How Walking Can Help You Lose Weight and Belly Fat

If you want to stay fit and healthy, it is important that you practice regularly.

Physical activity reduces the risk of developing health problems like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.

Exercise can help you live a longer and healthier life, as well as lose and maintain weight.

Fortunately, walking is a great form of physical activity that is free, less risky, and accessible for most people.

In fact, walking is not only good for you, it is one of the easiest ways to practice to incorporate it into your daily life.

This article explores how walking can help you lose weight and belly fat.

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Walking burns calories

Your complex body needs energy for all the complex chemical reactions (in the form of calories) that allow you to walk, breathe, think, and act normally.

However, daily caloric needs vary from person to person and are affected by factors such as your weight, gender, genes, and activity level.

It is well known that you need to burn more calories to lose weight.

Also, those who are physically active burn more calories.

However, the modern lifestyle and work environment can mean that you spend most of the day sitting down, especially if you have an office job.

Unfortunately, a sedentary lifestyle can not only contribute to weight gain, it can also increase the risk of health problems.

Trying to exercise more often by walking more often helps you burn more calories and reduce these risks.

In fact, walking a mile (1.6 km) burns about 100 calories depending on your gender and weight.

One study measured the number of calories burned by non-athletes who ran at a speed of 5 km (3.2 miles per hour) or about six miles per hour. Brisk walkers have been found to burn an average of 90 calories per mile.

Additionally, while a significant number of calories were burned while running, approximately 23 calories were burned per mile, meaning that both forms of exercise contributed significantly to the number of calories burned.

Try hiking hilly or gently sloping routes to increase the intensity of your walk and burn more calories.

SUMMARY:

Walking burns calories, which can help you lose weight and keep it off. In fact, walking just one mile burns about 100 calories.

Helps preserve muscle mass

When people cut calories and lose weight, they often lose some muscle in addition to body fat.

It can be reactive, because muscle is more metabolically active than fat. This means that it helps you burn more calories every day.

Exercise, including walking, can help combat this effect by preserving lean muscle while losing weight.

This can help reduce the drop in metabolic rate that often occurs with weight loss, making it easier to maintain results.

Additionally, it can reduce age-related muscle loss, helping you retain more muscle strength and functionality.

SUMMARY:

Walking can help prevent some of the muscle damage that occurs when you lose weight. It helps you lose weight and reduce metabolic rate dips, making it easier to keep the extra pounds off.

Improve your mood

Practice is known to improve your mood.

In fact, physical activity has been shown to improve your mood and reduce stress, frustration and feelings.

This makes your brain more sensitive to the hormones serotonin and norepinephrine. These hormones release feelings of frustration and stimulate the release of endorphins, which make you feel happy.

This is a great advantage in itself. However, regular walking can also improve your mood and make it easier to follow the habit.

What’s more, some studies have shown that enjoying physical activity can increase your chances of continuing it.

If people do not enjoy it but tend to exercise less, it may be because the exercise is too demanding physically.

This makes walking a great option, as it is a moderately intense exercise. It can motivate you to walk more instead of giving up.

SUMMARY:

Getting regular exercise that you enjoy as walking can improve your mood and encourage you to stay that way.

Walking can help you lose weight

Many people who lose weight get these back

However, regular exercise plays an important role in maintaining your weight loss.

Regular exercise, like walking, not only helps you increase the amount of energy you burn every day, it also helps you build leaner muscles to burn even more calories at rest.

Also, participating in regular, moderate-intensity exercises like walking can improve your mood, making you more likely to stay active in the long run.

A recent review estimates that you need to walk at least 150 minutes per week to maintain a stable weight.

However, if you lose a lot of weight, it may take you more than 200 minutes a week to avoid recovery.

In fact, research has shown that people who exercise more tend to be more successful at maintaining their weight loss, while those who exercise less are more likely to regain weight.

Involving more walking in your day can help you increase the amount of exercise you do and contribute to the goal of your daily activities.

SUMMARY:

Staying active and taking more steps during the day can help maintain weight loss.

How to incorporate more walking into your life

There are many more benefits to being more physically active, including better physical condition and mood, lower risk of disease and a longer, healthier lifestyle.

For this reason, people are advised to engage in moderate-intensity exercise for at least 150 minutes per week.

When walking, this means walking at a brisk pace of 2.5 hours per week (at least 10 minutes at a time). Exercising more than this has additional health benefits and further reduces the risk of disease.

There are various ways to increase the number of walks and achieve this goal.

Here are some ideas:

Use a practice tracker and record your steps to motivate yourself to move further.

Practice jogging at your lunch break or after dinner.

Ask a friend for an evening walk.

Walk your dog every day or join a friend on their dog walk.

Have a walk-in meeting with a colleague instead of meeting at your desk.

Carry out activities such as taking children to school or going to the grocery store.

I'm here for work. If it’s too far, park your car farther away or get off the bus and walk the rest of the way before stopping for a bit.

Try to choose new and challenging routes to make your walk interesting.

Join a mountaineering group.

Everything helps, so start small and try to gradually increase the number of daily walks.

SUMMARY:

Incorporating more walking during the day can help you burn more calories and lose weight.

BOTTOM LINE

Walking is a moderate-intensity exercise that can easily be incorporated into your daily life.

Just walking more often can help you lose weight and belly fat, as well as provide other great health benefits, including the risk of disease and a better mood.

In fact, walking just one-mile burns about 100 calories.

If you want to lose weight, you will get the best results by combining your increased physical activity with healthy changes in your diet.