How I am Losing Weight

I have lost a significant amount of weight recently. It is mostly down to increasing my activity levels.

Here are the 2 aspects to this that you may be able to duplicate:

1. I am going for long walks of up to 4 miles at a time, taking in some steep hills. This burns over 400 calories at a time and takes just over 1 hour. The scenery is nice but to make best use of the time, I am experimenting with language learning while I am on the walk by listening to dialogs via an iPhone (you could use any MP3 player though).

I am not used to listening to things other than the natural sounds so it seems a bit strange and I am making sure I remain alert to dangers such as vehicles when my hearing may be impaired by the playback from the ear phones. For example taking a good look around when crossing a road and walking on the side of the road that faces the occasional oncoming vehicle.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I am logging all my walks with the aid of GPS and an online service so it is kind of fun and motivating to clock up the miles and save the routes.

Already I am clocking up some serious walking distance like about 16 miles over the last 5 walks. So I could get addicted to this if I combine the walks with learning activities since I kill 2 birds with one stone. But at about 1 hour and 10 minutes I have had enough of walking and want to get it over with, so it’s not like I could walk all day long to burn as many calories as desired.

2. I am doing some muscle-toning workouts at home. These are quite simple with the aim of preventing me from losing muscle mass with these walks. I want to burn fat not muscle. So I do push ups, crunches, planks, bicep curls and shoulder presses occasionally. From what I read by the experts, the idea is to work your muscles hard so they need to rebuild and give them plenty of rest between workouts.

For example, today I did a fairly intense session where I pushed myself close to the limits of my abilities to do well formed exercises for push ups etc. So hopefully my muscles ache tomorrow and need to rebuild. At the moment they just feel a bit tired, but the next day usually shows me if I worked out hard enough.

Anyway, I hope I gave you some inspiration to get more active and burn the calories.