Walking for Weight Loss is an Easy and Effective Solution
What’s the hardest part of losing weight?
While you may be tempted to answer by referring to that period when you are still learning to fight and control your impulses and cravings, many others would beg to differ.
For a lot of people, the hardest part of the weight loss process is keeping the weight off once it has been lost. As a matter of fact, it’s so hard that it’s keeping the weight loss business afloat; if everyone could become slim and never gain weight again, eventually there would be nobody left to purchase weight loss products.
Needless to say, many are looking for ways to maintain their weight once they have dropped their excess fat, and as it happens the answer might lie in something as simple and lightweight as walking for weight loss.
The Effectiveness of Walking for Weight Loss
Various studies have looked into the effectiveness of different types of exercises when it came to burning calories, and it surprised many when it was observed that walking about two thousand steps at a brisk pace burns somewhere around a hundred calories. For reference, two thousand steps is about one mile’s length and takes a person on average fifteen minutes to travel.
And so it was found that walking is great for losing weight… but how is it the perfect tool in order to maintain it?
Well, it was estimated by researchers at the University of Colorado that most adults consume somewhere around ten to thirty excess calories per day, leading to gains of somewhere between one and three pounds per year, and that’s if you are following a more or less strict nutritional plan as well as a light exercising regime.
Surprisingly enough, the key to keeping the weight off is to simply walk for an additional fifteen minutes for five days per week.
15 Minutes of Walking for Weight Loss
If you will be taking an extra two thousand steps five days per week, you are going to be burning an extra five hundred calories. For the sake of the argument, let’s say that you are typically gaining an excess of fifty calories every day. Under these circumstances, you would be gaining an excess of three hundred and fifty calories per week, but burning five hundred through walking.
In the end, you will be burning an extra hundred and fifty calories per week, even leaving you with some room to cheat on your diet once in a while.
Taking Walking for Weight Loss to The Limit
If you really want to tap into the full potential of walking for weight loss, then the best thing to do would be to walk not for an extra fifteen minutes, but for an extra forty-five minutes to an hour, five days per week.
At this point, you are going to be burning somewhere around 1500 to 2000 extra calories per week, which will actually help you lose between one and two pounds.
All in all, regardless of what type of exercising system you are following, you would do well to integrate regular walking into it; it doesn’t take up much time, effort, money or equipment, but the results it yields can be truly phenomenal. Get a good pair of walking shoes and you’re set to go.