How I accidentally gained 7 kg with a relatively minor life change
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Like most, I know about the “compound effect”: how the accumulation of little daily things on a long time period ends up generating huge results.
List most, I totally get the concept intellectually, and yet I struggle to notice its power on my life, unless I really take a step back. Last week I had such opportunity when I read this article.
It explains how an excess of just 7 kcal per day (a tenth of an apple) is enough to gain 0.5 kg each year. What we sometime attribute to some sort of natural law of nature (“you get fatter as you age”) could just be the result of a minuscule anomaly repeated thousands of times.
I started to wonder: is there such process happening in my life right now ? If yes, it must be a tiny habit which changed. I quickly thought about one: my daily walk commuting to work. I needed to make my own calculations and see what kind of impact it could have.
When I started working in Ubisoft, I quickly figured out I’d like to live nearby because 1) the neighborhood is nice 2) it’s pretty inexpensive 3) I had no constraints. I had never been this close to my job/school and quickly fell in love with the possibility to walk to and from work (and the flat was nice as well).
About a year and a half ago, I changed position within the company. My new office is in another building a few streets away from the previous, closer to my home. A month later, I decided to put to good use my newly increased salary to find a new place to live.
I still like the city where both my work & home are located, and hate public transportations even more, so I searched for a flat within half-an-hour walking distance. And among others, I visited one right across the street from my office, just 50 meters away.
My friends warned me that such proximity could make it harder to disconnect from work (it does) but since it’s a perfectly fine place otherwise, it’s not that bad of a concession to make. At this time, I was still quite active, happy with my weight and my calorie balance was the least thing on my mind.
If I had made the calculations below earlier, I might have realized the impact on my health of what felt like not that big of a change: I was still living & working pretty much in the same area, I just happened to bring the two much closer.
So basically, I went from an 18 minutes commute time between Office A & Home A, to just 1 minute between Office B & Home B.
Based on my weight & walking speed, I consume an average of 4 kcal per minute, so 72 kcal for trip A and only 4 for trip B (18 times less).
In France, when we exclude all public holidays, vacation times and week-ends, we work 228 days a year. Performing this work-home trip twice a day, that’s 32668 kcal consumed yearly commuting on trip A, only 1815 on my new commute trip.
A kilogram of body fat equals 7000 kcal, so I was basically “losing” 4.67 kg a year with the A trip, but 18 times less, 0.26 kg, with the Office B-Home B trip.
It’s a 7 kilograms difference over the course of the last 20 months.
I didn’t really change any other alimentation or sport habit in this time period, which makes this explanation a pretty serious candidate to justify how I gained almost exactly 7 kilograms in this period.
Looking back now and you might feel it when reading the story, it’s quite obvious that walking a lot less in my daily life would lead to these consequences.
I never really considered walking to be an important calorie-consuming activity. I do now, it’s not much compared to any other physical activity but it’s still enough to make a big cumulative difference at the end of the year.
I’ve experienced the power of the compound effect on a concrete example of my life, and now I’m willing to leverage it to my own interest too.
Actually, I just moved to a new office again, 6 minutes walk from my home, so about 1.5 kg at the end of the year, according to my calculations. A good enough start, I’ll lose the rest of my weight with an additional weekly workout.
