Best Exercise To Lose Weight - Part 1

You can lose weight without exercise, with just stretching or with exercise and better nutrition. The absolute best way to lose weight, keep it off and feel your best is to incorporate exercise into your daily routine and to eat healthy well-balanced meals that stay under the number of calories you need to maintain your current weight.

Walking affords you a safe exercise program that protects your joints, increases your metabolism, improves your cardiovascular health and improves your overall health. With all of these benefits to a fitness walking program, it’s no wonder that people are starting more exercise programs by walking and physicians recommend walking for their patients from age 10 to 100.

As you walk, you work muscles, joints and tendons. Walking requires the joints to be flexible to assist the legs with lifting, standing and moving. Without using walking in your daily program you can lose flexibility and increase your risk of arthritis or degenerative changes to the joints. While degenerative arthritis, or osteoarthritis, can be triggered by an abundance of weight bearing exercises that create excess stress on the joints, your joints can also lose their effectiveness when they are not used as well.

By staying physically active and walking a brisk 30 minutes each day you can easily burn an extra 150 calories each day during the walk. Of course, the faster you walk or the longer you walk, the more calories you’ll burn. It can be helpful to start walking on a treadmill at the gym to estimate how fast and for how long you’ll need to walk in order to burn off the number of calories you’d like to burn each walk.

Reference:

(1) American Journal of Clinical Nutrition: Further Evidence for the Benefits of Walking

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/89/1/15.full

Resources:

fitSugar: How to Walk off 10 pounds

http://www.fitsugar.com/How-Lose-Weight-From-Walking-29205542

Woman’s Day: Weight Loss Transformations: How I walked Myself Slim

http://www.womansday.com/health-fitness/workout-routines/weight-loss-transformations-how-i-walked-myself-slim-111676

Prevention: Walking

http://www.prevention.com/fitness/fitness-tips/walking

Reader’s Digest: 16 Ways to Lose Weight Walking

http://www.rd.com/slideshows/16-ways-to-lose-weight-walking