Walking To Lose Weight

Walking to lose weight is still a favorite way to exercise for weight loss as its so practical and has lots of other benefits but I am continuing from a previous post about my new delight in Just Dance! the Wii dance game which shows an animated professional dancer to follow as best you can, and aerobically exercise and gain points for getting it right.

The crux of the weight loss exercise argument is always about calories burned. Aerobic or fat burning exercise produces more calories burned in a shorter time than walking. Once I have a certain level of fitness which can sustain faster or more intense exercise without causing undue restriction to ongoing activities (the easiest way to derail an exercise program is to overdo it and force quit ) then walking to lose weight can be supplemented with very effective calorie burning for those occasions when walking for an hour is not an option for me.

Just Dance! for an hour would probably burn 500+ calories. Walking at a brisk pace would burn around 300. Time vs effort is the equation!

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Once you’ve started walking to lose weight and have actually remembered to do it regularly the best way to increase weight loss is to increase the calories burned walking, by adding variety with interval and power walking. However there are many ways to add to the calories burned and increase the other advantages which come from exercising your body.

Walking to lose weight outside offers the potential opportunity to do other exercises. Recently I was walking in a park with a friend-we were walking for weight loss as were many other people who were there-and discovered that the park had an outdoor gym with some interesting gym-type equipment. It was fun and added some more intense muscle exercises and a diversion to our walk.

When in a park or grassy area which lends itself to sport or activity it is more comfortable to do some exercises which wouldn’t look right in your suburban street. However you could do them at your house at the end of the walking for weight loss, or with the Wii.

My suggestion today is to add lunges -doing a set of 10 every half mile or 500 meters. They could be walking lunges or stationary.

Always allow your body particualry the leg muscles to warm up before lunging, and if you haven’t done them for a while or are new to them start gently and judge how your legs are coping before intensifying.

For far too many years I couldn’t ‘do’ lunges. For some reason the lunge fairy hadn’t stood on my shoulder and sprinkled the fairy dust and I reluctantly lunged. In case you had the same errors in your thinking as I did I will pass on my new way of doing lunges which now gets me rated as ‘very good’.

To lunge:

Stand with your feet slightly apart and take one leg back behind, with the heel of this foot off the ground and the toes on the ground and flexed, balancing and taking the weight.

The front knee must not come over the toes when bent so move the back leg further back if this is the case.

The ‘lunge’ is bending the front knee as the back knee moves towards the ground.

Stability comes from the placement of the back leg- not too close or they are impopssible to do, or too far back and balance is lost. Try until you can keep balanced while doing the lunge down and back up.

Don’t worry if your back knee doesn’t seem to go too far down at first. Unless you have a mirror it is hard to tell just how far you are getting that back knee down.

Walking to Lose Weight Hints:

1. The important leg in this exercise is the back one. Focus on dropping that back knee rather than bending the front one.

2. When taking the leg back, think ‘balance’ rather than taking a direct line backwards. It may be easier for you to take your back foot off line a few inches. Avoid going so far as to require your body to twist when you are lunging.

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This Christmas as we all take stock and decide, consciously or otherwise- sometimes the decision is through focus and positivity, or it can be unconscious awareness that we have eaten and moved less over these few days, to “do something” about the extra pounds gained, walking to lose weight will easily be a popular choice on the exercise front. In this technical era, when innovation and design improvements are mandatory, even walking for weight loss can be taken to the next generation, however.

I am looking for ideas to add to and improve my walking experience. It seems that there is a constant stream of ideas from walking accessories, Iphone applications, and medical research to the latest fad nutritional supplement.

Each New Year we tend to look at the coming year and focus on some aspect of life, maybe very specifically-I’ll take the dog for an hour walk every day- to the general, such as using all the latest “help” available to continue the walking to lose weight program. This is an ongoing commitment to walking to lose weight as it is a lifestyle change into an active person for you.

One way to keep the attention on walking for weight loss is to ensure fresh ideas overlaid on the basics.

The two new ideas to grab my attention for 2010 are the iPhone apps such as Weight Watchers and the chili supplement which has incorporated calorie burning by metabolism enhancement.

iPhone:

I am a big pedometer fan and find the low tech versions to be fantastic for those starting out with walking to lose weight. If you like to play with a bit more technique however a more advanced version such as the one mentioned on the right could be more to your liking. The sales link is to my Amazon affiliate account.

The various iPhone apps with every weight loss concept covered are enticing. Sometimes this can be an illusion, especially if the technical side is not a joy to you. There is not a way for the iPhone to magically cause weight loss or do the walk for you. I am considering it, not as a specific weight loss tool, but the technical side requires some commitment on my part.

Chili

Protective encapsulation protects one’s stomach from inflammation and the supplement increases calories burned without walking, etc. I’m not sure why this is supposed to happen.

However 2010 is the year for new and fresh ideas for walking to lose weight and weight loss for me.

Anyone wishing to make comments on the Iphone for weight loss, or the chili supplement are welcome.

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Regular readers of this blog know that in my world view it is mental attitude which dominates success in weight loss. Walking for weight loss is the best method to make weight control a lifestyle.  It needs to be a lifestyle change for those of us who have ongoing issues with weight and an apparent failure to correct them.

Walking for weight loss enhances your mood, and reiterating my original premise, the right mood is a must for keeping at weight loss. And this depends upon lots of things such as your metabolism. Weight bearing exercise revs up your metabolism as well as toning your body.

Tip: Try something new! Whenever the old routine is getting tired, add a small change in some way. It may be the major injection your walking to lose weight routine needed at this point.

A couple of weight loss tips:

try a new (and easy) low fat snack recipe-this dill dip appeals to me because I love dill;

go to the library or video store and borrow a Walk Away the Pounds DVD, see if you like it;

make one day a walk everywhere day.

Use your imagination, look at what others are doing and without abandoning your already established walking for weight loss process, add some spice. Try it, if you don’t like it then forget it. Alternatively you may find it works for you, so give walking for weight loss tips a chance!

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For most of us the connection between the food eaten and the calories it contains, the exercise we do and the energy used, is less than clear. If walking is a wonderful weight loss exercise and only 10 minutes twice a day causes us to lose weight it really can’t be that difficult to get the whole diet issue under control. Yet walking uses only 300 calories an hour as a generous estimate, less for a 60 kg woman. Aerobic or power walking could use 400 calories in the same time.

Can using an extra 100 calories daily lose weight when we know that a pound of fat is made up of 3500 calories?

Yet it does. Over time, and more quickly than these figures suggest.

Sometimes it can be easy.

Other times it takes a combined effort of diet and extensive exercise.

There is a magical process which works to make the calories in and out equation more productive than it looks from this information.

It occurs when a number of aspects of diet and movement, metabolism and body chemistry combine in such a way that weight loss occurs quicker than the simple burning of calories suggests.

All things being equal the benefit of calories burned through exercise is more than simply a withdrawal from the fat bank account but the increased metabolic rates and standing body rates of ongoing life support.

Knowing too much can be discouraging and  irrelevant unless you are selectively using monitoring of behaviour rather than results.

The connection between food and calories made by recording food and calories eaten can be insightful and effective.

The connection to exercise is more problematic-it has more than a calories burned impact, dependng on the type of exercise it can effect metabolism as muscle uses more energy for maintenance than fat. And walking for weight loss can provide a way of feeling in control. it offers a solution after the horse has bolted i.e. having overeaten then walking can ameliorate the guilt or physical affects in addition to the calories burned walking.

Recording pedometer steps helps motivation towards achievement of a target such as 10,000 daily steps. It allows the user to become conscious of their movement and liable to add extra when possible. For eating the recording of food as it is eaten becomes a means of avoiding unconscious eating.

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