Jinn

I'm not huge, 230 at 6'6" but I have a sizable (10-15 lb) gut and some A-cup moobs.. healthy range for my height is 186-220 or so, and I'd like to aim for 180-190.

I was working out at one point every day before work and dropped down to 220 but no reduction in gut or moobs. Now I'm working 12 hour days and don't really have a spot for a workout between 5am and 5pm, and not too excited for it after I get home in rush hour.

On the up-side, I can't park anywhere near work because it's so fucking expensive so I'm walking 2mi round trip every day.. 1 mi to work from parking lot, 1 mi back to lot after work.

I am a relatively sedentary computer worker and prior to now walked ~600 feet a day.. between house and car, car and work and maybe around the building to the bathrooms. Will this jump to 2mi/day slowly wittle down my weight if I keep my diet relatively the same? I haven't seen any difference yet but I'm wondering if I keep it up if I can get similar results (down 10 lbs) as I did jogging 30 mins a day in the gym before. It takes me about 25 mins to walk to the 2 miles, so the pace is considerably slower..

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snowy

Depends on if you're burning more calories than you're taking in, ultimately.

Walking is one of the things I really ramp up on when the pounds start creeping back. I lost about 10 lbs. last year on a trip to Chicago because we were literally walking miles a day (sometimes 8-9) despite the fact that I was eating mostly hot dogs and pizza (I love Chicago).

Muscle mass is a contributing factor as well--if you have more muscle mass, you're going to burn more calories. I'd say walk, but also incorporate some resistance exercise into your routine. Even something as little as a half hour of yoga every day with some push-ups, squats, and core exercises thrown in can help a lot. This is all stuff you can do while watching television or whatever.

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Baraka_Guru

If all things stay the same, you will lose weight, but it might not be very much. There is a huge difference between walking for 25 minutes (in two intervals) and jogging for 30 minutes (in one interval). The two biggest factors are intensity and recovery. You will burn more calories overall with the jogging than you will with the walking by a long shot.

But the walking is a good thing. I'd do both. Consider jogging three times a week instead of every day, and do the walk every day.

You'll be lucky to burn 200 calories a day with that 2 mile walk. You need to burn 3,500 calories to lose a pound of fat. So we're talking about losing maybe 2 pounds per month if you're lucky.

Burning fat, as Snowy mentioned, has more factors involved. Building muscle helps, as does cleaning up your diet. Balance out your macronutrients, and try to eat a reasonable number of calories. Don't be afraid of fat and carbs. Balance your diet. If you calculate how much you're eating, and then see what you should be eating based on your weight, you might find that you can cut out 500 calories simply by eliminating "empty calories." That's up to a pound per week in fat loss by cutting out sugar. It's easy to eat 500 calories worth of sugar. Too damn easy.

Anyway, sorry for the rant.

Bottom line: diet and exercise: intensity, frequency, duration—clean up your diet, balance, cut out the crap.

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The_Jazz

If you don't change anything else, yes, this should help - some. As snowy said, it depends on if you're taking more calories than you're burning (actually whether or not your body is efficiently harvesting those calories, but that's another discussion).

Just start walking and see what happens. My guess is that within a few weeks you'll notice some sort of difference. It may not be weight loss, but you'll probably feel better.

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Lasereth

If you came in here wanting a no bullshit answer, here it is: no.

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Jinn

Based on my BMR and experience, I maintain my weight at about 2700 calories a day (remember how tall I am - it takes a lot to pump that much blood around).

Honestly my biggest empty calories are sodas, which is usually one a day. They're 27-40g sugar, which is roughly 100-200 calories. I'd cut them out, but there's simply no way to do 12 hour days consistently without caffeine. Caffeine from tea has no noticeable effect on my alertness, and I can't stomach black coffee. Sweetened coffee has more sugar than soda, so that's not really useful either. And finally, "Diet" soda has all sorts of issue - #1 is that it is nigh-undrinkable, I hate the taste of artificial sweeteners and #2 I'm not certain that sucralose, etc., metabolize in a healthy way and I'm not keen on drinking them at all even if I could stomach the taste.

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im2smrt4u

It can be tough, but dropping or at least cutting back on high calorie drinks can make a world of difference. I have lost 15 lbs recently simply by dropping soda and making a big reduction in my beer consumption. Of course, there is some exercise in there, but cutting the empty calories is huge.

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Baraka_Guru

A teaspoon of sugar is about 12 to 15 calories. If you use one or two teaspoons in your coffee, that would be less than a soda, especially the ones with 40g of sugar. (The sodas on the upper end would have as much as 12 tsp of sugar in them, and on the lower end, you're probably looking at a minimum of 6 tsp. Put that in yer pipe and smoke it.)

Also consider this: Coffee calories: Sabotaging your weight-loss plans? - MayoClinic.com

Try coffee with a teaspoon of sugar and a tablespoon of low-fat milk. You should still be under 30 calories. That's at least a net loss of 70 to 170 calories per day.

So, yeah, you could put as many as 4 tsp of sugar in your coffee (gross) and still come out on top.

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Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
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Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
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Jinn

Not to be stubborn, but I have a hard time drinking coffee with three sugars packets and two creamers. I'm not sure I could come short of spewing black coffee all over the break room with only 2 tsp of sugar. And as a corollary, I don't like how much caffeine coffee has. Pop varies, but generally has 40-60 mg of caffeine. Coffee is as much as triple that, and interferes with my sleep and mood..

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hunnychile

My SO dropped several pounds when he quit drinking Diet Coke and any other type of soda pop. Me, too.
The only time I have a Cole or Pepsi is when I've got a big late afternoon meeting or perhaps a hangover (which isn't very often these days). My dentist told me my teeth have improved in strength & whiteness 80% since I've quit the colas. The SO gave up potatoe chips too and he looks much trimmer than he did a year ago.

Both of us walk a few miles every week. When I walk every day, I can dump 5-10 pounds easily.

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Baraka_Guru

Drink water. Drink carbonated mineral water with lemon in it. Use it to cut your soda in 1/2. Something.

In terms of caloric surplus/deficit, you do realize that not drinking that soda will have a similar impact as walking 2 miles, right?

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Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

Lindy

plus one to Lasereth...

noodle started a thread on losing weight by walking back in May: http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/general...do-you-do.html

The actual math for walking is not very encouraging:


jinn, at 230 pounds, your distances ought to be a little less than half of mine at 110 pounds. You would burn about 130 calories in walking a mile. You would have to walk about 27 miles to lose 1 pound, so probably a little over 1200 miles should lose you 45 pounds and get you down to 185. Think Toledo to Denver.

Lindy

Charlatan

It's all about caloric intake. Cutting the crap food combined with the walking and you will lose weight.

But mostly cut the crap food.

When I start putting on weight, I just eat less. I choose better quality and skimp on the quantity. With very little exercise, I drop weight.

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Baraka_Guru

Okay, so let's recap.

You want to lose up to 50 lbs. You are essentially hoping for a transformation. I call it that because that's what it is. I don't know of anyone who easily lost 50 lbs. I do know people who have lost that much, and they all seem to have the same thing in common: they completely changed their lifestyle when it came to food and exercise.

It's going to take hard work, and walking alone won't cut it. You aren't the weight you are merely because you don't walk enough. There are other reasons too, and they're connected to your diet and the lack of other kinds of exercise.

If you cut the crap out of your diet and follow the government nutrition guide, that's going to be an immediate boon.

If you begin a regimen of exercise that includes 30 minutes to an hour of resistance training three days a week, in addition to three 30-minute cardio sessions (at 75% intensity or higher) a week, that is the least you should be doing if you want to seriously burn off the weight.

Doing more puts you at the risk of overtraining. I see you work long hours, this is also a factor. Stress can lead to weight gain. Exercise is the cure for that.

Balance your life, and your body will balance itself.

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Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

Jinn

No, no, no. I've simply asked if walking alone will likely cause a drop of weight. I don't need your sanctimonious crap, Baraka. I'm very well aware of how to lose 50 lbs. Like I said before, I was doing alternating cardio and weight training five days a week before. Doesn't work with my current schedule.

I'm not actively looking to lose 50 lbs, my current weight is not even unhealthy for my height. It's purely aesthetic, so I'm not inclined to go on any sorts of 'transformations' - especially when keeping gainful employment is more important to me, and one of the two would have to erode the other. And I'm not dropping soda simply because I can't keep said employment without it - 12+ hour days is impossible without caffeine and I've yet to find any moderate levels (50g) that didn't taste like piss in exchange for being lower calories.

If Lindy's math is even remotely correct for my height/weight - "You would have to walk about 27 miles to lose 1 pound" - I'm walking 2 miles a day, so I'll lose a pound every two weeks, or two pounds a month. Good enough for me; I'm not exactly morbidly obese.

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Lasereth

You won't lose any weight walking. If you do lose weight it's due to something else like a subconscious diet change. If you splurge one day and drink a coke when you usually don't then you just erased 3 entire days of your walk. And that's just a coke. Go out to eat once more than normal and you just wasted a week (or more) worth of walking. Walking doesn't do shit for weight loss. It's a health habit to have but people who lose weight by walking forget that they also changed their eating habits a bit and actually changed much more than just the walking. If you're walking to lose weight then you're probably doing other small stuff to lose weight as well which causes the weight loss.

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Baraka_Guru

Bear in mind that you will likely notice diminishing returns as your body adapts to the same walking routine. The weight loss won't be linear. You might shed 5 or 10 pounds (over God knows what time frame) and then notice the 2 miles of walking isn't doing much else. The body only adapts when it's faced with a challenge. Once you get good at that 2 miles, it won't need to adapt much further.

And for the record, everyone needs my sanctimonious crap, so you're going to get it anyway. I have to keep my fragile ego intact somehow.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

Jove

No. Unless of course you follow everyone's advice here on how to lose weight, otherwise you most likely will stay the same weight.

Lindy

The diminishing returns would indeed apply, but not because of the body adapting to a challenge. This is not like strength training, where you need to continually increase the load if you want to keep increasing your strength. This is a simple work-energy equation. How much energy output (calories) does it take to move 230 pounds of jinn 2 miles? If there is no change in energy input (food) then this will eventually change to: How much energy does it take to move 220 pounds of jinn 2 miles? Then 210 pounds. And so on. The answer will be, of course, a bit less energy than before, slowly decreasing the rate of loss.

In an effort to keep the contents of my previous post parsimonious in its content, I didn't mention anything about the diminishing rate of diminishment. Instead I applied the famous formula fudge factor, and just "bumped" the numbers a little bit.

Lindy

MSD

Unless someone at work is a coffee enthusiast, what you're drinking is most likely shitty coffee (myth #1: coffee is supposed to be bitter.) Everything I've seen points to sucralose being safe and healthy as a sugar substitute (and really, substituting just about anything short of cyanide for most of the sugar in our diets is healthier than the sugar is) and stevia is safe, healthy, and tastes a hell of a lot better. Grab a bottle of liquid stevia and put a few drops in coffee, see how it tastes. If you need the caffeine to get through 12 hour days you probably already have a tolerance built.
I suspect it was the "other type" that led to the weight loss, not cutting out diet soda.

yournamehere

I start out gym visits with a 15-minute mile to get my heart rate up. Lindy, I'd say 4 MPH is a little more than a "brisk" pace. Any faster and I'd have to jog - and I've got a bad knee, so I don't.
Anyway, the treadmill always says I burned about 100 calories. Maybe it's calibrated correctly; maybe not. But calories measure work - which is what it takes to get your body from Point A to Point B. It doesn't matter how long it takes you to get the job done; so walk, jog, or sprint - it all burns the same amount of calories. Running fast just means you're burning calories at a faster rate over less time. Walking burns less calories; but for a longer period. It still takes about 100 calories to move your body a mile.

But using that math, walking 2 miles per day would burn 1000 calories per work week. That would let you drop 15 pounds in a year; all else staying the same.

But I agree with everyone saying that consuming less calories would give quicker results. It's a lot easier to not have a Coke (or a beer, or a handful of M&Ms) than it is to walk 2 miles.

As The Jazz said earlier, walking 2 miles every day will definitely improve your life in some way; compared to not doing it.

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MSD

The number of calories burned depends on the amount of work done (which takes your weight into account,) and that includes efficiency with which the body does work (and this differs from person to person, just like two people who weigh the same, have the same level of activity, and are the same height and body type taking in the same number of calories will not necessarily experience the same weight loss or gain.)

If nothing else, walking two miles is more exercise and you will feel better overall from adding exercise to your daily routine.

hunnychile

Hey Jinn - How's it ging for you? Notice any differences?

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G5_Todd

Dude I really think you just need to work on replacing the fat with muscle....I am 6'3" 190pounds...prior to joining the army I was 215 pounds...My goal is to be 220 pounds...But a person that is 6'6" 230 pounds is not alot at all...

I was obviously looked bigger when I was 215, I was about the same strength as I am now but I was toned...at 190 I am lean you can see my veins and abs...But I want to gain weight again and then try to cut to get lean and keep most of the muscle...

As earlier said its all about burning more calories then you consume...but the best way to get rid of man boobs is the lift weights and tone....from what I understand is when you lift you body continues to burn calories all day...cardio mostly burns them while you are doing it....

If you decide to get serious I wouldnt at all mind chatting with you to give you some ideas or tips...

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Jinn

Sorry, I just saw this. I was 233.6 when I wrote the OP and I'm now at 224.1 so I'm down 9 lbs. I had food poisoning for 3 days from some bad Pho but other than that I didn't really change anything except for the walking to/from work.

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Plan9

Wow, you guys are ridiculous. 6' and 200 lbs. isn't much?

God, I'd hate to think about how everybody sees me.

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It couldn't hurt.

Plan9

I'd imagine most people walk two miles a day just doing chores in their house on a lazy Saturday.

You'd be better off lifting weights with the 20-something minutes it takes to walk your two miles.

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