If you're looking to lose a few pounds or just want to ease yourself into an exercise regimen, walking may be just the place to start. While taking a walk is one of the more underrated forms of exercise it shouldn't be discounted: it's good for your heart, easy on your joints, and it's the cheapest workout on the market (free). You may not lose a drastic amount of weight right away but you will increase your endurance and burn off a few calories. And, every little calorie adds up. Plus, you can walk anywhere at any time so it's one of the easiest forms of exercise to really stick with.
Everybody's body has a different resting metabolic rate. So, it's somewhat impossible to say how many calories one will burn at a specific weight because muscle weighs more than fat and burns more calories than fat. But, let's say that you're a normal Joe(sephine) and you weigh 140 pounds: walking for an hour at the 4.5 mile / hr speed is going to burn about 300 calories. If you do this 5 days a week, you will burn 1500 calories. It takes 3500 expended calories to burn off a pound of fat, so if you keep up the regimen, you will lose two pounds of fat a month without changing anything else. And, yeah, two pounds in one month may not seem like a staggering amount; but, that's 24 pounds in one year! And, all you have to do is get those tennis shoes on.
Furthermore, any exercise regimen lends itself to getting fitter faster once you get the ball rolling. Once you begin to notice even a little bit of results, you get kind of addicted to it. You notice even a slight improvement in how your pants fit and you can't help but become a little more conscious of what other lifestyle choices will lend itself to all the progress you're making -- i.e. diet, sleep, stress management. Walking releases endorphins that help you relax and sleep more soundly. And, it revs up your metabolism and increases muscle mass so that even if you don't adjust your diet you're burning more calories per day just to keep everything in your body running. After just a few weeks of getting into it, your endurance will increase and your heart will be stronger. You'll notice that you can walk faster and longer with ease . . . which leads to even more fat burning. And, the best part about walking the weight off? No one says you have to do it all at once. You can break up your new fitness plan into 4 daily increments of 15 minutes and that makes walking a much easier plan to stick to than any other exercise program out there. The bottom line is that, sure, you're not going to move mountains in your waistline by next month if you implement a walking exercise plan; but, you will lose some serious weight if you stick to the plan and maintain a healthy diet. And, you get to be outdoors, you can carry on a conversation with a pal, or, you can volunteer to walk dogs at a shelter and kill the workout and do-gooder birds with one stone.?
