Obesity causes major health problems such as heart disease, high blood pressure and Type 2 diabetes, so keeping your weight under control is a key part of staying healthy. Walking on a treadmill at home is convenient and easier on your knees than running, but your workout must be strenuous enough to help you lose weight. Your current weight, the speed and incline of your treadmill workout and how much time you spend walking all contribute to walking away the extra pounds.
How Weight Loss Works
How to lose weight is no mystery: You need to create a calorie deficit by burning more calories than you take in. For instance, if you burn 100 more calories than you consume today, you will create a 100-calorie deficit and your body will use your fat stores to make up the difference.
Calories Burned
The number of calories you burn walking depends on your pace and how much you weigh. According to MayoClinic.com, if you weigh 160 lbs. you will burn 183 calories walking 2 mph for 1 hour. This equals about 1.14 calories per pound of body weight, so if you weigh 190 lbs., you will burn about 217 calories per hour, and an hour a day on the treadmill will burn 1,519 calories per week. If you increase your speed to 3.5 mph, you will burn about 1.73 calories per pound of body weight for each hour on the treadmill, which equals about 329 calories per hour.
Walking Time for Weight Loss
Each pound of fat contains about 3,500 calories, so you need to create a 3,500-calorie deficit in order to lose 1 lb. If you weigh 190 lbs., you will need to walk 10.6 hours on the treadmill at 3.5 mph in order to lose 1 lb. per week-- that's about 1 1/2 hours per day.
Walking on an incline will also help you burn more calories -- New York City-based weight loss physician Dr. Jana Klauer indicates that each degree of incline increases the number of calories you burn by about 10 percent.
Comparisons
When it comes to burning calories, walking on a treadmill ranks pretty low compared to other types of exercise. Walking 3.5 mph on a treadmill burns about 1.73 calories an hour per pound of body weight. Swimming laps burns about 3.19, jogging 5 mph burns 3.65, working out on a stair-stepper burns 4.11 and rollerblading burns 5.71 calories per pound of body weight per hour.Walking on a treadmill will help you lose weight, just much more slowly than more rigorous types of exercise. Walking on the treadmill four days a week and doing a harder workout the other three will help you reach your weight loss goal much sooner.
Cutting Calories
Reducing the number of calories you take in will help you create the calorie deficit you want and reduce your time on the treadmill. Cutting beverage calories is an easy way to reduce calories since it doesn't make you feel hungry the same way reducing your food intake would. For example, a 16-oz. bottle of soda contains about 200 calories, so skipping a daily bottle saves you 1,400 calories per week.
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