Guess I'll share my own story: close to seven years ago now I was nudging up against 270 pounds and had a 44 inch waist. I decided to make some changes and started walking 2 miles a night. This is less than half the distance spoken of in the OP, but in compensation the route involved several decent hills and I walked it briskly. I also did a couple of other things that I think were important: I stopped adding sugar to coffee and I stopped drinking soda and having desert every night after dinner. Over a period of around a year I dropped from 265-ish to 215-ish and shrank my waist to 36 inches. I'm still walking the two miles every night, seven nights a week. Coming out of the covid-19 year of sloth I've put about 15 pounds back on, so I am considering adding another mile or two to the routine and perhaps doing a few other exercises, but just walking those two miles a night worked wonders for me.
I have a similar story I’ve posted about before. Cut sugar, made myself do 30 minutes of brisk activity each day, lost about 70 pounds.
Mind you, it got harder to do brisk activity as it went. What started as walking for 2 miles ended up being running for 5 miles. (5 miles became the target after a while so I stopped with 30 minutes. It would take 38-40 minutes at my best.)
Also got hit with COVID gain, so I’m back at it. Bought me a treadmill and am doing at least a 5k every day, training back up to at least 4 miles.
I found a lot of it was consistency. It felt like weight loss had an inertia to it. Took a while to really start losing, but once it started it was easy to keep dropping a pound per week. Even after stopping running for a bit, the weight stayed off for quite a while.
Anyway, good on you (us!) for regular exercise! It really can make all the difference.
I have a similar story. Many friends asked me how I lost weight. Did I join a gym? Start running? Keto? The answer is boring but I cut out sugar.
I stopped adding it to drinks. I stopped drinking soda and fruit juices and smoothies (fruit juices/smoothies are as bad as soda imho as they all try and pretend they are healthy). Stopped having dessert (unless out for a meal for a special occasion), no biscuits, chocolate, crisps and snacks.
Plus I started viewing my calorie intake over a 7 day period rather than daily. This way I didn't 'feel bad' if I went out for a meal or had a movie and pizza night with the family. I found that 'feed bad' mindset made me quit many times as I felt I had 'failed'. So by removing it and viewing intake over a whole week I could easily reduce a bit over 3 or 4 days and still break even. A simple change of perspective really worked for me.
It took a while but now I don't like how sweet many things are. Like a mars bar is disgusting to me now. Two bites and I feel kind of sick from how much sugar is in it. It shocks me how desensitised I was to sugar as it is added to literally everything.
Also an added bonus to the weight loss was that I also saved a lot as my appetite changed and I was naturally less hungry than I used to be. Smaller meals and less processed crap meant my shopping bill was much lower than before.
Your story sounds a lot like mine. I didn't get to 270, but I was getting around 230 before I decided to change things. Fortunately, I didn't have a job at that point, so I got to shed about 1/3 of that weight in ~6 months by doing lots of walking, hiking, and improving my macros (i.e. cutting out sugar and high carbs). Today I'm at 150.
In my opinion, it really doesn't help to tell people what kind of exercise they should be doing. Just sweat. Do whatever it is that you can do consistently. No matter what, you are almost certainly burning more calories than you did sitting around. Combine that with better macronutrients, and you'll almost certainly lose weight.
Once you get slimmer, this can get more difficult because people with more body weight have a greater basal metabolic rate. What I do now when I need to shed some weight (sometimes I get up to 160) is do those things you did before but also eat less. I calculate my BMR, divide it by half, and only eat that many calories. This is a short term strategy, not a long term one.
Cutting the sugar might have been the bulk of the effect, it's very difficult to burn calories over the base metabolic rate, but it's very easy to consume an extra 200 calories a day in sugar.
As a brief counterpoint, for the last few years, I walk at least 5 miles a day (just writing this on the way home from a 15 mile hike), 12 mile cycle commute in normal times, don't drink any sugar, eat one meal a day, caffeine/alcohol free and vegan, resting heart rate is 45-50 bpm.
I'm 270lbs/5'11" with a bunch of weight related health issues. I do have an appetite, for sure. But careful calorie tracking says I should be at a 1000kcal/day deficit, but my weight is stable. Go figure.
I gained a ton of weight after I stopped smoking. To take it off and keep it off, I made several similar changes.
I stopped drinking sweetened drinks, cut out refined carbs, and took up learning to cook everything from scratch as my new hobby. (It's hard to really get the sugar in your diet under control unless you cook everything from scratch.)
I didn't change my level of physical activity.
This has worked to keep the weight off for more than a decade.
Great job on your progress. I have a question for people who drink a lot of soda: is this something that started in your household growing up and was carried into adulthood?
I lost my weight by eating less and better. I experimented with a literal "no exercise" regime to see if exercise matters in losing weight.
My findings is that food intake is 100% of weight loss based purely as ratio to movement/use of food intake. (you can run all day, and if you eat too much, you stay overweight)
Worth remembering that almost all processed foods have added sugar, salt or fat these days - apart from other additives like preservatives, stabilizers, emulsifiers, and the list of -ers goes on.
Read product labels closely, and/or don't buy ones without labels. For unprocessed products, to know their natural composition, use Wikipedia and sites like USDA nutrition data site.
> So if you're chasing high-level performance, single-digit body fat, or a bodybuilder physique, then relying solely a ton of walking isn't the right move. But the reality is that most average people are pretty far from those goals, and focusing on the routines of really high performers my be doing more harm than good. In other words, expecting that you'll accomplish the training required for a movie star body when starting out a fitness routine is setting yourself up for disappointment. Walking a bunch, on the other hand, is something that is relatively simple to fit into your everyday life. The best fitness routine is always going to be the routine that you follow consistently. And I can vouch for the—unscientific, absolutely not peer reviewed—results.
Reminds me of something Terry Crews said it in a Reddit AMA a while ago. This is inexact, but somebody asked how a person who is new to exercise should start going to the gym. Terry Crews' response was that this person should start by spending a week going to the gym, reading magazines for 45 minutes, and then going back home.
The idea was that this helps you develop the habit of going to the gym, having a pleasant time, and not seeing it as a scary and foreign place where everybody's better than you (you're probably not gonna get insecure about somebody else reading more magazines than you are). Once you have that habit and familiarity, you can start actually exercising without those mental obstacles.
Funny advice, but it's an interesting way of thinking about building new habits.
It also reminds me of people on various fitness subreddits who will expend a bunch of effort trying to craft an optimal workout routine when their baseline is barely working out at all. Just pick something you like and do it at a moderate intensity for a few months! It's way better than nothing, and you'll accumulate random knowledge along the way that will help you come up with something better later.
Most of this person’s weight loss seems to have been from eating fewer calories, not walking. I posted this reply to a prior submission of the same article (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26744434):
43 pounds in 16 weeks is 2.7 pounds per week. A pound is 3,500 calories, so 2.7 is 9,450 calories per week, or a deficit of 1,350 calories per day.
Even if he was walking a very low 3,000 steps per day previously, an extra 7,000 steps/day - about 3-4 miles - is walking for perhaps 60-80 minutes. For someone who weighs about 260 pounds, 1 hour of moderate walking would burn about 450 calories. So, assuming he didn’t do other exercise that the article omitted, the remaining ~900 calorie/day deficit came from eating less than his metabolic rate (BMR).
Walking sped up the process, but he would have lost the weight just by eating fewer calories - and food changes account for about 2/3rds of the loss.
(I’m assuming he neither added nor lost much muscle mass, which seems likely from the description.)
Its a combination and a psychological shift to ensure reinforcement of success. I went from 270 down to 200 over 8 months. It slowed down, but went lower over several more months. I started with walking and adjusting my diet. Had I not started seeing success quickly I may not have continued the diet.
When I started, walking up a moderate hill after a mile was tough. It got easier each day and overall health improved. I was eventually able to add some running and other exercises.
Also, at the very start, I am certain it was more than 450 calories per hour after weighing that much in my case. It certainly came down as the body got used to it and did build muscle mass in legs. Same with food, the body will get used to the calorie restriction over time and calorie restriction alone won’t take you the distance.
> Most of this person’s weight loss seems to have been from eating fewer calories, not walking.
This is likely true for everyone losing weight. Exercise gets you fit(-ter than you were before), though, and there are a lot more health benefits from being fit than thin. I'm pretty sure being thin just helps you with your sugar.
Worth noting that the longer someone is in a caloric deficit, the more their non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT) drops. NEAT is the caloric burn from this like random movements and fidgeting, walking around the house, etc. Maintaining a baseline step count creates a NEAT floor, so you're more able to stay in a deficit towards the end of the diet.
While dieting contributes the most to weight loss, I believe some simple exercises + calorie counting goes a long way. When you understand how much physical effort is needed to burn off that snickers bar you're thinking about snacking on, it becomes much easier to put it off.
I believe the giant misconception in 'cardio calories burned' is the fact that exercise affects your resting metabolism quite a lot and people that exercise burn calories throughout the day.
While diet is a 'major factor' - for people who are sedentary, then walking 2 miles a day can be a huge step up.
Walking us also incredibly stress-relieving, so I would imagine if you're a stress or boredom eater, walking probably creates a second effect where you're less likely to eat.
I started walking three years ago at the age of 55 for ~2000 km per year since. There was Hypertension and a suspected heart problem at this time, so I was cautious about running. I also have a nice area of wood very close to my home.
It turned out quite well. I am officially heart-healthy today, blood pressure went down about 20-25 mm Hg, weight 10-15kg.
Regarding running - I do it the same way I do something for my upper body. Sometimes the body is longing for it, and than I do it. In the case of running: Long walks often give a certain stiffness, especially in the legs. When this happens, I simply include a few (1-3) kilometers during the walk.
I also learned, that it is far easier to sustain such a regime instead the more common forms of exercise. I think its more natural for all but a few people in the long run. Someone wrote here about running as hunting/fleeing which by origin is necessarily associated with stress. I think there is much truth in this.
The only part that becomes sometimes difficult, is the time demand. Doing the math: My 180 km / month are 12km (two hours) every other day. I had to aquire some additional discipline to make it happen.
I'm a massive fan of walking for mental, psychological, and physical benefits and have been walking at least 25k steps a day for the last two years. The only (somewhat major) downside is that it takes quite a bit of time, some days, particularly weekends when I don't have work to do, I look at the clock and it's approaching dinner time and I feel like the day just disappeared without being able to sit down and relax at all.
25k is excessive in that regard and I wouldn't recommend that much, but 10k is incredibly achievable and I would highly recommend anyone make a habit of walking every day.
I hate gym culture and I hate running too because the exercise is the 'core' of what you're doing in that time. Walking works for me because I can listen to new music and podcasts or sometimes just go through my mental monologue backlog without any stress. Living in an extremely walkable European capital is also a plus.
Human legs are heavily optimized for walking. Running is a hunting/fleeing mechanism and it just feels wrong for me to artificially simulate that stress environment.
10-15k steps is (relatively) easily achievable simply by not driving. Walking to the office, walking to the shop, walking over to a friend's house for dinner, etc. It takes a little more time than driving, but not as much as one might fear (I'm guessing, I've never owned a car). It keeps you fit(ish). It helps you sober up after getting drunk in a bar. It helps you unwind from a shitty day at the office. Throw in the occasional random walk and you'll reach 10k+ easily.
I basically do everything on foot that is within a 5k step radius. I make allowances for when I'm carrying heavy stuff (once made the mistake of walking 7km with a 10liter bucket of paint). It's not something I would recommend to everyone, but I would recommend it to almost everyone.
Wow, 25k is a LOT! I try to average 7-8k a day, and post-Covid I hope to bring that average to 10k a day. It's the perfect base to stay healthy for me, with all other more intense cardiovascular exercise (e.g. strength training or HIIT) being extra 2 or 3 times a week.
25k would really take a huge chunk out of my day, I think at least 3 - 3.5 hours or so. But it really depends, working from home means I'm sedentary all day. In other jobs you wouldn't have to squeeze everything into the few evening hours so much.
The biggest issue I have with walking is that the city becomes a bit boring. I love walking and exploring, but I've also lived in the capital city of my country for decades. Every day is new and brings new little experiences, yet also many similar ones. Especially because I'm always leaving and returning from and to the same place, there's a limit to my routes. I've walked the same streets thousands of times by now. On holidays in Europe or Asia I easily hit >40k steps daily because it's just so much fun, every corner brings something new, architecture, a river, a forest, a square or park, or lots of little shops or eateries or public art pieces.
I do these walks on weekends. Doing 25k steps usually takes me a little over 3 hours (3 and ~20 mins). I walk the exact same route each time. When I work in the office, on such day I usually do about 10k step. I wish I had the time to walk more, for me it's almost as good as sleeping (brain wise).
Maybe shift a bit to running? You should be able to jog without breaking much of a sweat now, and it's more time-efficient than walking for getting steps in.
I had a mentally rough start to my work life. I graduated as an engineer in 2009 and for several years I couldn't really make much choices for myself, but after 7 years I quit having a boos. I now work for myself and all is good.
Anyway. One of the important steps (pun somewhat intended) of getting back in mental shape was to walk part of the way back from work. If I would have walked all the way that would probably have been something like 80 k steps and I could get off the train at several places on that way. And since I could also get on it again I could both choose the length of my walks and the vary where they took place.
My record during that period was a day where I in tota walked almost 40 k steps. There is something that happens after about 3-4 hours of walking like that. At least I can achieve something similar to a runners high. Also, I had some problems around let's say my more sensitive parts, which also got completely fixed by that treatment.
If you've just walked for 1-1.5 hours, that's still good and everything. But if you have the time and have some mental/physical problems, and like walking, try 3-4 hours several times a week. There's some magic in that. I recommend having a start and a goal but taking different paths and exploring. Listen to some pods sure, but also explore and think. Most important though, put in those 25 k + steps, and do it in a pace you like!
Crawling may be even better. Not even hands and knees but on your belly. I've been working in the crawl space under my house for the last couple of weeks and it is kicking my ass. It's very much a whole body workout. Maybe babies are smarter than they look.
> long walks have been a hidden weapon of superhero body transformations for ages.
Really? And here I thought the hidden weapon of celebrity body transformation was steroids.
When so many other athletics endeavours have widespread doping, despite testing? And somehow Hugh Jackman at age 50 is more ripped than Lance Armstrong was at age 30? And the secret weapon is walking? Sure.
No, you are absolutely right. It is extremely naive to think actors/celebrities (whose million dollar movie contracts, photo endorsements and ad placements, and other visual body marketing media, depend on their physical appearance being top 1%) are doing this without drugs.
Your observation about Hugh Jackman is on point. If you need more evidence, look at the difference between The Rock (a pro wrestler and admitted user) between 1993-2003 vs. now. In 2021, he’s at least 20 years older, and yet his latest action movie appearances have him at a lower body fat, and higher muscle mass % per height than when he was 20 years younger? Come on, that’s not how biology works.
If you go to any serious website or forum where actual steroid users converse, none of this is shocking news. Drugs make for fast body transformations, and the results revert back to natural limits once you stop the drugs (useful for an actor preparing for a movie/show/appearance, who then does not care about that look once it’s finished).
> And here I thought the hidden weapon of celebrity body transformation was steroids.
The hidden (not so much, plenty are open about it) weapon of celebrity body transformation is (1) having plenty of resources for dietitians, trainers, equipment, etc., and (2) having it be central to your livelihood so that you can literally spend as great a proportion of your waking hours on it as necessary.
One thing I’ve found very recently is that walking outside early in the mornings does wonders for your sleep.
I’ve been a light, disrupted sleeper for as long as I can remember, but a walk outside and getting daylight on retina has the effect of shutting down melatonin levels, properly starting your day in biological terms. Now I hit 11:30pm and feel genuinely sleepy, which is novel in and of itself and get nearly double the deep sleep I was getting before.
Doing the exact same walk at midday does not have the same effect.
The impact of feeling genuinely rested and refreshed is life-changing.
I'm not trying to shit on walking for walking's sake, but if your goal is performance, health, or changing your body composition, I see no reason to prefer walking over running. You cover more distance. You get a better cardiovascular workout. Your lung capacity will increase more. Same for cycling if you have some injury or disability that prevents running.
Does anyone here have trouble focusing after a tough workout? Sometimes even a few days after? I used to do sprint training as part of my workout routine and also some weight lifting/machine. However, especially after especially tough sessions, it'd give me brain fog for the rest of the day and sometimes days after as well. Also sometimes I'd just be too sore to really concentrate. I'm currently doing a post grad degree which requires quite a lot of deep focused thinking and I've kind of stopped my exercise regiment as a result. Anyone else experienced this before and how did they deal with it?
Walking a lot was the default norm for humans across the world before cars, etc, made it impossible to do what we need to do with just walking. Urban planners used to incorporate fitness into their designs and that seems to mostly be a thing of the past.
You can blame our couch potato physiques on modern life to a large degree. We don't have to quietly accept this. We can decide to redesign the world such that walking to run errands is much more the default norm again and then fitness can be incorporated into daily activities of living instead of being an extra burden on top of them.
> Four months ago my friend John Sharkman stepped on the scale and realized he was the heaviest he'd ever been. Sharkman—a former college football quarterback—was weighing in at 263 pounds, fifty pounds heavier than his time as an elite athlete...It's not like walking is some secret. 10,000 steps is the default recommendation of some of the most popular fitness trackers on the market, and long walks have been a hidden weapon of superhero body transformations for ages. But until witnessing Sharkman undergo his transformation I didn't realize just how powerful just walking could be...So in our group chat, Sharkman and a few other friends made a commitment to walking 10,000 steps a day and tracking our food. We aimed for about 2,000 calories. Sharkman dubbed the initiative Health Zone. After four months following those guidelines, my friend dropped 43 pounds. Collectively the group chat was down 105.
So in other words, a single individual, who already had a history of being fit and the ability to pursue athletics at a high level, reverted to his mean, and made up almost half of the entire gains across 4+ ('a few other') people, by using bog-standard recommendations, of the sort that have completely failed to solve the obesity crisis and fail for most people that try it.
What can I say to a writeup like this, which is so self-refuting? "Nothing in psychology makes sense except in the light of individual differences." How can fitness journalists and 'nutrition coach and personal trainer' experts be so blind to the reality of individual differences? Just look at exercise studies's summary statistics, and look at how different the results are for individuals doing the same thing!
I think there's some confusion over whether the term fit means just attaining an ideal body weight or also having a lean and muscular appearance. The latter isn't so easy to achieve through just walking and diet, but many people are only interested in the former.
Whatever your goals, it's hard to go wrong with a mix of weight training, cardio/walking and eating right.
As someone who had to walk 10km daily in the past for years, if you live somewhere with a hot weather be careful sweaty clothes are the perfect environment for fungus to grow on your skin.
> 10,000 steps is the default recommendation of some of the most popular fitness trackers on the market
It's worth keeping in mind that much like "8 glasses of water per day", this recommendation does not have any particular pedigree (outside of trivia about the early marketing of pedometers in Japan). It's not clear that it was based on any evidence, and it isn't especially supported by the studies that do exist (which suggest that the benefits on mortality and morbidity for most people taper off somewhere in the range of 6,000-8,000 steps per day). It's a reasonable enough goal as far as it goes, but all signs point to it being chosen to be a "round" number and not because it's an actual estimate of anything materially meaningful.
This article was great. It is known that counting calories on itself helps with getting thinner, and walking it's known to have many benefits as well. Now I'd love to see how much of the improvements were based on walking itself, vs calorie counting, vs calorie restriction.
[+] [-] markbnj|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fredleblanc|5 years ago|reply
Mind you, it got harder to do brisk activity as it went. What started as walking for 2 miles ended up being running for 5 miles. (5 miles became the target after a while so I stopped with 30 minutes. It would take 38-40 minutes at my best.)
Also got hit with COVID gain, so I’m back at it. Bought me a treadmill and am doing at least a 5k every day, training back up to at least 4 miles.
I found a lot of it was consistency. It felt like weight loss had an inertia to it. Took a while to really start losing, but once it started it was easy to keep dropping a pound per week. Even after stopping running for a bit, the weight stayed off for quite a while.
Anyway, good on you (us!) for regular exercise! It really can make all the difference.
[+] [-] satysin|5 years ago|reply
I stopped adding it to drinks. I stopped drinking soda and fruit juices and smoothies (fruit juices/smoothies are as bad as soda imho as they all try and pretend they are healthy). Stopped having dessert (unless out for a meal for a special occasion), no biscuits, chocolate, crisps and snacks.
Plus I started viewing my calorie intake over a 7 day period rather than daily. This way I didn't 'feel bad' if I went out for a meal or had a movie and pizza night with the family. I found that 'feed bad' mindset made me quit many times as I felt I had 'failed'. So by removing it and viewing intake over a whole week I could easily reduce a bit over 3 or 4 days and still break even. A simple change of perspective really worked for me.
It took a while but now I don't like how sweet many things are. Like a mars bar is disgusting to me now. Two bites and I feel kind of sick from how much sugar is in it. It shocks me how desensitised I was to sugar as it is added to literally everything.
Also an added bonus to the weight loss was that I also saved a lot as my appetite changed and I was naturally less hungry than I used to be. Smaller meals and less processed crap meant my shopping bill was much lower than before.
[+] [-] ravenstine|5 years ago|reply
In my opinion, it really doesn't help to tell people what kind of exercise they should be doing. Just sweat. Do whatever it is that you can do consistently. No matter what, you are almost certainly burning more calories than you did sitting around. Combine that with better macronutrients, and you'll almost certainly lose weight.
Once you get slimmer, this can get more difficult because people with more body weight have a greater basal metabolic rate. What I do now when I need to shed some weight (sometimes I get up to 160) is do those things you did before but also eat less. I calculate my BMR, divide it by half, and only eat that many calories. This is a short term strategy, not a long term one.
[+] [-] chillacy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cameronh90|5 years ago|reply
I'm 270lbs/5'11" with a bunch of weight related health issues. I do have an appetite, for sure. But careful calorie tracking says I should be at a 1000kcal/day deficit, but my weight is stable. Go figure.
[+] [-] GeekyBear|5 years ago|reply
I stopped drinking sweetened drinks, cut out refined carbs, and took up learning to cook everything from scratch as my new hobby. (It's hard to really get the sugar in your diet under control unless you cook everything from scratch.)
I didn't change my level of physical activity.
This has worked to keep the weight off for more than a decade.
[+] [-] smichel17|5 years ago|reply
My mom calls these "the covid 19".
[+] [-] daenz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RobertRoberts|5 years ago|reply
My findings is that food intake is 100% of weight loss based purely as ratio to movement/use of food intake. (you can run all day, and if you eat too much, you stay overweight)
[+] [-] vram22|5 years ago|reply
Read product labels closely, and/or don't buy ones without labels. For unprocessed products, to know their natural composition, use Wikipedia and sites like USDA nutrition data site.
[+] [-] schnebbau|5 years ago|reply
> So if you're chasing high-level performance, single-digit body fat, or a bodybuilder physique, then relying solely a ton of walking isn't the right move. But the reality is that most average people are pretty far from those goals, and focusing on the routines of really high performers my be doing more harm than good. In other words, expecting that you'll accomplish the training required for a movie star body when starting out a fitness routine is setting yourself up for disappointment. Walking a bunch, on the other hand, is something that is relatively simple to fit into your everyday life. The best fitness routine is always going to be the routine that you follow consistently. And I can vouch for the—unscientific, absolutely not peer reviewed—results.
[+] [-] mycologos|5 years ago|reply
The idea was that this helps you develop the habit of going to the gym, having a pleasant time, and not seeing it as a scary and foreign place where everybody's better than you (you're probably not gonna get insecure about somebody else reading more magazines than you are). Once you have that habit and familiarity, you can start actually exercising without those mental obstacles.
Funny advice, but it's an interesting way of thinking about building new habits.
It also reminds me of people on various fitness subreddits who will expend a bunch of effort trying to craft an optimal workout routine when their baseline is barely working out at all. Just pick something you like and do it at a moderate intensity for a few months! It's way better than nothing, and you'll accumulate random knowledge along the way that will help you come up with something better later.
[+] [-] jmchuster|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ec109685|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] troydavis|5 years ago|reply
43 pounds in 16 weeks is 2.7 pounds per week. A pound is 3,500 calories, so 2.7 is 9,450 calories per week, or a deficit of 1,350 calories per day.
Even if he was walking a very low 3,000 steps per day previously, an extra 7,000 steps/day - about 3-4 miles - is walking for perhaps 60-80 minutes. For someone who weighs about 260 pounds, 1 hour of moderate walking would burn about 450 calories. So, assuming he didn’t do other exercise that the article omitted, the remaining ~900 calorie/day deficit came from eating less than his metabolic rate (BMR).
Walking sped up the process, but he would have lost the weight just by eating fewer calories - and food changes account for about 2/3rds of the loss.
(I’m assuming he neither added nor lost much muscle mass, which seems likely from the description.)
[+] [-] mleo|5 years ago|reply
Also, at the very start, I am certain it was more than 450 calories per hour after weighing that much in my case. It certainly came down as the body got used to it and did build muscle mass in legs. Same with food, the body will get used to the calorie restriction over time and calorie restriction alone won’t take you the distance.
[+] [-] pessimizer|5 years ago|reply
This is likely true for everyone losing weight. Exercise gets you fit(-ter than you were before), though, and there are a lot more health benefits from being fit than thin. I'm pretty sure being thin just helps you with your sugar.
[+] [-] porb121|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MMAesawy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jollybean|5 years ago|reply
While diet is a 'major factor' - for people who are sedentary, then walking 2 miles a day can be a huge step up.
[+] [-] Ozzie_osman|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unholyguy001|5 years ago|reply
Elevation gain during walks matter hugely. Walk up a few pretty decent hills and your 400 number becomes a 600 number
[+] [-] legulere|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbeex|5 years ago|reply
It turned out quite well. I am officially heart-healthy today, blood pressure went down about 20-25 mm Hg, weight 10-15kg.
Regarding running - I do it the same way I do something for my upper body. Sometimes the body is longing for it, and than I do it. In the case of running: Long walks often give a certain stiffness, especially in the legs. When this happens, I simply include a few (1-3) kilometers during the walk.
I also learned, that it is far easier to sustain such a regime instead the more common forms of exercise. I think its more natural for all but a few people in the long run. Someone wrote here about running as hunting/fleeing which by origin is necessarily associated with stress. I think there is much truth in this.
The only part that becomes sometimes difficult, is the time demand. Doing the math: My 180 km / month are 12km (two hours) every other day. I had to aquire some additional discipline to make it happen.
[+] [-] jacobmischka|5 years ago|reply
25k is excessive in that regard and I wouldn't recommend that much, but 10k is incredibly achievable and I would highly recommend anyone make a habit of walking every day.
[+] [-] spiderjerusalem|5 years ago|reply
Human legs are heavily optimized for walking. Running is a hunting/fleeing mechanism and it just feels wrong for me to artificially simulate that stress environment.
[+] [-] elric|5 years ago|reply
I basically do everything on foot that is within a 5k step radius. I make allowances for when I'm carrying heavy stuff (once made the mistake of walking 7km with a 10liter bucket of paint). It's not something I would recommend to everyone, but I would recommend it to almost everyone.
[+] [-] IkmoIkmo|5 years ago|reply
25k would really take a huge chunk out of my day, I think at least 3 - 3.5 hours or so. But it really depends, working from home means I'm sedentary all day. In other jobs you wouldn't have to squeeze everything into the few evening hours so much.
The biggest issue I have with walking is that the city becomes a bit boring. I love walking and exploring, but I've also lived in the capital city of my country for decades. Every day is new and brings new little experiences, yet also many similar ones. Especially because I'm always leaving and returning from and to the same place, there's a limit to my routes. I've walked the same streets thousands of times by now. On holidays in Europe or Asia I easily hit >40k steps daily because it's just so much fun, every corner brings something new, architecture, a river, a forest, a square or park, or lots of little shops or eateries or public art pieces.
[+] [-] pan69|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dTal|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hansvm|5 years ago|reply
14 mi, 22 km, 3.5+ hr?
[+] [-] kruxigt|5 years ago|reply
Anyway. One of the important steps (pun somewhat intended) of getting back in mental shape was to walk part of the way back from work. If I would have walked all the way that would probably have been something like 80 k steps and I could get off the train at several places on that way. And since I could also get on it again I could both choose the length of my walks and the vary where they took place.
My record during that period was a day where I in tota walked almost 40 k steps. There is something that happens after about 3-4 hours of walking like that. At least I can achieve something similar to a runners high. Also, I had some problems around let's say my more sensitive parts, which also got completely fixed by that treatment.
If you've just walked for 1-1.5 hours, that's still good and everything. But if you have the time and have some mental/physical problems, and like walking, try 3-4 hours several times a week. There's some magic in that. I recommend having a start and a goal but taking different paths and exploring. Listen to some pods sure, but also explore and think. Most important though, put in those 25 k + steps, and do it in a pace you like!
[+] [-] hirundo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelt|5 years ago|reply
Really? And here I thought the hidden weapon of celebrity body transformation was steroids.
When so many other athletics endeavours have widespread doping, despite testing? And somehow Hugh Jackman at age 50 is more ripped than Lance Armstrong was at age 30? And the secret weapon is walking? Sure.
[+] [-] ddelt|5 years ago|reply
Your observation about Hugh Jackman is on point. If you need more evidence, look at the difference between The Rock (a pro wrestler and admitted user) between 1993-2003 vs. now. In 2021, he’s at least 20 years older, and yet his latest action movie appearances have him at a lower body fat, and higher muscle mass % per height than when he was 20 years younger? Come on, that’s not how biology works.
If you go to any serious website or forum where actual steroid users converse, none of this is shocking news. Drugs make for fast body transformations, and the results revert back to natural limits once you stop the drugs (useful for an actor preparing for a movie/show/appearance, who then does not care about that look once it’s finished).
[+] [-] dragonwriter|5 years ago|reply
The hidden (not so much, plenty are open about it) weapon of celebrity body transformation is (1) having plenty of resources for dietitians, trainers, equipment, etc., and (2) having it be central to your livelihood so that you can literally spend as great a proportion of your waking hours on it as necessary.
[+] [-] faichai|5 years ago|reply
I’ve been a light, disrupted sleeper for as long as I can remember, but a walk outside and getting daylight on retina has the effect of shutting down melatonin levels, properly starting your day in biological terms. Now I hit 11:30pm and feel genuinely sleepy, which is novel in and of itself and get nearly double the deep sleep I was getting before.
Doing the exact same walk at midday does not have the same effect.
The impact of feeling genuinely rested and refreshed is life-changing.
[+] [-] Jonnax|5 years ago|reply
My healthiest was when I lived in a small town of 30k people.
Everything was walkable. So I walked 30 minutes to work and back every day.
Went to the town centre for shopping and carried it back.
Put on a podcast or audiobook. Time will fly
[+] [-] massysett|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsego|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orthoxerox|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pc86|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ackbar03|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|5 years ago|reply
You can blame our couch potato physiques on modern life to a large degree. We don't have to quietly accept this. We can decide to redesign the world such that walking to run errands is much more the default norm again and then fitness can be incorporated into daily activities of living instead of being an extra burden on top of them.
[+] [-] gwern|5 years ago|reply
So in other words, a single individual, who already had a history of being fit and the ability to pursue athletics at a high level, reverted to his mean, and made up almost half of the entire gains across 4+ ('a few other') people, by using bog-standard recommendations, of the sort that have completely failed to solve the obesity crisis and fail for most people that try it.
What can I say to a writeup like this, which is so self-refuting? "Nothing in psychology makes sense except in the light of individual differences." How can fitness journalists and 'nutrition coach and personal trainer' experts be so blind to the reality of individual differences? Just look at exercise studies's summary statistics, and look at how different the results are for individuals doing the same thing!
[+] [-] PlugTunin|5 years ago|reply
Whatever your goals, it's hard to go wrong with a mix of weight training, cardio/walking and eating right.
[+] [-] gryn|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xcde4c3db|5 years ago|reply
It's worth keeping in mind that much like "8 glasses of water per day", this recommendation does not have any particular pedigree (outside of trivia about the early marketing of pedometers in Japan). It's not clear that it was based on any evidence, and it isn't especially supported by the studies that do exist (which suggest that the benefits on mortality and morbidity for most people taper off somewhere in the range of 6,000-8,000 steps per day). It's a reasonable enough goal as far as it goes, but all signs point to it being chosen to be a "round" number and not because it's an actual estimate of anything materially meaningful.
[+] [-] franciscop|5 years ago|reply