How to Lose Weight by Walking

As a doctor, I've learned to keep my instructions for the patients as simple and as efficient as possible. This ensures great compliance and adherence (basically how well the patient follows and sticks to the instructions given). Also as a doctor, I give a short explanation of the reasons I am prescribing a certain drug or better yet, a lifestyle modification (diet, exercise, walking to lose weight, etc). This is why I want to show you how Weight Loss Walking works and why we should include walking to lose weight in any of our diet and/or exercise programs. Then I will finish with the simple guidelines of how to get started on your new walking program in order to lose weight.

A quick and simple overview of how we lose weight - We burn more calories than we take in (eat) = weight loss. This is somewhat simplified but studies and basic physiology show it to continually be true. I won't cover how our diet plays a role in weight loss, but let's just keep it simple and assume our diet is basically the amount of calories we take in during the day (again this is very simplified but serves my point). Now, for all intensive purposes there are 3 basic ways our body burns calories.

1. Basal Metabolic Rate aka BMR (how many calories we burn by just being alive, which is based on age, muscle weight, and gender).

2. Thermic Effect of Food aka TEF (how many calories we burn from eating food, which is based on the type of food).

3. Activity Thermogenesis, which is broken down into Exercise Related Activity Thermogenesis aka ERAT (how many calories we burn from exercise - eg. lifting weight, running, etc) and Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis aka NEAT (how many calories we burn from activity that is NOT exercise - eg. doing dishes, WALKING, etc).

If we want to lose weight, then we must either eat less (take in less calories) or increase one of these three methods of burning calories. The only way we can increase BMR is by decreasing our age (not possible) or increasing our muscle (hint: it's pretty tough to increase muscle in a short amount of time!). We can increase our TEF by changing the foods we eat (this is not the scope of this article, but needless to say this is the toughest aspect to change in all of my patients and doesn't account for a lot of calories burned anyway). We can also increase our Activity Thermogenesis by upping our ERAT (increasing our exercise time, intensity, and frequency, which is also tough to do with patients right away) or increasing our NEAT (increasing what we do during the day that is not exercise, most of which is made up of WALKING). Out of all of these, NEAT is the EASIEST to start, and easiest to continue for long-periods of time in order to lose weight.

As you can see, walking to lose weight should be used in conjunction with diet and exercise in order to have a fully maximized weight loss plan. Hopefully you can also see why weight loss walking might be the best option to start your weight loss plan with! Here are my quick and easy instruction to start your new walking program to lose weight.

1. Buy a pedometer. I recommend the pedometer listed below since it's been shown in studies to be one of the most accurate and precise.
2. Do a few days of self-analysis where you find out your baseline daily steps you take in a day.
3. Once you know your baseline, add about a 1000-2000 steps in your day and stick to that for 2 weeks.
4. Every two weeks, increase your steps by about 1000-2000 steps until you reach your goal (anywhere from 10,000 to 20,000).

Simple eh? With just these simple steps, my patients have lost up to 40 pounds with just "Weight Loss Walking." The only problem that occurs is the fact that this weight loss is somewhat slow, but steady. It can take a few months to a year to see those kinds of results, but in the end it is totally worth it because the weight loss from walking remains long-term compared to quick weight loss schemes like those crazy fad diets you read about and see on tv.

Remember, in order to fully reap the benefits of walking to lose weight, make sure you combine your new weight loss walking program with a solid diet and exercise plan!