Self Help

Changing a few little habits here and there is a good way to burn off maybe 50 to 100 calories a day. But in addition to that kind of exercise, you want to make vigorous, honest-to-goodness exercise part of your lifestyle. It will speed your weight loss, increase the mobilization of fat, make you feel better and help normalize your body chemistry. The best way for most people to do all that is to get into the habit of taking at least one long daily walk.

That’s what I do now. When jogging produced a long series of injuries and a chronically sore back, I switched to walking. It was like heaven. All traces of back pain vanished. And I even lost more weight! Running was so stressful, I could only do it three times a week. But now I can walk five or six days a week, burning more calories.

When I was younger I used to walk a lot because I had to. Now I walk because I have to again - not because I don’t have a car but because I need the exercise. The town I live in, like many towns, has a hiking club, and that’s how I got started. Many newspapers now carry schedules of weekend events, and chances are that a local hike is on the docket. Usually these hikes are easy, just enough to get you mildly sweaty, which is the best of all states to be in. But these weekend hikes should serve mainly to stimulate you and give you recreation. Walking once a week isn’t nearly enough.

The most important thing of all about walking is actually getting out there the very first time. It is that way with a lot of things in life. Taking the plunge is the hard part; the rest is easy. Objectively, it may not seem like there is anything very daring about simply going for a walk, but I’ll be the first to admit that making a change in your daily routine is one of the most difficult things you can do. But it’s also one of the most important.

The number of calories that you burn up walking depends on how much you weigh, your rate of speed and where you’re walking. If you are toddling along at 2 miles per hour, which is about the speed at which you’d be going past an interesting showcase window, you will be burning about 145 calories an hour if you weigh about 120 pounds, 185 calories if you weigh 150, and 215 calories if you weigh 200 pounds. With moderate walking, at 3 miles an hour, you will burn between 235 and 350 calories per hour, depending on your weight. At 4 miles an hour, which is brisk walking, the kind you do when you’re really serious about getting someplace, the values range between 270 and 400. If you are walking up a grade that is just steep enough to make you bend forward a little in order to balance yourself better, you will be burning up twice the number of calories that you would walking on the level. Don’t, however, go out hunting hills the very first day. Work up to them slowly. If the weather seems uncomfortably cold for walking, be grateful, because walking in the cold air burns up 7 to 10 percent more calories than walking in the hot June weather.