James' World 2

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Early risers get a lot of good press: They are supposedly more productive and possibly better problem solvers. But after a month of forcing myself out of bed at 5 a.m., I learned that getting up early isn’t always the best thing for you.

I’m a morning person, and most days I’m out of bed by 5:45 a.m. I usually have 15 minutes before the rest of my household starts to wake, and I use this time to enjoy a cup of tea as well as the stillness of the morning. I look forward to this time so much that I wondered, What would happen if I expanded the 15 minutes to an hour?

While it was a nice thought, getting up at 5 a.m. was harder than I expected. My alarm went off a mere 45 minutes earlier than normal, but I had to drag myself out of bed. With no plan other than tea and stillness, I quickly learned that an hour is too long. The second day I decided to meditate, a practice I’ve wanted to do but never seemed to have the time for. Unfortunately, I fell asleep in my chair. Eventually, I took out a piece of paper and did a brain dump of all the things I wanted to get done in January–at least I had a plan.

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Four months ago my friend John Sharkman stepped on the scale and realized he was the heaviest he’d ever been. Sharkman—a former college football quarterback—was weighing in at 263 pounds, fifty pounds heavier than his time as an elite athlete. The realization that he’d jumped up to the size of a lineman was humbling, and he knew he needed to shed some weight. He asked me, his fitness journalist friend, to help. But the request came with quite a number of caveats: he didn’t want to cut off certain food or alcohol, he didn’t want to go to the gym, and he didn’t want the whole process to feel that hard.

In the past, I’ve undertaken a number of successful fitness and fat loss challenges. I’ve taken all the pre-workout in the world, done thousands of kettlebell swings, gone paleo. But Sharkman’s request got me thinking: What is the least amount of effort necessary for substantial weight loss? Can you get real results by just kind of messing around?

So in our group chat, Sharkman and a few other friends made a commitment to walking 10,000 steps a day and tracking our food. We aimed for about 2,000 calories. Sharkman dubbed the initiative Health Zone. After four months following those guidelines, my friend dropped 43 pounds. Collectively the group chat was down 105. Those are life-changing, infomercial-pitch numbers. Some caveats obviously apply: losing weight is hard, and keeping it off is even harder. Your mileage will almost certainly vary. But the whole experience made me wonder: just how fit can you get from just walking?

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Photo Illustration by C.J. Robinson

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