Did you know that walking is the #1 form of physical activity among people who’ve lost weight? Harvard Medical School mentions a study among more than 5,000 people who lost weight. According to them, these people lost on average 66 pounds AND kept it off for an average of 5.5 years! What was their secret sauce? Well, 52% of them mentioned walking one mile or more every day.
So walking is a very effective way to lose weight. And walking 30 minutes a day is easier than you may think!
I. Why walking 30 minutes a day?
Before we talk about how many calories you can lose by walking 30 minutes, let me remind you that Center for Disease Control (CDC) recommends to adults to do 30 minutes of moderate physical activity 5 days a week. And walking can totally be your main source of exercise!
The health benefits of walking (beyond weightloss goals) are countless: walking reduces significantly your risk of cardiovascular disease, strengthens your lungs, helps control high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes. It strengthens your bones and muscles. It also improves your mood (more on that on a later post).
II. How walking will help you to lose weight?
So let’s say you have committed to walk 30 minutes each day. Notice that it can be totally doable especially if you chunk those daily 30 minutes into 3 portions of 10 minutes. Indeed, when you walk, it doesn’t matter if you walk 30 minutes straight or if you do it in smaller portions. Your walking efforts add up at the end of the day. And this is why walking is your best ally in improving your health as well as losing weight.
Now you may wonder how walking will help you to lose weight? Well as you may know losing weight is about increasing the gap between what you eat and how many calories you burn. If you want to lose weight you could either cut the calories you eat or increase the calories you burn. I think that losing weight only by cutting the calories you eat can be really challenging. And I think adding a little bit of exercise make it a lot easier. But obviously if you walk but then you eat even more, it doesn’t work!
So be careful to not eating more because you have increased your daily steps and so you “reward” yourself by eating that extra piece of cake or by sipping a glass of beer!
III. How many calories do you ACTUALLY burn during a 30-minutes walk
Ok let’s do a little bit of Math here: The research shows that to lose one pound a week you need to burn some additional 500 calories per day.
The calories you burn depend on many factors such as your sex, age, ethnicity, body composition (which means that if you are athletic your body needs more calories to function properly), genetic factors, height and even weight.
The higher your weight is, the more you spend calories by doing the exact same amount of exercise. This is good news when you start losing weight but it also explains why, by doing the exact same thing, you may plateau after a while.
The calories you spend depend also on your pace (meaning walking at a good pace vs casually) and the pathway you walk on.
So as you see, many factors are involved and we can elaborate more about that in a later post.
But a rule of thumb is that walking 30 minutes let you spend some additional 150 to 200 calories for 30 minutes walking. And as we said earlier, to lose one pound a week you need to burn some additional 500 calories per day.This means that typically when you walk 30 minutes a day you have done 30 to 40% of the daily work. Which is awesome!
IV. Conclusion: walking is a very effective way to lose weight
If you commit to walking only 30 minutes a day, you set yourself up to a good start for losing weight. And not only you lose weight, but you also get all the health benefits from regular physical activity.
And if you want to surround yourself with likeminded, supportive people who have weightloss goals, join our Facebook group dedicated to weightloss and Selfcare! We would love to see you there 😉