The video in question!
The following article is from my video, which you will find linked above.
Walking is one of the most underrated aerobic exercises out there. Most people wouldn’t consider it a legitimate way to lose weight and maintain a healthy lifestyle. After all, we expect weight loss to only occur from running miles on a treadmill, while sweating buckets.
A walk in the park, by definition, is way too easy to be effective. Or is it?
The truth is that walking consistently throughout the week can have significant impacts on how you look and feel, not to mention the very positive internal physiological effects it can have.
Even more so if you find it difficult to motivate yourself to workout.
Can walking help you to lose weight?
I am an unwitting case study for this, in that I was able to burn enough fat from walking to become 20kg or about 44lb lighter. I had not intended to lose weight from walking though. I just started walking one day because I had begun a dopamine detox. I needed to keep myself from any forms of stimulation and so I started walking in circles around my garden. It was not for weight loss purposes at all. I really needed to lose weight, but it had not been my intention.
It happened to be a happy side-effect of the consistent walking habit that I created.
Long after my detox had finished I was still walking everyday, only I began challenging myself to walk more and more each week. I have now lost in excess of 20kg or 44.09lb. I have no before picture because I hadn’t planned this and hated the way I looked, so I stayed away from cameras.
This article is about how one of the most underrated, low impact exercises can benefit everyone; from beginners to advanced exercise practitioners; older people; people with injuries; people who just find it difficult to motivate themselves to work out; and of course people who want to lose weight.
Walking may not be as hard as running, but it is still considered to be a low to moderate form of aerobic exercise. The faster you walk, the longer you walk, and the more frequently you walk, will burn more calories, which will add to the caloric deficit that is required to lose weight.
One thing that needs to be said is that you cannot outwalk a bad diet. A very bad diet will make it difficult, if not impossible, to lose any weight. People will often say, “90% of weight loss is reliant on diet”, but this is taken out of context, and it devalues the very powerful and positive effects of consistent exercise.
There are a lot of studies out there that compare the effects of diet and exercise on weight loss. They often conclude that dieting alone usually results in more weight loss than exercise alone.
But after reviewing a number of these studies, researchers realized that in most of these studies, the calories burned were not matched. Sometimes the diet only groups would be burning 1700 Calories per day, but compared to an exercise only group burning 200 Calories per day. With a flawed setup like this it is easy to see that the diet only group would come out on top. So the researchers established that when the calories burnt are matched, weight loss is matched.
This helped to conclude that exercise alone, without dietary restriction can be an effective strategy for losing weight.
Walking at a moderate to fast pace burns about 150–200 Calories in 30min. So in an hour you are burning about 400 Calories, and 200–400 Calories per day can make a significant difference.
In one study, participants were instructed to only add 1000 steps per day, which is only about 10min of extra walking per day, and also without modifying their diets. Their leg strength, blood pressure, and cholesterol levels improved, and they lost weight and visceral belly fat, while improving their overall body composition.
In another study researchers concluded that walking is a safe and effective strategy for improving insulin resistance, thereby helping to prevent diabetes.
In a Duke University study, over a 6 month trial period, a group of frequent walkers demonstrated a 6 times greater improvement in glucose tolerance, or blood sugar absorption than a group of runners. More efficient use of blood sugar allows the pancreas to produce less insulin and allows it to rest.
This is assuming you do nothing else except walking. It is far more beneficial to combine walking with other forms of exercise, like resistance training and/or high intensity interval training, and also to combine that with a well balanced diet plan. If you are walking and on a solid diet it can help enhance the effects of the diet and workout plan.
Higher Intensity exercises have a lot of advantages over the lower intensity activities like walking. With higher intensity workouts you can get the same results in 15min that you would get after 45min or an hour of low intensity activity. So it saves you time, but it can also build more muscle and improve your muscles ability to use oxygen more efficiently.
But low intensity activities have their own advantages. Firstly, it is low impact and low stress activity. This makes it ideal for people with injuries, or people that are out of shape, or at a more advanced level in age. It helps to reduce the risk of injury from exercise. According to one study, the chance of getting an injury from walking is 25% lower than being injured from running, and other estimates have it as much as 50% lower.
There is a good reason for this. Running creates more stress on your joints every time your foot strikes the ground.
There is a ground reaction force, which is much higher in running than in walking. When you walk the ground reaction force generated is about 1.5 times your body weight, whereas with running it is about 2.5 times your body weight. This is a significant increase in reactionary force.
Walking may benefit people that are out of shape and looking to start slowly, but it can also be great for more advanced exercisers that are looking to add in some active recovery in between their other workouts.
High intensity training can exhaust your central nervous system and can leave you feeling tired for your next workout, and walking can help with soreness and recovery. This makes it a great way to burn some extra calories without decreasing your performance levels for your next workout.
It may be preferential for you to save time by doing higher intensity exercise, but if you find it easier to maintain a consistent training strategy of low intensity training, then it can be just as effective. Walking is a lot easier to maintain as a habit. You can walk anywhere, it doesn’t require a gym, it doesn’t interfere with your other workouts, and it’s relatively stress free compared to other forms of exercise.
According to some studies, exercise is important when it comes to losing weight, but it might be the most important factor to consider when it comes to maintaining the weight loss, potentially more so than diet.
In one study, the researchers stated that the most common method for weight loss is diet, but they also say that diet does not provide a long term solution. Over 50% of the people that lose weight by dieting end up regaining the weight, making dietary change more difficult to maintain over time. These researchers claim that exercise is the only factor on the energy expenditure side that can actually be voluntarily controlled over the long term.
At the end of the day, diet is super important for losing weight, but consistently exercising may be the most important thing to keep that weight from returning.
The Physical Activity Guidelines for Amricans recommends 150min or 5 30min walking sessions per week of moderate activity. This should be doable for almost everybody.
The health benefits this can help to provide include the prevention of high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, and osteoporosis, to name a few.
A study at the University of Kansas reported that low impact aerobic exercises prevent the early onset of dementia and reduce the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.
Walking can improve your overall well being by helping to reduce stress and release endorphins.
Walking is good for eyesight in general. Both low and high intensity exercises strengthen and stimulate the visual cortex, which is the part of the brain that processes the information coming from the optic nerves.
According to the American Heart Association, walking is no less effective than running for the prevention of heart disease and strokes. A daily 30 min walk can help to avoid serious problems.
As it is an aerobic exercise, walking helps to increase oxygen flow in the bloodstream and helps to eliminate toxins and waste. The better quality and deeper breathing can help to improve the symptoms associated with lung disease.
Just 30min of walking everyday can help to lower the risk of developing cancer of the colon, improve digestion, and help to regulate bowel movements. Walking has also been seen to help the chances of survival of colon cancer even after diagnosis. However I didn’t find any information to corroborate this claim.
And as mind and body are most certainly connected, it stands to reason that walking would have a positive effect on the human mind. The Journal of Psychiatric Research published the results of a study on 50 people suffering from major depression. It showed that walking 30–45 min a day, 5 days a week improved their conditions significantly. Imagine how it could help you if you’re just feeling down.
Why did I start walking?
As I said before, my reasons for walking had nothing to do with weight loss. I had begun walking in order to help me regulate my dopamine using a dopamine detox. This is outside the scope of this video, but I will be going into more detail about that in my next video, so keep an eye out for that one.
It wasn’t until I noticed that I had lost a bit of weight that I became aware of how powerful walking could be. It also needs to be said that part of the detox included restrictive dietary measures, which forced me to eat more healthily. I wasn’t eating any junk food at all. This meant no sugar, no bread, no processed food, and very little, if any, dairy.
As I noted earlier, combining walking with an improved diet plan can increase the weight loss effects, and that’s exactly what I experienced. So to be fair, it wasn’t just the walking that helped me to lose those kilo’s. After a month of just walking I began to incorporate resistance training and a little bit of high intensity interval training. All of these together kicked the weight loss into overdrive and the weight started melting away almost daily. I could not believe the results I was getting.
At some point this all became a bit of a challenge to see how much walking I could do in a single day. My personal best sits at 45.06Km. It was relatively recent. When I started walking I was doing about 10km a day, but slowly increased that to an average of about 15km. I have since managed to walk for an average of 19.92km per day. Some days I walk more and some days I walk less. It all depends on what I have to do in a day.
I can’t shoot and edit while walking, although that would make for an interesting challenge, but I digress. Now it is 12 weeks since beginning this journey and I am more than 20kg lighter than when I started, and I am still walking everyday.
I continued walking because of the benefits I was actually experiencing. My mood was elevated, I felt healthier and more comfortable with my own body, and I had become much more productive with my time. I was able to combine my walking sessions with things that I enjoyed doing, such as reading and listening to podcasts. I was walking around the garden, so I was able to forget about where I was “going” and just focus on the other activity. Once I had formed the idea for this channel and had started researching topics of interest, I was hooked. It was like a puzzle piece had fallen into place and I was now ready to do what I was meant to do. I enjoy the entire process of creating these videos; from the research to the shooting and editing. I do a significant portion of the work, whatever I can, while walking. I don’t know how else to do it now.
What are my recommendations?
I don’t think walking is for everyone. I know many people won’t have the inclination to walk for hours on end, and that’s fine. It isn’t about having to walk for hours upon hours. It’s about getting up and going to do something that will benefit you. Something that might help you to become more motivated to find something that will work for you. I found walking works with my lifestyle, but I understand that not everyone has the time or the space to walk like I do. It is my hope that maybe this will inspire you to find your own lifestyle change catalyst. Starting off with low physical guidelines can help to motivate you to slowly adopt a healthier lifestyle. It may help you to adopt a better diet, and when you start to see some positive changes from your diet, that might convince you to change more aspects of your lifestyle. Ultimately turning into lasting change.
So get out there and walk for an extra 10 min a day and see how you feel. The only effect it can have is a positive one.
Thank you for reading. Keep well and I hope you have a wonderful day.
Peace be da journey :)
