Sorry, but being on your feet all day does not translate into being physically active. In fact we tend to overestimate how physically active we think we are by 30% or more (the foot-brain gap) just as we underestimate the amount of food that goes into our mouths (the eye-mouth gap). It has been shown that these wrong estimations are greater in overweight people.

How physically active is your work? Well the number of occupations where there is a lot of physical activity is actually quite small these days and even farmers are now doing so many tasks with machinery that their energy consumption over a day may not be much greater than office workers. However there are exceptions and it is much easier for a farmer to introduce more activity into his or her day than an office worker.

How much activity does an office worker have on any given day? If one was to wear a pedometer that measures the number of steps taken in a day, the total after having breakfast, driving to work, walking around the office during the day, then driving home, having dinner and watching TV before bed, would probably amount to about 3,000 steps for the day if you were lucky.

How many steps do you need to maintain energy balance? This obviously depends on how much you eat and also on how heavy you are, but for the average Aussie diet in a 70-80 kg person the answer is at least 7,500 steps. For those people who want to lose weight or have lost significant weight and want to keep it off, it might be more like 10,000 steps plus that are needed. This means we need to have at least 30 minutes of active walking or other aerobic activity a day for energy balance and many people will need a lot more than that - up to 90 minutes a day to keep their weight under control.

Somehow we need to always be on the look out for opportunities to move more. Sounds crazy doesn't it and I am sure our forebears did not have to do that to keep healthy. But nor did they have such easy access to large quantities of energy dense, high calorie delicious food. Of course if we could resist that we would not have to move as much.

Those who succeed long term in losing weight without regain tend to be very physically active people, which perhaps says it all.