The Most Underrated Weight Loss Tip

When it comes to losing weight, or getting into shape, most people tend to jump directly into hard exercise or deep caloric deficits. While this does get results, they tend to be short term results. Research actually shows that almost 90% of diets and intense short-term exercise programs fail. The biggest reason for this high failure rate is that people never learn to incorporate proper eating and exercise habits into their daily lives, and they eventually give up. To combat this problem, we typically recommend a slow and steady lifestyle change instead of a specific exercise routine or diet. In this article, however, we’re discussing the power of one of the most underrated exercises for losing weight, and why it’s so powerful. The exercise in question is, of course, walking.

Why Walking?

So you might be asking yourself if we’ve gone crazy. Walking? Seriously, that’s your big brain weight loss tip? Allow me to explain! Walking tends to be overlooked as a weight loss exercise because it just sounds too good to be true. Simply walking more can’t possibly result in losing any weight, no less the dozens of pounds you may need to lose to attain a healthy physique. This, however, is where you’re unfortunately mistaken. Walking is incredibly powerful, and gets progressively more beneficial the heavier you are.

Studies have found that the average 150 pound person burns around 100 calories per mile walked, and this calorie number is directly proportional to your weight. Meaning that if you are 225 pounds, you burn 150 calories per mile, 300 pounds burns 200 calories, and so on. What this means is that the more you walk, the more calories you burn and the more weight you end up losing! If you weigh 225 pounds, and walk just one extra mile per day for a whole year, you burn enough calories to lose over 15 pounds of fat! That’s incredible!

How Do I Incorporate Walking?

Now how can we incorporate walking into our daily routines? Well there are literally dozens of ways to do so, but lets focus on a few options that we like the most!

The first option, and our favorite, is to simply schedule a morning walk right after you get out of bed. This is doubly powerful because one, it gets you out of the house and signals your brain to wake up, and two, starting your day with a form of exercise has shown to set your day up to be more productive and effective! As the saying goes, an object in motion tends to stay in motion.

Another favorite of mine is to go on a 10-20 minute walk right after a big meal. This could be lunch, dinner, or even breakfast, it really depends on when you have your largest meal of the day. Walking actually helps the digestive system, and you also end up burning off some of the calories you just consumed!

Now the next couple of recommendations are more passive, for example parking farther away from the grocery store, or walking to the coffee shop for your morning or afternoon coffee (granted it's within walking distance). Other options are doing more chores around the house and yard, walking around the house or the neighborhood when on the phone, and taking the stairs instead of the elevator or escalator. Simple things like this can easily add a mile to your daily step count, which, as we’ve discussed previously, adds up very quickly over the course of a year!

Other Benefits of Walking

In addition to weight loss and physical fitness, research shows that walking has a myriad of other health benefits. Two of the biggest benefits found are increased creative thinking, and improved mental health.

If I had a dollar for every time a biography or autobiography of a successful or creative individual mentions walking or strolling through a garden to get the creative juices flowing, I’d probably be famous enough to have an autobiography written about myself! So many figures throughout history have talked about the power of simply going outside and walking through nature to give their brain a chance to relax, and come up with new and exciting ways to think through a problem. So if you’re stuck on a problem either at work or for school, try taking a break and going on a little walk. You’ll either come up with a solution outside, or your brain would have had a chance to reset and rewire itself, so you end up fresher when you come back to the problem!

The other big benefit of walking is improved mental health. Studies have found that walking has a direct and positive effect on your mental health through numerous pathways. For example, walking has been shown to improve sleep quality, reduce stress, increase energy, increase cognition and focus, and improve your mood! The way walking has these effects on your mood and mental health is by increasing blood flow and circulation through your body. This affects the HPA, or hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (essentially a feedback loop that regulates your mood), and stimulates the release of hormones to calm the HPA axis. This then makes you feel less stressed and more relaxed!

While these effects and their magnitude differ from person to person, if you choose to adopt more movement and more walking into your daily life, you’ll surely see improvements to your mood and energy!

I hope this article was able to convince you of at least some of the potential health benefits of increased movement, especially through walking! We typically encourage our clients to aim for about 10-12,000 steps in a day, however that may be overkill for some. To start out, we recommend starting in the 7-8,000 step range and increasing the step count as you feel more comfortable.

If you’re looking for a more personalized weight loss plan, reach out to us and we’ll get you started!