day to maintain your weight is about 6,000, average number of steps we really do in a day is about 3,000, and for a weight loss they recommend 8 to 10 thousands steps per day. As usual, marketing guys did not bother to read the book, they promote. However, people who will look at the cover in the bookstore, especially if they know the number of steps they do, are likely to decide that “this thing is not for me”. Even worse, they will spread the word, because now we have a classic mind virus. It has a good anchor (weight loss), a good carrier (the news that this particular thing cannot work, although a completely wrong one), and it will essentially harm the sales in the long run.
Why am I writing about that here? First, it’s a good example how some mild mind viruses are born. In this case there was no design or evil genius behind, there was just one stupid marketing guy who picked the wrong data to illustrate the point and reflected it in a particularly wrong way. And
the second, I wanted to show you how easy is sometimes to defuse a potential mind virus from getting roots in your mind. All I had to do was to look inside the book and find a discrepancy. And I did not had to read the whole book, if this information would not be available easily, I would discard the whole book and cover information as untrusted source (like you would a website badbadguys.com on Internet…), that’s it. See more in the “Test Against Reality” chapter of my upcoming book “Disinfect Your Mind”.