Does walking help to reduce weight?

Question

How can i measure on how much i have walked?

Answer 1

Walking helps you shift your attitude toward health, fitness, and weight loss.Take a year to move through the following 3 steps to make gradual but positive lifestyle changes.

Walk : weight loss
1. Just get out there and walk a little. Build a daily habit. Let’s call it being active. Don’t think about changing clothes, going to a gym, jumping around for an hour, or changing clothes.
Just take a short walk to the bus stop, the corner mailbox, or the convenience store for a gallon of milk. Find ways to add an extra 2,000 steps into your daily routine.

Buy and wear a pedometer to measure your steps. A 20-minute walk is about 120 steps per minute, or 2,400 steps. You can break that up into 3 walks of 800 steps each.

How far you walk or how fast you walk aren't important. It’s simply walking in short spurts most days of the week. Be careful. Once you start paying attention to walking, you’ll want to walk farther.

Add a simple 4-minute stretch routine a few days a week after your walk to maintain your natural range of motion. Just stand up, even if you’re at work fully dressed in work clothes. Put one leg back, bend the front knee, and lean forward to stretch the calf muscle. For thighs, grab your ankle from behind, keep your knees close together. Lean forward to stretch your lower back.

Eventually add a simple 2-minute warm-up before you walk: Hold on to a railing for balance and circle your ankle, one leg at a time. Then swing each leg, forward and back. Put your hands on your hips for a circular trunk rotation. This gets the blood flowing and leaves your muscles less prone to injury.

Goal: You’ll realize you don’t have to hurt to feel better. After a walk, you’ll feel invigorated and happy.

2. Walk longer, build strength. Start increasing your walking distance, and you’ll begin to see weight loss. During this second phase, increasing distance means increasing time to 45-60 minutes 2 days a week.
Walking for weight loss

You can cover serious distance in an hour of walking and walk even longer on weekends. Build up to a half-day or day-long hike. This increase in duration increases weight loss, burns more calories, and builds strength as you get off the beaten path and hike up and down hills on a challenging course.

Hike 2 miles somewhere and back at a brisk pace. Ask at any outdoor shop about the best places to hike, such as conservation land, state parks, a waterfront, or rail trail. Go for a full-day trek through a bird sanctuary, take a picnic to a waterfall, or go on an organized hike with a group.

When the weather outside is frightful, many people turn to treadmills. Admittedly, treadmills are boring, but spice up a complete treadmill workout by using elevation to give the sense of a trail. You don’t have to follow the preprogrammed courses. Create your own interval training with hills. Make it a mental game. Life isn’t automated, and your treadmill workout shouldn't be either. Ascend and descend by varying your elevations and speeds.

Pick 5 of your favorite CDs for your portable Walkman – classical, country, rock and roll, even rap. Hit random play, and whatever song comes up, go that tempo. Start and end with an easy one. Put a fan in front of the treadmill to create natural cooling from the wind you’d normally get on a trail.

Keep an activity log. Noting your daily activity is a great motivator, especially when you see those miles start to build up. Tally your daily, weekly, and monthly totals. You’ll hate to write down “0” for any day.

Goal: Walk vigorously for a longer period of time twice a week. If you don't see dramatic weight loss, it may be because you are building muscle.


3. Walk faster and seek variety. In this 16-week segment, you’ll find the athlete within. Speed up your walking and you’ll see total body fitness improvements. A couple days a week, go fast enough to break a sweat and breathe hard.
walk for weight loss
Use the 1-to-10 scale of perceived rate of exertion to measure endurance. Think of 1 as watching TV; 10 is sucking air (you can’t go any farther). Daily walks, for example, are 5 or even 6-6.5 sometimes. Twice a week, crank it up to 7, 8, or 9 on a steep hill for a few minutes. Now you’re burning serious calories and building real aerobic fitness through interval training.

Need variety? Complement your walking with a counterbalancing exercise such as martial arts, yoga, water aerobics, or a court sport like tennis.

Goal: Walk in a 5K or 10K event such as a corporate cup run/walk, a fund-raising race for the cure, or other organized community activity.

How to measure progress: Other than simply feeling great and watching the scale, you can actually measure what fitness walking is doing for your body. Before you begin your activity program, have your doctor check your cholesterol, blood pressure, glucose (high levels can be a sign of early or undiagnosed diabetes), and your body mass index. BMI is a number that reflects your height-to-weight ratio (simply take your weight in pounds, multiply by 703 and divide by your height in inches squared—keep this number under 25 for optimal health).

Measure again at 26 and 52 weeks. You’ll see marked improvements, but not necessarily on the scale. You may be turning fat into muscle, which weighs more than fat. The best measure is how you feel—about yourself.

Answer 2

walking is a start! but its only a little part of a whole lot you need to do for your body to start losing weight.

a pedomiter can measure how far you walk. it counts your strides, and then multiplies that by the average distance a person covers when they take a stride. they're not always super acurate, especially if you have a very wide stride, or a small stride. it all depends. also, you could get something like microsoft streets and trips to measure how far one point to another point would be, (if you dont have microsoft streets and trips, and you have no way of getting a mapping software, contact me with the zip code you would be walking in, or preferably a street that would be convienent for you to be walking on, and also tell me a distance you would want to be walking. for example, a mile, or a mile and a half)

or if you live near a high school, since school is out just about everywhere now, go to the football field or running track. usually if its a regular size football track, 4 times around the field is one mile.

if you're only walking one mile, you should really be trying your best to do it everyday. and even that without diet, or any other exerise, you might still be gaining weight.

people 100 years ago had to work hard in a days time. they ate about as much as us, but the entire day was exersize. so you can see now why everyone is having such problems with weight.

make sure you are keeping the portions down of what you eat. an ideal size dinner is 2 to 4 portions. (4 is almost overdoing it, so if you can stop at 3 thats great) a portion, is about a handfull. i know it looks small on your plate, but eat it all, and then wait a good half hour for everything to hit your stomach, and if you are still hungry, a small snack is OK. (a cup of yogurt, a glass of fat free chocolate milk, or one piece of toast, very light on the butter or margine, fruit spred is a great alternitive) you might still feel hungry, but if you've ate 5 or 6 portions for every meal, you are going to feel very hungry, all the time. it will not hurt you to cut down on your portions, and if you dont mind loosing the weight slowly, you can cut down on your portions slowly. if you ate 6 all the time, eating 4 or 5 for a month or so until you're used to it is a great way to solve the hunger issue. but then you have to downsize again to 2 or 3 protions as soon as your used to it.

in the end, its so much easyer to walk without that gut. you have more energy for everyday stuff! you dont feel tired as soon as you did! (but it does take a good month or so for your body to feel the effects.)

Answer 3

Any exercise helps. I read where walking on a treadmill before eating can raise the metabolism and lower triglycerides.

There are things you can buy to wear that can tell you the miles, I think. I've never had the money for something like that- but if your car has a trip meter or a decent odometer even, you can measure off a distance by driving it. I just walk as far as I feel up to, - the hard part is getting the dog to let me turn around when she wants to go on. lol

Answer 4

Walking is one of the best ways to help in losing or mataining your weight. A good pedometer will measure the distance you walk, but if you don't have one map out a route with your vehicle or have someone do it for you and chart the distance. Or you could go to the track at your local high school. The distances are marked there. And tests have proven that walking is every bit as good as running.

Answer 5

Walking reduces weight very slightly, however it depends how far you've walked.

Running would be a much more effective way of losing weight.

Answer 6

Yes, Anything that burns calories will reduce weight. In order to loose you must burn more than you consume. You can figure roughly 80-100 calories per mile walked (depending on body eight, speed, hills). You can use a pedometer or even set the odometer on your car to see how far you've gone. Good luck. Keep walking!!!

Answer 7

I'm pretty sure this is a common sense question, but...

Yes, walking helps to lose weight as it is a form of exercise.

You can measure how much you've walked if you walk on a track, or alternatively, use your car to measure the distance after you walk it.

Answer 8

Yes, walking even 10 minutes a day helps.

I went to the sports store and purchased a pedometer that measured the number of steps I take. Figure that 10,000 steps a day is about 2 miles.

It is best if you also eat a balanced diet along with the walking. Check out Yahoo!Answers for "diet" for suggestions, if you are not already on a moderate protein, low glycemic carb, good fat diet.

Answer 9

Use a pedometer to measure distance walked http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedometer . Start out slow going for a short distances and slowly build up over time you won't lose weight quickly unless you are walking long distances very briskly. However you will increase your stamina and tone your body and feel a difference.

Answer 10

Yes! I have read MANY MANY studies that discuss the benefits of walking and losing weight. Also I have read MANY MANY studies that say running DOES NOT have a greater effect on weight loss than walking. My mom has lost 75 lbs by WALKING ONLY ....(well and changing her eating habits of course).

Answer 11

YES WALKING HELPS REDUCE WEIGHT. IF YOU WALK 25 TO 30 MIN. EACH DAY YOU WILL LOOSE SOME WEIGHT NOT A LOT BUT SOME AND YOU WILL MAINTAIN YOUR PRESENT WT.