Can you lose weight just by walking?
My evidence so far
My wife’s birthday is in May, and this year I had planned a series of events to celebrate a Big One. For one of these events, jeans were frowned upon, so I trawled through my cupboards looking for my smartest pair of chinos. Bringing out four pairs, I picked the best pair and tried them on.
I think you can guess what happened.
They didn’t fit. None of them did. After nearly two years of out-of-work laziness, followed by Covid isolation, I had clearly put on some weight.
There and then, I decided to do something about it. And this incident also provided me with the perfect motivation, and a target — to get back into my size 32 chinos.
Given how little I had exercised over the preceding 18 months or so, and mindful of doing myself a premature injury, I decided to see what I could achieve just by walking. On the 1st of June 2021, as soon as I finished work, I started up my Runkeeper app and walked 1.4 miles (2.28km) around my ‘block’. It took me over 26 minutes at 11:34 / km. I wasn’t impressed.
So the next day, I went out again and did 3km (1.86 miles) at 11:15 / km. After a refreshingly cold shower, I stepped onto my Fitbit scales and recorded my weight as 80.5kg (I was horrified!), 29.9% body fat, (even more horrified) and a BMI of 27.2 (whatever that meant).
I set myself the target of getting down to 75kgs within 3 months, and started ramping things up. I didn’t walk every day, but I managed at least 4 days a week. Possibly the biggest psychological problem I faced was that my house is at the end of a cul-de-sac at the top of a hill at almost the highest point of our town. Every walk started off steeply downhill but meant it ended steeply uphill.
After two weeks, I was regularly doing around 5km or 3 miles per day, I had already lost half a kg in weight and 0.7% body fat. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but I was seeing small improvements virtually every day.
By the last day of June, I had done 16 walks totalling 74km (46 miles) at a pace often more than a minute faster per km. I was also down to 79 kgs (1.5 kgs or 3.3lbs lost), my body fat was down to 27.2% and my BMI 26.7.
I was winning!
Coincidentally, over the month of July, I did another 16 walks totalling 102.8 km (nearly 64 miles), I was down to 77.3kgs, my body fat was 24.1% (!) but my BMI had plateaued at around 26.1.
With this sort of progress, I re-examined my goals.
I still hadn’t tried to fit into my chinos at this point, but the 75kg goal still felt completely realistic given I had lost 3.2 kgs in 2 months and had 2.3 kgs to go. I also wanted to get my body fat percentage down to under 20 (and keep it there).
I started to plan some longer walks. In June I had averaged 4.6km, in July it was 6.6km. By the end of August, I wanted to average 8.5km per day, doing at least one 10km walk per week. I also set myself the challenge of walking all the way round Bewl Water — a reservoir encircled with walking and cycling trails, measuring 12.5 miles or 20km. The date I set myself was Monday the 9th of August.
On the last day of July, I did 9.2km and 3 days later I did 10.4km and still felt good at the end. That walk was at 10:06 / km and burnt over 600 calories. My weight was down to 76.7kg — only 1.7kgs from my target and I still had almost a month to reach it. I was confident.
Even more so since the first two weeks of August coincided with a cancelled family holiday, so instead I’d be walking around London or Roman ruins or Go Ape with my daughter. And I could still get my walks around the town done in-between.
And then, on Wednesday the 4th, at GoApe, I followed the instructors advice for landing at the end of a zip-line, starting to run in the air as I approached the mud-and-wood-chips landing area that I had previously hit first with my heels and backside. My first stride was okay, but when my right foot touched down, something gave way and I fell to the muddy ground, my right ankle in agony.
By the time the ambulance arrived (and got itself out of the mud), the shock had worn off, but the pain hadn’t. Apparently I passed out twice. In hospital it was confirmed that the ankle was broken in two places. I had surgery the next day and was discharged late on Friday afternoon with one of those big black boots for support instead of a cast.
As I write this, I have my leg up on a cushion on my recliner sofa, my crutches beside me.
I had planned to walk 12km last weekend, and the 20km of Bewl Water yesterday. Obviously neither of those things happened. I am under orders not to put weight on the ankle for two weeks — until Thursday next week. It will be a couple of months before I am properly walking again, I suppose.
When I start doing my walks again (I definitely will, because I have really enjoyed it), I will resume measuring my progress, and will write a follow-up to this post. But so far, I have proven — at least to myself — that, with no changes to my diet — I can lose significant weight and body fat just through walking.
You could too.
