Walking To Lose Weight

I probably have been on twenty different diets in my life. It's very frustrating. You go on a diet, lose weight, feel good about it for six months, then you notice that you've gained back half the weight you originally lost. Then six months later you're right back where you started from. Time to do it again. It's really sort of depressing.

I've tried every type of fad diet there is, it seems,but I'm sure there are many more that I haven't tried than I have. The problem is I always want to lose weight really fast, but experience has taught me that's not the right approach. When I was in college or a twenty something, all I cared about was looking good to women, so my first desire was to just lose stomach weight. I tried several weight lose programs,but the end result was always the same--lose fifteen ponds, gain it back in six months. When I was about to graduate from college--boom!--a quicky diet made me look good for graduation. My sister, who was overweight, married her high-school sweetheart, wanted to lose weight really fast, lost thirty pounds and looked great for the ceremony and all the wedding pictures, and then a year later gained it all back. Sound familiar?

The Internet provides a myriad of different options to lose weight online. Ive tried weight lose programs involving diet pills, natural supplements, a colon cleanse, you name it, I've tried it. But I always gained the weight back within a year of losing it. Clearly, it wasn't working the way I had hoped for. It might have helped me if I had read some information about all the weight loss programs that were available. Just reading some weight loss reviews could have at least guided me in advance which diet programs were good and which ones were not.


I'm a Baby Boomer, and health concerns have now given me a different motivation to lose weight. I have high blood pressure and high blood sugar levels. My doctor told me on my last physical that I could add ten, maybe even twenty, years to my life if I lost weight and eliminated my blood pressure and diabetes problems. He said I really needed to change my lifestyle, to eat foods that are good for my cardiovascular health, and--surprise!--exercise on a regular basis. I dunno. Exercise on a regular basis? That's when he suggested walking. Walking? Yes, he said,walking to lose weight is a weight loss secret that will help you not only lose weight but also improve your cardiovascular health. And do this forever. That's when I decided to really take the bull by the horns and follow my doctor's advice.

The essense of my new approach to longevity is to lose weight naturally by eating healthy foods and to enter into an exercise regimen that involves regular aerobic exercise. My cardiologist said aerobic exercise on a regular basis provided the cardiovascular benefits that other types of exercise did not. For example, thirty to forty-five minutes of walking to lose weight
on a treadmill with no breaks was better than playing baseball or even tennis. The key reason was that baseball and tennis were not continuous exercise routines. They were stop and go motions, whereas walking on a treadmill for a set time and that was was continuous was much better for my heart. Notice he said "walking." Can you believe that? Walking to lose weight--it's something anyone can do and we'd hardly know we're really exercising. Now of course, walking up a flight of stairs or a San Francisco hill is a different story! But you don't have to walk up a steep incline to grab the benefits that walking provides. A brisk walk on a flat surface does the trick! So this meant that I didn't have to exert myself so much that I dreaded doing the exercise and would find excuses not to do it.

I'm going to report back here regularly on how I'm doing and offer meaningful suggestions to any readers who are also interested in losing weight naturally and leading healthier lives. I'll be walking to lose weight and I won't even realize I'm exercising! I encourage any of you who have an opinion on this to leave comments.