Calories Burned from Walking

If you want to lose weight walking, it’s important to understand how calories work. You can, of course, just spend an half-hour to an hour a day walking, and chances are you will lose weight if you are eating right. But when you have a plan, it is easier to know what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong, so you can get the most efficient walks possible.

Calories and Your Body

Calories are units of energy that come from food, and are used by our bodies to allow it to function. Eat too many calories per day (more than you burn off) and you begin to gain weight. Eat less than you burn off, and you will lose weight. It’s a fairly simple math equation.

3,500 calories make up roughly a pound of fat. The average person consumes 2,000 calories per day. (Of course, 2,000 calories is the recommended daily intake of calories – as you can see from America’s obesity epidemic, we eat a lot more than the 2,000 average.) The recommended daily intake is 2,000 because that is the average amount of calories we burn per day just being alive, doing our daily routine with moderate exercise in between.

Keep in mind these numbers are guidelines only. Don’t take them to heart, because the calories we need to consume and burn per day will vary with each individual due to sex, weight, health conditions, metabolic rate, age, etc etc.

Knowing that 3,500 calories make up a pound of fat, you can lose weight by

• Reducing the amount of calories you eat to be less than the amount your burn each day
• Increasing exercise to burn more calories per day, so you burn more calories than you consume.
• Combination of Both

Combining a proper diet (preventing excessive intake of calories) and increasing exercise is the simplest plan to follow for losing weight. How much weight you lose will depend entirely on the diet and exercise, but because this series is about walking for weight loss we will look at how to lose weight walking.

How Much Weight Can You Lose Weight Walking?

Below are two examples of how much weight you can lose just by walking. We look at a person who weighs 150 lbs and one who weighs 250 lbs. We look at how many calories you can burn with the various types of walking available to you. We’ll look at the types of walking you can do later.

Calorie estimates taken from CalorieLab.com

Things to Take Away from the Above Example

Heavier People Burn More Calories – The heavier you are, the more calories you will burn no matter which type of walking you do. It takes more energy for your body to move your weight than someone who weighs less. As you lose weight, your body will require fewer calories to do the same type of walking.

Walking Does Not Have to be Boring – As you can see, walking does not mean you circle your block 20 times. You can walk uphill, walk with weight, walk fast, anything! We will get into the types of walking in a later article.

Walking Will Make You Lose Weight – If you have a steady diet (meaning your weight is generally the same – it does not jump up and down a lot day-to-day), adding something as simple as walking will allow you to lose weight. A 250 lb person can lose a pound per week but with brisk, uphill walking 1 hour per day 6 days a week.

Walking for Weight Loss

• Introduction to Walking
• Health Benefits of Walking
• Calories Burned from Walking

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 at 5:06 pm and is filed under Walking for Weight Loss. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.