Walking To Lose Weight

One of the advantages of using some sort or other of recording system during weight loss is that the ups and downs over time are clear. Walking to Lose Weight offers a perfect benefit of being easy to maintain once the weight loss you want is achieved. This is because it has become such an ingrained and joyful habit it is easier to keep doing than to give it up.

I dislike any implication that ‘weight’ should be thought of as a lifetime disease that perhaps may come with the idea of continuously walking to lose weight. The real purpose is to start with walking or any other routine activity as an add on to your lifestyle that wasn’t there before, and to integrate it with such thoroughness that the benefits including but not especially ongoing weight balance, flow every day.

Also while starting with the easiest option (walking) it is by far the healthiest and most effective to continuously try out and apply differing exercise and diet techniques to add variety, for the fun factor, and to intensify calorie burning.

Keep Walking to Lose Weight does convey the fundamental premise of successful lifetime weight balance for those with chronic weight issues, that is, once started you don’t stop. You keep activity and diet conducive to weight loss. In other words it is a benefit to remember to keep walking for weight balance even though your weight is under control now.

You don’t have to continue to talk about weight issues and walking to lose weight. With the interim goal achieved it is now about having an ongoing lifestyle that supports who you want to be!

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A way to make a walking to lose weight and an exercise for fitness program work for me has been to make it an equal part of my lifestyle as other important aspects. While weight loss is often at the back of the  mind of many of us it isn’t always a part of the activity or task schedule of our daily lives. It tends to be an add-on process. It takes off at certain times and then retreats back into obscurity when other more pressing (on some scale)needs or goals take over.

One way this reveals itself as a disadvantage is when you have actually been successful. The relaxing of your desire i.e. goals around weight loss and the tasks or focus required to achieve the original goal, often means a return to the exact behavior which caused the problem in the first place, such as lack of exercise or  poor diet and food consumption habits.

It is likely that you have lost weight successfully before. Often times it is a lack of ability to continue the behavior which caused the weight loss which triggers the return of excess weight. To use a trivial example, say your house is generally comfortable but messy. Your mother-in-law is coming and you want to make a good impression so a spring clean is underway. You could even say to yourself as you appreciate how nice it feels to be in a cleaned house with the sunshine and flowers creating a cozy effect: ‘This is the way I want it to be always.’  Yet with the mother-in-law gone (and she lives far away) and the kids come home and don’t understand your new desire for order and cleanliness, soon you’ve forgotten you had any other goal then to tidy up for a particular occasion.The same applies to diet and exercise aimed at one goal-weight loss- without embedding the desire into your lifestyle.

Walking for weight  loss and activity for its own sake adds value to your life in many ways. Eating in filling yet healthy ways also adds to a sense of caring and looking after ourselves and our bodies which also feels good.

Counting calories or pedometer steps are ways to systematize a balanced diet and regular exercise into your lifestyle. Walking to lose weight is a lifestyle choice which lends itself to activity as a matter of course. While other  exercise options are still necessary because variety is important, the advantage of walking is its ability to fit into most lifestyles with ease, and making it easy is instrumental to weight loss success.

Walking to lose weight becomes an attitude pervasive enough that once established it has its own  momentum and replaces the need to consciously choose to diet or exercise.

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Walking, as a lifestyle, has lots of contemporary significance (green,conservation, fitness, health) and may seem extreme as a metaphor for fulfilling your lifestyle desires in other areas. Walking to lose weight seems even narrower with the assumption that this is a weight loss concept. The new walker is different.

The new Walking to Lose Weight is about the lifestyle skills learned from adapting your way of life for health, fitness and joie de vivre.

I’m writing from this perspective. Studies reveal that the behavior such as exercise and eating style required to lose weight is the basic behavior required to keep it off.

The original impetus for me to start was walking to lose weight. This process of integrating walking and pedometer steps into my lifestyle turned out to be a significant change to my  approach to life.

This blog, and others, enabled me to use the turnaround process I had developed elsewhere for my own well being benefit. If you have read since the beginning of this blog, August 2008, you may have noticed a new emphasis develop. It really was a personal attempt to make walking a consistent part of my life. Over time I moved from the regulation technical and fact oriented regurgitation of well established (although not undisputed) theories of weight loss. I realized that more than that was required and it had a lot to do with how I viewed my life and the world as I saw it.

OK that’s a big jump, and there are a lot of steps in between. I hope to make the leap easy for you.

Lifestyle change is not easy when it is voluntary. It allows wobbling, changing your mind, not taking the harder decision, getting confused along the way.

We (humans) seem to feel better with a simple answer, such as change only one aspect and get the whole problem resolved. This makes it seem achievable. This is good. If you don’t start with enthusiasm it is even harder to change.

Walking as a weight loss process tends to be the preferred option for those with issues around exercise and maybe diet.

It is so simple to make the time and do it. But then it requires doing more to continue the weight loss impact. Then it requires solving issues such as injuries or stress, tiredness, time conflicts. And doing it every day seems harder than you thought. Why is that?

Walking for weight loss and using the 10000 steps program for instance, requires a considerble lifestyle adaption.

It means looking for support from people other then friends and family or in addition to them because their goals may not complement yours that well.

It can be done; but it requires a period of time to blossom into its full potential as little bit by little bit you find your issues are resolved and some even disappear.

OK now it is practically possible but what’s this?

Sometimes you don’t feel like it. Sometimes you’re distracted, bored, off color.

What do you do then?

One day or even two doesn’t matter…unless you give up and decide its too hard, you’re not up to it, it works for others but not for me.

Keeping to a lifestyle change which is voluntary, and most of us prefer our changes to be of this type, requires more of something we don’t always have consistently over long periods and that is unfailing enthusuasm.

This is no different to other issues within our lifestyles that we know we can change for the better… but it seems too hard, others disagree, maybe it isn’t possible… Your lifestyle at the moment probably grew over time with changes integrated haphazardly until now it is what it is and mostly it seems unchangeable. Inertia has set in and the momentum is towards keeping it going in the same way.

Any lifestyle change of significance, done over time, requires a perseverance and positive attitude. There is a transition necessary and if this process is seen as failure than you may give up before the success you so desired.

Dramatic changes such as the sudden onset of illness or winning the lottery are quick disruptions to old patterns but dealing with, or coping with them in your life, takes time for the new adaptations to be comfortable

Longer term processes such as weight loss require these adaption tasks ahead of the overt change.

Necessary now is a way of thinking and attitude to support the change.

Weight loss is an example of life style change. Another example is starting a home business.

Now we’re getting to the connection to your personal and world views.

Having what it takes to make and then keep to these changes requires a mental and emotional outlook which keeps you up for it.

These abilities are distinct to the individual but exist in each of us. Whether we can access them depends on our own limits and aspirations. That is your world view and your attitude to life.

This is a big concept for some and a non-issue for others. My work life involves mentoring those who would like me to help them make the connection to making the big changes over time.

I will continue writing abut the connection your view of the world has to your success.

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At the same time as I am an advocate for small steps (goals) when starting with walking to lose weight it is also fun to take a small bites approach to eating. See where it leads. Maybe this will make it easier for you to manage your hunger. Eat just enough to feel satisfied in the moment. It is another form of the five small meals a day diet. By taking only several bites of a meal you are likely to become hungry again. At this point simply eat a few more bites. See how long it takes to complete a ‘meal’. It is most likely to be over a few hours.

This should give you the opportunity to cut down on overall eating in a day.

Walking to lose weight for an hour daily does require you to eat enough to keep your energy up for an active daily lifestyle. This should be made up of healthy alternatives to your previous diet. Keep meat servings small, and increase the amount of vegetables and rice. This will ensure you have enough energy.

Transition processes work well for this new lifestyle change. In this way you prepare for the overall change by practicing some of the behavior (walking and eating healthily) before introducing it on a regular basis. Gradually bring together several layers of resources that will support exercising for weight loss as ongoing.

For instance, if you are a regular burger junkie, try alternatives such as Subway and lean versions. Remember to practice a new attitude of being willing to replace your taste expectations by ‘seeing’ your alternative meal as ‘healthy’, ‘feels clean’, ‘I can feel my new body already’, etc.

Think of it this way: if I was a new me with a svelte figure and heaps of body confidence what decision would I make about this food?

You might try identifying with the people who make the ‘no sauce’ or ‘no butter’ requests. I know about some of us spending all the time while we’re ‘trying’ new behaviors sabotaging it with internal comments about the types of people who could like this food! The way to accept and start to enjoy this new food is to begin to look for reasons to like it.

A familiar example is the full cream versus low fat milk. Yes there is a difference but often it can be totally disguised in recipes etc. And many of us now find full cream cappuccinos less appealing and too greasy. I can always tell the difference because a full cream take away cap is far heavier to hold than the equivalent skim version.

Walking to lose weight fluctuates like all aspects of a daily life. It is not something to attempt to do perfectly yet will seem ‘perfect’ to others looking at your results.

So along with the small step goals, and small bites remember to make small lifestyle changes too. This is like allowing a refreshing breeze into your life.

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When walking to lose weight it is well to remember that generally you should walk each day unless you are exhausted from the continued exercise and it affects your abilities during the day. Then you should take up to two days off a week.

If your results go the other way and even with a regular daily walking to lose weight schedule your weight loss has plateaued then you need to shake up your schedule in another way. The energy (calories) used from any particular exercise changes over time as the body’s muscles adapts to the process and economizes on the number of calories burned. Initially this is compensated for by increasing the amount of time and distance of walking. Total calories burned increases.

Eventually, however, you will meet the maximum time commitment you are able to make and at this stage when your walking for weight loss schedule needs intensifying then several options are available to you.

1. Increase the intensity of the walking you do by adding hills, steps, weights or intermittent running. Another way to increase the intensity of an hour’s walking to lose weight would be to do a high intensity walking DVD such as those from Leslie Sansone or  Kathy Smith’s Power Walk.
2. Break up your standard program with exercise groups such as aerobic step classes.
3. Use an activity  monitor which measures not only steps throughout the day but also the level of exertion during those steps. This enables you to increase the number of movements done at the higher level intensity rather than the lower end of your walking to lose weight.
4. Have a ‘bootcamp’ period of one or two weeks when you try different forms of exercise, such as boxing, aerobic dance, etc.

Remember that walking to lose weight on a smooth surface such as a path can allow you to walk at a brisker pace. Walking on natural terrain can increase the calorie burn though if your feet must grip, divert directions, go up and down inclines, change balance etc. Walking on a treadmill does not require the natural push off needed when walking normally. However you can walk faster, increase the incline and run for intervals.

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