Walking is a safe, easy way to begin your weight loss journey. While it's not the fastest way to lose weight, it will produce results if you dedicate the time and energy. You can always boost your caloric burn by increasing your walking speed over time, walking up hills or carrying small weights while you walk.
Calculating Weight Loss
Weight loss boils down to simple math; every pound contains 3,500 calories. In order to lose that pound, you must cut your daily caloric intake until you've conserved a pound's worth of calories or do enough exercise to burn them off. Before you set a weight loss goal, it's a good idea to be realistic about how much dieting and/or exercising you want to do. If walking alone won't burn off the calories as fast as you might wish, you can cut calories to reach your goals even faster. Conversely, if you're already on a low-calorie diet and can't cut many more, plan on devoting about an hour a day to walking.
Walking and Calories Burned
The number of calories you burn will depend on how long you walk, how fast you walk and how much you weigh. MayoClinic.com features a chart detailing how many calories people at three different sample weights can expect to burn when they walk for 60 minutes. At a slower pace of 2 miles per hour, a person who weighs 160 pounds will burn 183 calories, a person who weighs 200 pounds will burn 228 calories and a person who weighs 240 pounds will burn 273 calories.
Walking Speed
You will burn more calories if you walk faster. MayoClinic.com's chart posts a second set of calories burned for the same sample subjects walking at a faster pace of 3.5 miles per hour for a total of 60 minutes. The 160-pound person will burn 277 calories, the 200-pound person will burn 346 calories and the 240-pound person will burn 414 calories.
Expected Weight Loss
If you invest an hour a day in a brisk 3.5 mile-per-hour walk, you can expect to lose approximately half a pound per week. If you weigh 160 pounds, for example, you'll burn 277 calories each day and 1,939 calories per week. In just under two weeks, you'll drop one pound. If your starting weight is 240 pounds, however, your daily burn is 414 calories with a weekly burn of 2,898. In 1.2 weeks, you'll drop one pound.
Walking Plus Dieting
Although walking isn't going to melt away the pounds in a matter of days, it can produce results faster when you combine it with simple calorie-cutting tricks. According to Minnesota's Dakota County website, you can spur a one-pound-per-week weight loss by burning 250 calories per day and cutting an additional 250 calories. It can be as simple, they note, as giving up your daily 20-oz. soft drink, as most soft drinks contain about 250 total calories.
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