Go Take A Walk

I once asked a lean, mountain goat of a cyclist if there was a secret to staying in shape during the off-season. He crossed his skinny arms and told me the answer was to exercise moderately during the day and make sure you went to bed feeling hungry. I thought that was just great news. Personally, I’d prefer to stick toothpicks into my eyeballs than try to sleep counting sheep that I would actually rather be eating. So, going to bed hungry is not the answer. The answer is to wake up feeling hungry. There is a significant difference.

I remember that as a teenager, whilst growing up, I watched my dad eat mountains of rice for lunch. He would easily consume more than the rest of us put together. At the same time, my mum would eat a piece of toast with some broccoli and a bit of spinach, then wash it down with a weak mixture of some sort of diet milkshake. I thought it was odd that she ate less than our pet hamster and yet struggled to become lean, whilst papa bear over there ate enough to feed the five thousand and still looked pretty good.

Being bipedal, my dad, like most of us, walked on two legs. If he were still alive, he’d still be doing what the rest of us humans were meant to be doing in terms of locomotion. He walked a lot. A foot note (sorry about the pun) – he did a lot of walking until he retired and discovered bicycles, it all changed then and he didn’t walk enough, preferring instead to cycle, but that’s another story. Anyway, where was I? Walking. OK, so he walked a lot ... This did a few things. It saved on bus fares, wore out his shoes and increased his basic metabolic rate.

Your basic metabolic rate has nothing to do with tax cuts or bank bail-outs. Your basic metabolic rate (BMR) is the amount of energy your body requires for doing nothing. It is the amount of energy you need to breathe, stay awake and watch daytime television. Exercise has a knack of raising this basic metabolic rate. This is good.

If you exercise, and yes, walking is certainly a form of exercise, you require energy to do so. You are also likely to raise your BMR. At tick-over my dad’s BMR was higher than my mother’s, whose BMR was closer to that of algae. To make matters worse, she had been consuming so few calories for months on end that her body was geared up for a low calorie diet. It had, in fact, become very efficient at holding onto and storing any fat that came along.

When my mum could not resist a bit of trifle, or the odd chocolate bar, her calorie-deprived body would think: “Oh wonderful, I’m hanging on to that, tomorrow we’ll be back to dry toast and rabbit food.” At the same time, it turned down her metabolic tick-over to the lowest possible setting in an effort to conserve energy. Where dad’s metaphorical metabolic fire was stoked and roaring away, mum’s was on super-economy mode. This, of course, is bad news for weight loss.
My advice to all of you out there who are considering cutting down on heaps and heaps of calories in an effort to lose weight – don’t be over-zealous. Try first to increase your daily amount of light exercise. Take the dog for a walk or, better yet, encourage someone else to come with you. Take the kids along, walk to the post office instead of driving. Think about ways you can all walk instead of driving and you’ll be amazed at just how many short car journeys you will cut out.

This bit is important. Walking. Most people walk far too slowly to receive any benefit at all. You need to walk quickly. Here’s a tip. Try this. Go outside and walk and while walking, count your footsteps per minute. Try increasing the pace to the point where it feels uncomfortable. Where it begins to feel odd, ridiculous even. Just before that point is your ultimate cruising pace. Cross that line and you’ll feel like you need to jog. Scale back the speed 10 or 15 steps per minute. That is the pace you need to maintain on a fitness walk. Got it? If you’re still not sure, It’s the speed that you would walk at if you were really late for a movie. You’re not about to run, but you can’t saunter. If you saw someone else walking this fast, you’d notice it as they came past. Not all jiggle-hipped or anything, just a “hmm, that person is in a big hurry” kind of way.

Enough talking about walking – just get out there and do it! And go easy on the pecan pie. Let me know how you get on. And if anyone finds a nice recipe that involves broccoli, spinach and toast, don’t send it to me – my mum has tried it!

Ted