Walking Results: What Actually Happens When You Walk Consistently

 What results can you actually expect from walking? From weight loss to mental health to long-term longevity, this episode breaks down what really happens when you walk consistently — and why most people quit too early. 

Link to sources used in this episode

Check out WhyWalkingMatters.com Blog! Share Your Walking Story Listen on YouTube 

Email us at: Kaydoscope@gmail.com to share topics you'd like to learn about.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Welcome back to Why Walking Matters, The Science Explained. I'm Tatiana, your host. I asked a simple question. Why do you walk? And while I'm still building this community, I want to share three stories that represent what I hear over and over again. The first, I just needed something I could stick to. I started walking because I was tired of starting over. Every workout plan felt like too much. Walking was the first thing that felt doable. Now it's the one thing I don't skip. And that we know listeners is because walking is sustainable. I love when I get to see the things we talk about on the podcast play out in real life. Second, it's the only time I feel clear. I walk at the end of my workday. It's not even about fitness anymore. It's the only time my brain slows down. I didn't expect that to be the biggest benefit. And it's true, listeners, I've heard this time and time again that walking is a good way to wind down the day. And number three, I wanted to feel like myself again. After gaining weight and feeling off for months, I didn't know where to start. Walking felt small enough. Now it's the one habit that makes me feel back in control. I totally get that one. Walking is a small enough action that gets you going again, but but super effective in so many ways. Different reasons, same behavior. And that's what today's episode is about. If you actually walk consistently, what happens? We've talked about this before, listeners, but after the last two episodes where we talked about walking confidently, consistently, and building a routine, it feels like a good time to go back and look at all the benefits of walking. When we think about results, what does that actually mean? Most people think results equal weight loss, but the science tells a bigger story. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, regular physical activity like walking helps reduce the risk of heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes. From the CDC, physical activity has many immediate and long-term benefits. Physical activity helps you immediately feel better, function better, and sleep better. Adults who sit less and do any amount of moderate to vigorous intensity physical activity gain some health benefits. Some benefits of physical activity for brain health happen right after a session of moderate to vigorous physical activity. Benefits include improved thinking or cognition for children 6 to 13 and reduced short-term feelings of anxiety for adults. Regular physical activity can help keep your thinking, learning, and judgment skills sharp as you age. It can also reduce your risk of depression and anxiety and help you sleep better. Results, listeners, don't start on the outside, they start internally. So what's the truth about walking and weight loss? Let's answer the big question. Can walking help you lose weight? Yes, but not in the way most people expect. Walking helps by increasing your daily calorie burn, supporting fat metabolism, and making weight loss more sustainable. But according to the Mayo Clinic, weight loss depends on both activity and diet from the Mayo Clinic. Being active is vital to losing weight and keeping it off. When active, the body uses more energy in the form of calories, and burning more calories than you take in leads to weight loss. To lose weight, most people need to cut the number of calories they eat and move more. This is according to the 2020 to 2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Most often, that means cutting daily calories by 500 to 750 to lose 1.5 pounds or 0.7 kilograms a week. Other factors might also be involved in losing weight. Because of changes to the body over time, you might need to cut calories more as you age to keep losing weight or to stay at the same weight. Both diet and exercise are important. Diet affects weight loss more than physical activity does. Physical activity, including exercise, has a stronger effect in keeping weight from coming back after weight loss. Losing weight with diet alone and without physical activity can make people weaker. This is because of age-related losses in bone density and muscle mass. Adding resistance training and aerobic exercise to a weight loss program helps prevent the loss of bone and muscle. These are the exercise guidelines for most healthy adults from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Get at least 150 minutes of moderate aerobic activity a week or get 75 minutes of vigorous aerobic activity a week. You also can get an equal mix of the two types. Do strength training exercises for all major muscle groups at least two times a week. Moderate aerobic exercise includes activities such as brisk walking, biking, swimming, and mowing the lawn. Vigorous aerobic exercise includes activities such as running, swimming hard laps, heavy yard work, and aerobic dancing. Strength training can include use of weights or weight machines, your own body weight, resistance tubing, or activities such as rock climbing. So what does this mean? Walking alone can lead to a gradual change. Walking consistently leads to real change, and walking plus nutrition give the best results. Walking isn't a quick fix, it's a sustainable one. Now, where walking becomes powerful is with the results you don't expect, like mental health. Walking is linked to reduced anxiety, improved mood, and lower stress. From the Mayo Clinic, physical activity may help pump up the production of endorphins, the brain's feel-good neurotransmitters. Specifically, physical activity increases the brain chemical called beta endorphin. This can increase feelings of happiness and reduce feelings of pain. It is often called a runner's high. Any aerobic activity, such as a fun game of tennis or pickleball or a nature hike, can create this happy feeling. Research has found that exercise also increases other brain chemicals that help lessen pain. Exercise can offer relief while the body is reacting to stress, such as the flight or fight response, it can help the body's systems practice working together when dealing with stress. This can have positive effects on the body, including the heart and blood vessels, digestive and immune systems, helping protect against harmful results of stress. For example, it can lower resting heart rate and blood pressure and help improve the immune system. It can even lessen the effects of aging. Exercises like walking is meditation in motion. After a game of racquetball or a long walk, run or swim, you may find that you've forgotten the day's irritations. You also may find that you focus only on your body's movements and breathing during exercise. As you start to regularly shed your daily tensions through movement and physical activity, you may find that this focus on a single task helps you stay calm. It can increase your energy and optimism. It can help you focus and think clearly, and it even can help you use your imagination and improve problem-solving skills. Exercising a few times a week can increase your self-confidence, improve your mood, help you relax, and lower symptoms of mild depression and anxiety. Exercise also can improve your sleep, which is often disturbed by stress, depression, and anxiety. All these exercises benefits that can ease your stress levels and help you better manage your body and your life. Regular physical activity like walking improves sleep quality and helps you fall asleep faster. According to the CDC, good sleep is essential for our health and emotional well-being. Getting enough sleep and good sleep quality are essential for healthy sleep. It's recommended that adults aged 18 to 60 years get seven or more hours of sleep, age 61 to 64 years get seven to nine hours of sleep, and adults 65 years and older should get seven to eight hours of sleep. Getting enough sleep can help you get sick less often, stay at a healthy weight, reduce stress and improve your mood, improve your heart health and metabolism, lower your risk of chronic conditions like type 2 diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke, lessen the risk of motor vehicle crashes and related injury or death, and improve your attention and memory to better perform daily activities. Lots of overlap there, listeners. Now let's turn to blood sugar. Walking after meals can lower blood sugar spikes and improves insulin sensitivity. From the National Library of Medicine, there is a belief that walking just after a meal causes fatigue, stomach ache, and other types of discomfort. However, the author and one volunteer participant had no such negative reactions and found that walking just after a meal was more effective for weight loss than waiting one hour after eating before walking. For people who do not experience abdominal pain, fatigue, or other discomfort when walking just after a meal, walking at a brisk speed for 30 minutes as soon as possible, just after lunch and dinner leads to more weight loss than does walking for 30 minutes beginning one hour after a meal has been consumed. The author lost nearly 3 kg and the volunteer participant lost nearly 1.5 kilograms during one month of walking just after lunch and dinner. The author walked at a brisk pace while the volunteer walked at a stroll. We repeated the preliminary experiment twice between April and early May 2002 and once between August and September 2006 and obtained the same results. One 60-year-old Japanese female, the author, with a family history of diabetes mellitus, and one 67-year-old Japanese female volunteer participated in this experiment. Repeated hyperglycemia after meals causes hyperinsulinemia and the resultant resistance to insulin, which is problematic for people who have mild diabetes mellitus or are at risk for diabetes mellitus, and for people with obesity because insulin is the obesity hormone. Suppressing hyperglycemia after a meal will suppress insulin hypersecretion, helping to suppress the storage of internal fat and thus preventing obesity from worsening. People often walk to decrease their weight or to maintain a healthy weight. However, walking is not necessarily effective. Based on the fact that the blood sugar increase after a meal causes an increase in the blood insulin level, it was hypothesized that walking after a meal would prevent the blood sugar level from increasing because walking consumes blood sugar. Changes in blood sugar levels without walking after a meal and with walking at various times after a meal have previously been reported. Blood sugar is at its highest 30 to 60 minutes after a meal and reaches its lowest 2 to 3 hours after a meal in normal people. This schedule was confirmed in our trials. Accordingly, if walking is started as soon as possible after a meal, the increase in blood sugar level will be limited by blood sugar consumption during walking, and the insulin increase that occurs in response to a meal load will be restricted as well. So in this experiment, listeners, walking significantly lowered blood sugar levels. After just one 30 minute walk, blood glucose dropped. No meaningful change happened when people stayed inactive. What this means, walking has an immediate effect on your body, not weeks later or months later, but right away. When you walk, your muscles use glucose or sugar for energy. This pulls the sugar right out of your bloodstream, resulting in lower blood sugar levels. From CNN Health, for centuries, people in the sunny Mediterranean would get up after long leisurely meals and take a walk, often to the town square, to see neighbors and socialize. Walking is so much a part of that lifestyle, it is listed as the foundation of the Uber healthy Mediterranean diet. That may be one of the reasons studies have found the Mediterranean diet can reduce the risk of diabetes, high cholesterol, heart disease, stroke, and some cancers, all the while strengthening bones, improving brain health, warding off dementia and depression, and helping with healthy weight loss. Now you can add another reason to take a post-meal stroll. It may lower your blood sugar. That excursion doesn't need to take up a huge amount of your time either. Walking as little as two to five minutes after a meal can do the trick, according to a 2022 study in the Journal of Sports Medicine. Standing after a meal can help too, but not as much as putting one foot in front of the other, said study co-author Aidan Buffy, a doctoral student in the Physical Education and Sports Sciences Department at the University of Limerick in Ireland. Intermittent standing breaks throughout the day and after meals reduced the glucose on average by 9.51% compared to prolonged sitting. However, intermittent light intensity walking throughout the day saw a greater reduction of glucose by an average of 17.01% compared to prolonged sitting, Buffy told CNN via email. This suggests that breaking prolonged sitting with standing and the light walking breaks throughout the day is beneficial for glucose levels, he added. How does movement help to clear sugar from the bloodstream? Muscles need glucose to function, so movement helps to clear sugars from the bloodstream. That's the reason why many runners rely on carbo loading before a marathon or a race, for example. So again, listeners, walking doesn't just work over time, it works immediately. There are studies showing that even a single 30-minute walk can lower your blood sugar compared to doing nothing. So every walk you take is actively improving your health in real time. Results aren't just long term, they start the moment you walk. And lastly, walking helps to lower blood pressure and improve circulation. Check out episode 33, Walking and Blood Pressure, Why Your Steps Matter for Your Heart. Listeners, some of the biggest results you'll feel you won't see. Now let's set expectations, real expectations. In the first two weeks, expect increased energy and improved mood. In weeks three and four, expect that walking will feel easier and endurance will improve. And in the first two months, you'll have noticeably more stamina and possible weight changes. Over three months, walking becomes a habit. It feels automatic, and you'll see visible body composition changes. This timeline is supported by general physical activity adaptation from the CDC. If you quit after two weeks, you miss everything that happens after. Stay consistent, stay the course, don't quit too soon, have a structure, random Walking equals random results. Try some brisk walking. And to maximize results, try walking most days of the week if you can. Aim for about 150 minutes a week and again add the occasional intensity or brisk walking. Be sure to check out last week's episode where I outline a structure to help build your routine. Because building a routine is what creates the results that we're looking for when we walk. Listeners, you don't need to wonder if walking works, it does. The question is, will you stick with it long enough to see it? Because the results aren't just weight loss, they're not just better health, they're energy, clarity, confidence, and eventually a version of you that doesn't even question whether to go for a walk. They just go. So here's what I want you to do next. Go back to your routine, follow the structure, give it time. And remember, don't skip twice, because the results you're looking for, they're already in motion. It was my pleasure learning with you today, listeners. Remember, if you're enjoying this podcast, share with a friend and visit whywalkingmatters.com and share your walking story. Until next time, happy walking.