how to walk off 5 pounds from jettymd

So many patients ask me what exercises they should be doing to lose weight, or stay healthy, or prevent another heart attack. My answer is always the same since most of my patients are no exercising at all: go for a walk.

The large cardiology societies recommend walking for 30 minutes a day for at least 3 days a week. That's a measly 150 minutes out of 10,080 minutes in a week. Seems doable.

"I don't have time"

That's the most common response I get. The adult version of "the dog ate my homework".

In my humble opinion, if you watch an hour of TV each day, then you have time. Including me.

I often need a dose of my own medicine so last week, while keeping almost everything else the same (my diet, workouts, and workload), I decided to start walking home from work. It's about 1.25 miles, and I walk slow so the whole process takes about 30 minutes.

This was the best science experiment I could do for you all. My diet stayed the same, at 2000 kcal per day. My 5am workouts were the same as before. The only thing that changed was adding in walks for 5 days of the week.

I lost 5 pounds! Out of nowhere. I went from 198lbs the week before to 192lbs with just a week of walking that much. Everything else stayed the same and I didn't have to change anything else, so naturally, I think this is going to become part of my daily routine as it's an easy way to keep my activity level up.

Now, your mileage may vary. Losing weight and keeping it off is a very inexact science because there are a lot of factors that can derail you. This is only one example of what worked for me to lose five pounds.

One effect of increased activity level is to eat more food as people get more hungry. Fighting this urge is key to keeping weight off. The goal is to increase the amount of calories you spend (by walking) and limit the amount of calories you eat (by not eating trash). Walking is an easy way to do this and it gets you outside breathing fresh air instead of circling down a youtube video spiral.

It doesn’t take much to walk for 30 minutes a day but the results can be pretty large if you keep up with it.

Try it and let me know how it goes!

Remember, if you don't take care of yourself, your doctor won't do it for you. We can help with some things but we can’t help with everything.