WHY walking helps lose fat...

Today's post: Friday, 1-25-2008

New discovery can give you extra leverage in losing fat & keeping it off.

Walking is well known to be one of the better kinds of activity to add to your exercise program to lose fat.

And, even though running produces enough injuries in most of the people over 30 who do it often to be a bad idea, it works really well to lose fat in younger people if it’s carefully done.

Conversely, swimming seems to get you in shape without removing very much fat if any.

Here’s a very powerful reason why -- that is recent & very useful news.:

(I got behind in reading some of my health info email. The following information was in the 12-20-2007 Health Alerts email that I got from Newsmax.com.):

“People may be overweight simply because they sit too much, according to scientists at the University of Missouri.

They found that exercise alone isn’t enough to take off extra pounds — they discovered that the enzymes in our body responsible for burning fat simply shut down when we sit down.”

This quite literally means that you tend to add fat when you sit down & lose it when you stand.

This has a number of very useful implications you can use to lose fat faster & make sure it stays off.

1. If you have time to walk several times a week in addition to the strength training & fitness exercises you do & you’d like to be slimmer, by all means ADD the walking.

2. If you can do it safely & time-efficiently enough, adding even a small amount of walking to your commutes or to your shopping, will pay surprising fat loss dividends to you.

3. It helps explain why the pedometer based tracking of how many steps you take each day & gradually increasing them has been effective in helping people lose fat.

4. It means that indoor exercisers like the UrbanRebounder, treadmills, elliptical trainers, steppers, & the Nordic Track cross country style ski exerciser also work well to help lose fat.

5. It also means that doing household chores like washing dishes, sweeping, & vacuuming do double duty in helping keep fat off.

6. It helps further explain why watching too much TV reliably makes the people who do it fat.

(It’s also an added reason why one of the best ways to lose fat & find time to exercise is to turn off the TV & go the gym two or three days a week – or more. But even two times a week regularly will help, particularly if you do strength training.)

The other way to use this info without giving up TV watching is to watch it while you walk on a treadmill.

(If you watch TV 20 hours a week & walk at a 100 calorie per 20 minute pace, easy walking pace at a slight incline, you’ll burn 6,000 extra calories. And, according to this new info, you’ll be spending 20 hours a week standing up with your fat burning enzymes turned on where you are likely spending those same 20 hours a week now sitting with your fat storage enzymes turned on.)

7. It makes the idea of programming-in standing briefly at your desk a few times each morning & a few times each afternoon sound more likely to help you lose fat than you might expect.

If you’d like to lose some fat that stays off, take a moment & think of a couple things you can do to use this new discovery. Then once you get used to doing them, just keep doing them.