Walking, a simple yet powerful form of exercise, offers numerous health advantages, including weight loss. Incorporating walking into your daily routine can be an accessible and effective way to manage your weight, improve your mood, and reduce the risk of chronic diseases. This article explores the benefits of walking for weight loss, how to maximize its effects, and the science behind it.
The Benefits of Walking for Weight Loss
Walking is beneficial for weight loss because it helps you burn calories. If you add 30 minutes of brisk walking to your daily habits, you could burn about 150 more calories a day. Regular walking may help you burn extra calories, develop lean muscle, and reduce belly fat. Moreover, consistent physical activity is associated with other health benefits.
Calorie Burning and Weight Management
Your body requires energy (in the form of calories) for all the complex chemical reactions that allow you to move, breathe, think, and function. Being physically active burns more calories than being sedentary. A 2021 study measured the number of calories regular walkers or runners burned after walking 1 mile (1.6 km). Results showed that walkers and runners burned, on average, 107 calories. This number will vary, however, depending on your weight, sex, and ethnicity. Both walking and running contribute significantly to the number of calories burned and, therefore, weight management.
Preserving Lean Muscle Mass
You often lose some muscle in addition to body fat when you cut calories and lose weight. This can be counterproductive, as muscle is more metabolically active than fat. Having more muscle helps you burn more calories each day. Exercise, including walking, can help counter this effect by preserving lean muscle when you lose weight. Preserving lean muscle helps reduce the drop in metabolic rate that often occurs with weight loss, making your results easier to maintain. Regular exercise can reduce age-related muscle loss, helping you retain more of your muscle strength and function in later years.
Reducing Belly Fat
Storing a lot of fat around your midsection (abdominal fat) has been linked to an increased risk of diseases like diabetes and heart disease. Men with a waist circumference greater than 40 inches (102 cm) and women with a waist circumference greater than 35 inches (88 cm) are considered to have abdominal obesity, which is considered a health risk. Regularly taking part in moderate-intensity aerobic exercise like walking is associated with lower levels of belly fat.
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Improving Mood
Exercise is known to boost your mood. Physical activity has been associated with improved mood, decreased feelings of stress, depression, and anxiety, and increased energy levels. Walking can make your brain more sensitive to the hormones serotonin and norepinephrine, which relieve feelings of depression and stimulate the release of endorphins, which make you feel happy. Experiencing an improvement in mood when you walk regularly might also make the habit easier to keep up with than if you walk less frequently. This is likely to motivate you to walk more rather than give up.
Maintaining Weight Loss
Many people who try weight loss programs end up gaining all or some of their weight back. Regular exercise plays an important role in helping you maintain weight loss. You must continuously engage in physical activity if your goal is to keep off weight that you’ve already lost. People who exercise the most are usually more successful at losing a greater amount of weight, whereas people who exercise the least are more likely to regain weight. According to the National Weight Control Registry, 94% of people who have successfully maintained a loss of at least 30 pounds for 1 year or more report increasing physical activity, mainly by walking.
How to Enhance Your Walking Routine for Weight Loss
To get the most benefit from walking for weight loss, consider the following strategies:
Increase Walking Speed
Walking at a brisk pace burns more calories than walking more slowly. The National Health Service (NHS) recommends walking at a pace where talking is still possible but singing is difficult. People can also use apps or wearable devices to track their speed or heart rate.
Add Inclines
Walking uphill or on a gradient also increases the difficulty of the exercise and the number of calories people burn. For some, this may mean increasing the treadmill gradient, while others may want to incorporate more hills into their outdoor walking routine. People can also walk uphill more by using stairs instead of elevators or escalators.
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Incorporate Resistance Training
Adding resistance training exercises to a walk may help burn more calories and increase new muscle growth. To do this, people can take breaks from walking at regular intervals and use their body weight or outdoor equipment. Some exercises to try include squats, pushups, burpees, tricep dips, and lunges.
Try Power Walking
Power walking is a form of brisk walking that focuses on speed and arm movement. It can be an effective way to increase the intensity of walks. To try it, a person should first walk at a typical pace for about 5 to 10 minutes to warm up. Then they can increase to an uncomfortable but sustainable pace for 10 to 15 seconds before returning to a typical walking pace. People can repeat this pattern for as long as they can manage.
Split Up Your Walks
Some people may find it easier to maintain their daily exercise by doing shorter walks throughout the day instead of taking a much longer walk once a day. Doing this may even enhance the effects of walking for weight loss. One 2019 study involving 65 women found that those who did two 25-minute walks per day lost more weight than those who did one longer 50-minute walk per day.
Increase Your Step Count
Simply increasing the number of steps people take throughout the day may help with weight management as well as overall health. A common recommendation is for adults to walk 10,000 steps per day. To increase the amount of walking a person does throughout the day, they can try taking the stairs instead of the elevator, parking further away from shops, work, or school, and walking to lunch, work, school, or other activities if possible.
The Science Behind Walking and Weight Loss
Walking is a moderate-intensity exercise that can be easily incorporated into your daily life. Research shows that walking at a moderate intensity can support weight loss, improve muscle preservation, and offer lasting health benefits.
Read also: Weight Loss with Indoor Exercises
Walking Immediately After Meals
Based on the fact that the blood sugar (BS) increase after a meal causes an increase in the blood insulin level, it was hypothesized that walking after a meal would prevent the BS level from increasing, because walking consumes BS. For people who do not experience abdominal pain, fatigue, or other discomfort when walking just after a meal, walking at a brisk speed for 30 minutes as soon as possible just after lunch and dinner leads to more weight loss than does walking for 30 minutes beginning one hour after a meal has been consumed.
One study found that the author lost nearly 3 kg and a volunteer participant lost nearly 1.5 kg during one month of walking just after lunch and dinner. The author walked at a brisk pace, while the volunteer walked at a stroll. Repeated hyperglycemia after meals causes hyperinsulinemia and a resultant resistance to insulin, which is problematic for people who have mild diabetes mellitus or are at risk for diabetes mellitus, and for people with obesity, because insulin is the obesity hormone. Suppressing hyperglycemia after a meal will suppress insulin hypersecretion, helping to suppress the storage of internal fat and thus preventing obesity from worsening.
Additional Factors for Weight Loss
Weight loss is a process influenced by several key elements:
- Caloric Intake: The calories consumed play a major role. A diet focused on balanced portions and nutritious food can support a caloric deficit, essential for weight loss.
- Sleep: Studies show that lack of sleep can disrupt hunger-regulating hormones, which may lead to increased caloric intake.
- Stress Management: High stress can elevate cortisol levels, which may lead to overeating or weight gain.
- Hydration: Staying adequately hydrated can support weight management by aiding digestion, metabolism, and appetite control.
Recommendations for Walking
According to the Centers for Disease Control, it’s recommended to get at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic exercise per week to maintain a stable weight. In walking terms, that means walking for around 2.5 hours per week (at least 10 minutes at a time) at a brisk pace. Or, walking just 22 minutes per day also satisfies this recommendation. Doing more exercise than this has additional benefits for your health (and your weight) and reduces your risk for disease even further.