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Meet your new best friend and fitness partner: Wearing a pedometer to track your steps every day can have a dramatic influence on your weight.

Are you curious to know if you're exercising enough? Or are you looking for incentive to move more? Try clipping on a pedometer, one of those beeper-sized gizmos that counts your steps. Wearing a pedometer can be a wake-up call, as well as a highly effective tool to boost your motivation, control your weight, lower your blood pressure and reduce your risk for diabetes and heart-disease.

Setting your daily exercise goal in terms of steps, rather than miles or minutes, seems to make the target seem more achievable. Consider: University of Tennessee researchers instructed one group of women to take the recommended 10,000 steps per day, while telling a second group to take a daily brisk walk for 30 minutes. After four weeks, the women in the step-goal group, who could glance at their pedometers whenever they wanted, averaged 10,159 steps a day, compared to 8,270 steps for the second group. In other studies, inactive women who clipped on pedometers increased their daily step counts by 2,000 to 4,000 over eight weeks.

Most of us could use the added incentive. A 2005 study found that adults in Colorado, one of the leanest states, reported taking 6,804 steps per day; only 16 percent reported reaching the 10,000 mark. In another study, South Carolina women averaged 5,210 steps a day. By contrast, Amish men average 18,425 steps a day and Amish women 14,196. Not surprisingly, the Amish don't have an obesity problem.

For couch potatoes, the benefits of wearing a pedometer are particularly impressive. In an eight-week University of Tennessee study, women who were at risk for diabetes saw their systolic blood pressure (the top number) drop by seven points and their diastolic (the bottom number) drop by a significant five points in just eight weeks. Boosting their average steps from 4,972 to 9,213 also caused an 11 percent improvement in their body's ability to handle glucose. Although the women didn't lose weight during the study, they were less likely to become diabetic – without even changing their diet.

It typically takes longer to shed pounds. In one 24-week study, women with high blood pressure lost three pounds and dramatically improved their blood pressure by increasing from about 5,400 steps to 9,700, again without cutting calories.

Keep in mind that most pedometers more accurately count steps than distance or calories, so when purchasing a pedometer, skip the bells and whistles. To maximize the accuracy, clip your pedometer to your waistband directly above your thigh bone, and make sure it's flat against your body. If it's rolled on its side, it's likely to undercount steps. Test the gizmo by taking 20 steps. If the count is off by more than one step, return the device. Websites that sell pedometers include calorieking.com, pedometersusa.com, bodytronics.com, thepedometercompany.com and amazon.com.