Walking for Weight Loss

The first step in losing weight may not be starting another fad diet. It may be walking without changing a thing you eat.

With dieting, the focus is too often on the input side. People worry about calories in. They forget about the other side of that equation: calories out. Burning calories by boosting your metabolism through activity, not pills or diet promises, may be a far more successful way to lose weight.

Walking helps you shift your attitude toward health, fitness, and weight loss. Change doesn’t happen overnight—nor did gaining those extra pounds. Take a year to move through these 3 steps (at least 16 weeks for each step) to make gradual but positive lifestyle changes.

• Step 1: Just get out there and walk a little. Build a daily habit. Let’s call it being active. Don’t think about changing clothes, going to a gym, or jumping around for an hour.
  
  
  • Just take a short walk to the bus stop, the corner mailbox, or the convenience store for a gallon of milk. Find ways to add an extra 2,000 steps into your daily routine.
  
  
  
  • Buy and wear a pedometer to measure your steps. A 20-minute walk is about 120 steps per minute, or 2,400 steps. You can break that up into 3 walks of 800 steps each.
  
  
  
  • How far you walk or how fast you walk aren't important. It’s simply walking in short spurts most days of the week. Be careful. Once you start paying attention to walking, you’ll want to walk farther.
  
  
  
  • Add a simple 4-minute stretch routine a few days a week after your walk to maintain your natural range of motion. Just stand up, even if you’re at work fully dressed in work clothes. Put one leg back, bend the front knee, and lean forward to stretch the calf muscle. For thighs, grab your ankle from behind, keep your knees close together. Lean forward to stretch your lower back.
  
  
  
  • Eventually add a simple 2-minute warm-up before you walk: Hold on to a railing for balance and circle your ankle, one leg at a time. Then swing each leg, forward and back. Put your hands on your hips for a circular trunk rotation. This gets the blood flowing and leaves your muscles less prone to injury.
  
  
  
  • Goal: You’ll realize you don’t have to hurt to feel better. After a walk, you’ll feel invigorated and happy.


• Step 2: Walk longer, build strength. Start increasing your walking distance, and you’ll begin to see weight loss. During this second phase, increasing distance means increasing time to 45-60 minutes 2 days a week.
  
  
  • You can cover serious distance in an hour of walking and walk even longer on weekends. Build up to a half-day or day-long hike. This increase in duration increases weight loss, burns more calories, and builds strength as you get off the beaten path and hike up and down hills on a challenging course.
  
  
  
  • Hike 2 miles somewhere and back at a brisk pace. Ask at any outdoor shop about the best places to hike, such as conservation land, state parks, a waterfront, or rail trail. Go for a full-day trek through a bird sanctuary, take a picnic to a waterfall, or go on an organized hike with a group.
  
  
  
  • When the weather outside is frightful, many people turn to treadmills. Admittedly, treadmills are boring. Spice up a complete treadmill workout by using elevation to give the sense of a trail. You don’t have to follow the preprogrammed courses. Create your own interval training with hills. Make it a mental game. Life isn’t automated and your treadmill workout shouldn't be either. Ascend and descend by varying your elevations and speeds.
  
  
  
  • Pick 5 of your favorite CDs for your portable Walkman - classical, country, rock and roll, even rap. Hit random play, and whatever song comes up, go that tempo. Start and end with an easy one. Put a fan in front of the treadmill to create natural cooling from the wind you’d normally get on a trail.
  
  
  
  • Keep an activity log. Noting your daily activity is a great motivator, especially when you see those miles start to build up. Tally your daily, weekly, and monthly totals. You’ll hate to write down “0” for any day.
  
  
  
  • Goal: Walk vigorously for a longer period of time twice a week. If you don't see dramatic weight loss, it may be because you are building muscle.


• Step 3: Walk faster and seek variety. In this 16-week segment, you’ll find the athlete within. Speed up your walking and you’ll see total body fitness improvements. A couple days a week, go fast enough to break a sweat and breathe hard.
  
  
  • Use the 1-to-10 scale of perceived rate of exertion to measure endurance. Think of 1 as watching TV; 10 is sucking air (you can’t go any farther). Daily walks, for example, are 5 or even 6-6.5 sometimes. Twice a week, crank it up to 7, 8, or 9 on a steep hill for a few minutes. Now you’re burning serious calories and building real aerobic fitness through interval training.
  
  
  
  • Need variety? Complement your walking with a counterbalancing exercise such as martial arts, yoga, water aerobics, or a court sport like tennis.
  
  
  
  • Goal: Walk in a 5K or 10K event such as a corporate cup run/walk, a fundraising race for the cure, or other organized community activity.
  
  
  
  • How to measure progress: Other than simply feeling great and watching the scale, you can actually measure what walking is doing for your body. Before you begin your activity program, have your doctor check your cholesterol, blood pressure, glucose (high levels can be a sign of early or undiagnosed diabetes), and your body mass index (BMI). BMI is a number that reflects your height-to-weight ratio (simply take your weight in pounds, multiply by 703 and divide by your height in inches squared—keep this number under 25 for optimal health).
  
  
  
  • Measure again at 26 and 52 weeks. You’ll see marked improvements, but not necessarily on the scale. You may be turning fat into muscle, which weighs more than fat. The best measure is how you feel—about yourself.