Walking To Lose Weight

Walking to lose weight becomes a part of the planning process for me when I am consumed with the details of a fully committed calendar over several days.

Normally I would have written something for this blog but I probably won’t be posting again until next week.

I’m away for a 4 day business seminar and have been generally busy for the last few days. Sometimes working can seem to get in the way of my committed walking for weight loss lifestyle, but also, sometimes it is normal for priorities to be reordered for a little while. This is one of the reasons for making walking to lose weight a lifestyle.

As preparation I have been making walking and weight loss through dieting a priority for a limited time. Not as a one off diet but at an increased intensity, returning to the previous sedate program afterwards. By allowing for the normal flow of priorities, by anticipating that changes are coming, give thought to new ways of keeping weight loss a primary commitment.

Eat less when uncertain as to exercise options.

Be discreet about cutting down if food and drink are important with this organisation’s culture. You can still do it but leave the table often, or be going somewhere after, preventing over indulgence.

Planning for business trips or seminars, budget and review times, can be stressful. Walking is a great de-stressor; walk and meet with associates at the same time. Others may be tired of sitting. They do not have to know this is a part of your walking to lose weight program.

Less eating more talking. Network, make friends by concentrating on this aspect rather than the food.

Fill up your time with relaxing small talk not high pressure interviews. Think of this as a game where you are carefully assessing these other people.

Wear a pedometer and count steps to get a better idea of how much walking you have managed that day. It is easy to run up and down stairs a few times to get papers or other things and add effectively to the day’s steps.

If you are staying at a hotel use the facilities such as a treadmill or you may find taking your Walk Away the Pounds DVD the easiest way to walk.

Technorati Tags: Business Trips, diet, Dieting, Food And Drink, Lifestyle, pedometer, treadmills, walking, walking dvd, walking for weight loss, walking to lose weight, weight loss

Spring time and walking go together! What happens when the summer heat kicks in when walking to lose weight?

Summer is the only time I enjoy using a gym. It is a fantastic back up for when I don’t feel cool enough to vigorously exercise. The best walking for weight loss in summer is my favourite DVD in the air conditioning at home.

Some tips for walking to lose weight when the weather is hot or humid:

Hydrate carefully. Too much is not a good thing either but do make sure you’re sipping small amounts regularly. If you do vigorous exercise in the heat try the old trick of weighing yourself before and after, replacing the difference in your weight with its equivalent in water.

Avoid the heat of midday for exercising outside. Use sunscreen. Wear a hat and cover up in light weight clothing appropriate for exercise.

Even when exercising in air conditioning, if the temperature or humidity generally is high, your body temperature will go up more quickly than it would in winter. This is because your body is already working harder to keep your median temperature low.

It may be that the same amount of exercise you always do is actually more tiring at this time of year.

It is important to get your heated body back to normal as quickly as possible if you have done too much. Use a towel or washer wrung out in iced water on the top of the head. Repeat until a lower or normal temperature is achieved. Or tip a bottle of water over your head.

Dehydration means thicker blood, which requires the heart to work harder to push it around your body. Keep the water up!

Try some strengthening exercises to insure against injury if you’ve just sat through winter and spring. Walking is the best way to start back into exercise without over doing it but even then some parts of your body may need some special attention.

E.g.

ankles-use a step to stretch the tendons by standing with your toes on the step and allowing your heels to go back over and down below the step a few inches. Hold for 10. Repeat 10 times. Stand normally then rise onto your toes for a count of 10. Repeat.

toes- pick up marbles or other small objects with your bare toes to strengthen them.

calves -stretches will alleviate tightness.

thighs- these muscles can be strengthened by lifting the knee towards the chest while standing. In the meantime try walking up steep steps slowly.

Walking to lose weight in summer is cool!

Technorati Tags: beach walking, benefits of walking, gym, recreation, tips for weight loss, walk, walking dvd, walking for weight loss, walking to lose weight

It’s raining too much to go comfortably walking to lose weight outside and this means walking inside because I’m also not going out to a shopping centre today. I have a few back ups for when I don’t want to walk outside but my favourite is to use Walk Away the Pounds.

I get out the Leslie Sansone’ DVD, pop it in the Mac, pull out the weights and my step, and away we go. Every time I do it again after a while away I am surprised anew how tired my body feels. It is harder than doing the equivalent time walking. Also I have added in the step when I am short of space so when she walks forward for four steps, I go up and down on the step.

When walking to lose weight there are a few additions which enhance the likelihood of doing the required walking. An essential is a way to measure your activity. Using your watch is the simplest. Eventually you need to modify this to ensure that the requisite energy is being used. Then a pedometer becomes a good companion for walking outside or counting steps. Over time as you become acquainted with how much walking is needed for you to get the results you want, you will get to know how much distance is necessary. With Leslie’s DVD the 3 programs are divided into 1,2 and 3 mile distances. This makes it easy to add in an extra mile if you need that distance to bring your step count up for the day.

There are lots of good exercise DVDs available but every one has different space, time, equipment requirements. I’ve bought and not used more than once the Billy Blanks’ and Jillian Michaels’ DVDs even though these are good. Recently Jillian was quoted as saying that the weight loss lifestyle is hard but at least “Walk your lunch hour. Do a video in your living room for 30 minutes.”

There are some special aspects of the walking series which make me return to Leslie Sansone. She makes it seem easy, to get what you need from her simple routines. If you need extra such as a competitive element, or challenge (other than losing weight) -even a mental one- than the more complex systems are probably for you. The beauty of walking to lose weight is it’s simplicity. It can genuinely add value by providing more than weight loss.

The benefits of walking for health and general well being are numerous.

Leslie is friendly, inclusive and not intimidating, for either beginner or advanced. She explains really easily what she is doing and why it helps to do it this way.

Walking is easy, everyone can do it, but there is a learning component when doing it to lose weight and once you understand the significance of some of the moves and changes she recommends it is easy to modify what you are doing when walking in general. This way you get a higher calorie burn.

Her DVDs are a good demonstration of how walking can have a significant weight loss impact.

She adds weights and other accessories which are all well designed and explained. I have hand weights which I used before I got around to filling her Walk Away Weights with water. I really like these new type of weight-they’re easy to hold but require a different action, balancing the ball and keeping the fingers outstretched rather than gripping. The disc style weights are usually too big for me to hold comfortably and gripping the handle of the dumb bells can aggravate any arthritic problems.

The Walk Away the Pounds series is a real workout without being intimidating and requiring intricate techniques. If you have a preferred weight obviously you can use that and it can be modified in any number of ways, to suit your situation, such as my addition of the step.

Lots of people use DVDs for their regular way to walk or like me, supplement their normal daily activity when necessary. Either way it is a pleasure to walk with Leslie.

Walk Away the Pounds with Leslie Sansone

NOTE: The link to Amazon is for U.S. and Canadian purchasers only, because they work with North American DVD players or multi-format players only. For International purchasers this can be determined by checking your player manual.

Technorati Tags: walk away the pounds, walking dvd, walking for weight loss, walking to lose weight, weight loss tips

Following on from my previous post: Consumer Reports: Walking to Lose Weight is Key.

Sometimes when coming across an article or blog which really fits within my own walking to lose weight attitude to successful weight loss it becomes a great opportunity to improve what I’m doing. I like the idea behind this research: find out what is successful (or not) for a lot of people (over 22,000). Even with the normal biases from self-responding survey results this is impressive because we can think about what a large number of people have found effective and ineffective in weight control.

Most of what appears in my blog is based on my personal weight issues and success or failures. This stems from decades of frustration with an incomplete approach for what is a lifestyle choice rather than a one-off treatment.

My issues, in hindsight and summary form, have been:

poor eating habits
no exercise habit
situational eating.

What I want now is to use all that I now know to create an easy, healthy lifestyle where weight is not an issue, and my life is active because I want it to be.

Back to some of the findings from the Consumer Reports survey. I agree from personal experience with their findings that you need to get back up each time you “fail”,  it takes more than one go to lose weight. For the other keys to weight loss, and this may relate back to the first point, that more than one effort to lose weight is necessary, there are levels at which certain “rules” apply. Some of the stricter requirements are too “heavy” for beginner losers who are not mentally prepared for the discipline and positive attitude required for continued success.

Dieting and Exercise are Both Necessary: I agree with this. It produces a quicker and more attractive result.

However for those with low current exercise levels particularly through illness, long term or disability from overweight, weight loss can start from increasing movement without adjusting diet at first. It is better to moderate what you eat, get into walking and move through any difficulties you encounter initially, and then add stricter calorie monitoring. Calorie intake needs adjustment as your body weight decreases also because a lighter load uses less calories to move around. At the same time muscle maintenance uses more calories than fat so this lower calorie usage may not be as important if only a little weight needs to be lost in the first place. This is part of why you have to be prepared to fail and start over if you can’t take on all the necessary changes at once i.e. making time for exercise, doing it, shopping differently, preparing food instead of eating take away, solving problems as they arise, etc.

Self-Monitor:

I prefer keeping track of my exercise program e.g. pedometer or minutes/distance etc., and to keep noticing how clothes fit better etc. than to constantly weigh myself…except when I’m on target (i.e. I am the weight/size I want) when regular weight checks remind me if I start to stray.

Today after hopping on my Wii Fit to check my weight it confirmed what I had suspected: weight gain of 0.7 kgs! Of course I knew that I had been allowing myself some additional treats over Easter and doing less distance in my walking, consequently I’m not disappointed but I’m not happy. I now need to get back into my regular routine of counting steps and make good choices. And the scales help focus that intention.

But again if I’m in the beginning stages weight measurement can be misleading or de-motivating, when the results aren’t what you want or expected to see.

Use new information to revise some aspects of your weight loss program if it seems like a good idea.

My decision: I’m quitting my gym and using the various tools and walking to lose weight routines I’ve already put in place, to bolster my program.

Why? The gym has been my fall back position. Whenever I feel frustration I want to charge in to the gym and do some dynamite exercise to quickly lose inches. It has been useful but I wonder if my other resources are enough. There are other options to gym-style resources or walking dvds at home and through casual attendance at other exercise classes.

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Forcing walking when ‘against’ it could be the end of walking to lose weight for you. When you are out of alignment with the process pressuring yourself to do it could be detrimental to the overall goal of losing weight. All that is needed is a lightening of the tone generally as much weight loss success is determined by your attitude rather than your ability to do something. After all most of us can walk, most of us can, and indeed have, lost weight.

The most important aspect of an ongoing walking for weight loss lifestyle is to feel good about it!

Find a way of lifting your mood or changing your position on something. For example if you always do a particular route, time, class or profile- change it. The adage that change is as good as a holiday has lots of good thinking behind it. Added to that is the recognised benefit of walking to lift one’s spirits.

What could you make different about walking to lose weight today?

Some ways to do this and break a cycle that is getting you down:

Go to the shops and walk around to ger prices etc. instead of phoning or doing an internet search. Remember it is the time saving technologies which in many instances have taken out exercise from our daily lives. Add some of these opportunities for activity back into your life. So if you are a shopaholic use this!

Play with the kids at that next family party by participating or creating active games which they love. Or if they’re older go to a game and take every opportunity to jump up and cheer, do a victory dance-for both sides!

Take your walking dvd to a friend’s place, babysitting or when traveling.

Cultivate a level of indifference to what others might see as normal. After all anything you put time and effort into is important to you-don’t take advice from others to whom it isn’t important.

All the little accumulated successes enhance your confidence in the walking to lose weight process. Notice that you are feeling better-that in itself is a success! Count them all.

Technorati Tags: walking, walking dvd, walking for weight loss, walking to lose weight