Walking for Weight Loss: In Praise of Walking For Health And Fitness

Nov 29 by Joanna

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Many people are intimidated by the gyms, weight rooms and modern exercise machines.

The truth is – you don’t need any of these to be fit and keep your weight under control.

If you are wondering how to start exercising, then I recommend you start with walking. Walking is a form of exercise accessible to just about everybody. It’s safe, simple and doesn’t require practice.

Especially, if you have been a couch potato for a long time and you carry a lot of extra weight; walking is a gentle, low-impact activity that can ease you into higher level of fitness and health. And the health benefits are many.

Make it useful. Make it fun. If you don’t like walking alone, invite your spouse, partner, friend or neighbor to join you.

Here’s more about why walking is good for you, and how to get started with a walking program.

Where and When To Walk

The best exercise routine is the one you stick with. And making your walking useful will make it easier for you.

Walk to and from work. Walk for errands. Walk your child to school. Anywhere you need to go that you can walk to in (say) under an hour. Take a walk during your lunch hour. When you’ve got cell phone calls to make. To listen to an audiobook. When you don’t know what to do next. If you like animals, offer to walk your neighbor’s dog. When you are feeling down. It’s a great antidepressant. You will use less gas, and reduce your ecological footprint too.

Health Benefits of walking

Walking, like other physical activity, has many important health benefits. Walking can help you:

• Lower low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol (the “bad” cholesterol)
• Raise high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol (the “good” cholesterol)
• Lower your blood pressure
• Increase bone strength
• Improve circulation
• Reduce your risk of or manage type 2 diabetes
• Lose weight
• Improve your mood, prevent depression
• Stay strong and fit

All it takes to reap these benefits is establish a daily routine of walking. It doesn’t get much easier than that. There are no excuses not to do it. And you can forget the “no pain, no gain” talk. Research shows that regular, brisk walking can reduce the risk of heart attack by the same amount as more vigorous exercise, such as jogging.

Calories Burned Walking

You don’t need to worry about the calories at this point.

However, I know that some of you may still wonder, and search online for information on exactly “how many calories will I burn when walking.”

To make it easy for you, here it is. To lose 1 pound of fat, you need to burn 3,500 calories. So if you cut 500 calories from your diet each day, you’d lose about 1 pound a week (500 calories x 7 days = 3,500 calories). Walking along with cutting calories will help you boost your weight loss.

Activity (1-hour duration)	Weight of person and calories burned
	160 lbs (73 kg)	200 lbs (91 kg)	240 lbs (109 kg)
Walking, 2 mph	183	228	273
Walking, 3.5 mph	277	346	414

 

Walking Gear: What you really (DON’T) need to start your walking routine

We live in a society of compulsive buyers, obsessed with things. So many people when they think about starting a new activity, such as walking, they’ll immediately start thinking about:

• Walking shoes: which are the best walking shoes, where to buy walking shoes, etc.
• Walking poles: how will walking poles help my walking, what are the best walking poles to get
• Best mp3 players for walking
• Best walking music
• Exercise machines for walking: treadmills, ellipticals
• Best clothing for walking
• Heart Rate Monitors: The serious walker may want to invest in a heart rate monitor. This is the easiest way to measure exertion.
• Wireless types are best because they give an accurate readout and are comfortable to wear. They’re comprised of a belt worn around the chest and a wristwatch display.
• Pedometer to count your steps and/or mileage. Some will even calculate calorie expenditure. The most sophisticated versions are are the new GPS systems. These actually calculate speed and distance based on satellite readings.
• Etc.

Don’t worry about any of these – unless you enjoy gadgets and have money to spend. Just walk.

Exertion vs. Exercise

Here is an excerpt from the Urban Ranger site. Urban Ranger is an extended metaphor to convince people to make a habit of purposeful, sustained walking.

It’s idiotic. We’ve invented one class of machine to spare us physical exertion, and another class of machine to inflict it back on us again, but in an infinitely more boring, painful, and useless manner.

It’s offensive. Work, dammit, and you won’t have to play work later. No, you probably can’t kill a caribou for dinner, or plow a field, or do most of the useful work that your ancestors did for thousands of generations. But you can still walk. And believe it or not, walking is enough (more on that below).

Let me guess: you don’t go to the gym, or strap yourself to the bike machine, or grind the cartilage off your joints jogging around the track, as often as you think you should, if at all. Maybe you go for six months, plateau, get bored, quit for a year, get disgusted, and start up again. Maybe you haven’t exercised in ages. You suspect that your problem is a deficiency of willpower. Well, you’re off. Your problem is you are squandering willpower on a hopeless task: exercise divorced from purpose. The solution: purposeful exertion; in particular, walking.

Walking is still useful. It is interesting and pleasant. You can think and observe while you walk. You get somewhere. You don’t need any special equipment or outfits. It provides great health returns on very little investment, without the risk associated with high impact activities. And you can do it for the rest of your life.

Human beings are lousy runners, compared with other mammals. We are lousy at just about every kind of physical locomotion — with one conspicuous exception: we are good walkers. We are good at moving slowly over great distances. We do it efficiently, we can do for extended durations, and we do it without messing our joints up. We can do it from nursery school to nursing home. Nature is giving us a clue: do what you’re good at.

For the sake of your own dignity and the beauty of the world, please don’t put on any silly outfits and pump your arms like a maniac. Just dress and walk normally. That 5% extra health benefit or whatever that you supposedly get from pumping your arms won’t mean a thing when you stop after 3 months because you are tired of looking like a bozo. Also, you’ll unconsciously get faster as you do it a lot. So relax.

Forget the treadmills. That’s the dark side. If you live somewhere where it isn’t safe/nice to walk, move. If you can’t afford to move from your hellhole, well then you probably can’t afford a treadmill either. Read more about incorporating walking into your life and becoming an Urban Ranger here.

Questions? Comments? Weight Loss Tips?

Why not add to the conversation in the comment section below! Are you trying to lose weight? What type of diet are you following? What are you struggling with? Have you tried walking for weight loss?

Want to share some weight loss tips with fellow readers? I’ll be looking forward to hearing from you!

Thanks!