Walking For Weight Loss

Exercise plays a crucial role in maintaining our overall health and well-being, as well as boosting our self-esteem, which is equally significant. While many popular workout programs promise impressive physical transformations through extreme effort and dietary restrictions, these approaches are often unsustainable long term. Achieving desirable results without the need for intense training is possible. Are you aiming to build muscle or lose weight? If you have athletic goals or seek to enhance your strength, weight training and HIIT sessions may be suitable for you.  But for those who want to be slim and healthy, then simple walking is ideal.

All Around Benefits

Not only is walking enjoyable, it's free and encourages socialisation. It's great for body sculpting too. Walking melts fat off the whole body - the abdomen, upper arms and hips along with the legs and glutes. The reason walking is a fat burning exercise is because it's aerobic.

This means it increases circulation, increases the oxygenation of cells, detoxifies and increases metabolism. The areas of highest fat concentration melt away first. Taking regular walks is really the answer to a firm and slim body.  But I don’t mean the casual afternoon stroll - you can’t expect to get the benefits without achieving a moderate pace. If you are going to use walking as a way to trim your body, you’re going to need to up your pace, lengthen your stride, swing your arms and increase the walking pace.  If you want fat to melt away, you have to raise your heartbeat and keep it raised for at least half an hour. If you do this, you will start to notice a slimmer and more toned physique in a matter of weeks!

◊      Walking is low impact; it doesn’t damage the joints

◊      Your weight will improve and you'll reap other health benefits too

Have you got comfortable walking shoes with cushioned soles?  Buy yourself good ones and do your feet a favour. You won’t regret spending a bit extra on good walking shoes.

Sedentary Lifestyle? Get Your Walking Shoes On

Modern home and work environments mean that we spend large parts of our days sitting, particularly when we have office jobs. Sedentary lifestyles can definitely contribute to weight gain and also increase the risk of health problems.

One study estimated that in order for you to maintain a stable weight, you need to walk at least 150 minutes a week – remember to keep it brisk. And if you want to increase the intensity of your walk and burn even more calories, then you can try walking on routes that have hills and slight inclines.  When people cut their calories to lose weight, they can lose muscle in addition to body fat. Since muscle burns fat, deliberately trying to lose muscle is counterproductive. Muscle is metabolically more active than fat; it helps you burn more calories each day. Toning and resistance exercises, which include walking, help to counter the effects of muscle loss by preserving lean muscle as you lose weight.  It helps to reduce the drop in your metabolic rate making your weight loss efforts easier to maintain. Walking also reduces age-related muscle loss, helping you retain your muscle strength and function as well.

An effective way of reducing belly fat is to regularly participate in aerobic exercises and that means plenty of walking. One study showed how obese women who walked 3 times a week for 50-70 minutes at a time reduced their waist circumferences by 2.8cm (1.1"). They also lost 1.5% of their overall body fat.

Apart from helping you to lose weight, walking has other benefits too. It boosts your mood, decreasing feelings of stress, anxiety and depression. It makes your brain more sensitive to the hormones norepinephrine and serotonin – it's these hormones which relieve the feelings of depression and stimulate the release of endorphins, making you feel happy. It's also a great way to soak up some natural Vitamin D by walking outside in the sun.

So, get out and walk!

“Walking is a man’s best medicine” ~ Hippocrates