Even if you're not on a New Year's diet (Atkins, South Beach, or "nothing but wild salmon and organic beef because I'm terrified by recent news about other kinds of food"), you can still lose weight. How? Take a walk.
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This isn't the first time you've heard that advice. But it may be the first time you've heard that a half-hour stroll each day can keep your weight down despite what you may shove in your mouth. Well, that's a bit of an exaggeration: Researchers from Duke University didn't ask a bunch of normal eaters to start wolfing down whole pizzas. They did ask people, over the course of eight months, not to change what they ate. These were 120 middle-aged men and women. All of them were overweight to begin with. Some spent the eight months doing a lot of high-intensity exercise, equal to jogging–fast enough to breathe hard–about 20 miles per week. Some took a medium course: They jogged as hard but for shorter distances. Some took things quite a bit easier, at a pace equal to walking 12 miles per week. And some didn't exercise at all.
No real surprises overall, says the report in this week's Archives of Internal Medicine. The harder people worked out, the more pounds they lost and the more inches dropped away from their waists. The group that didn't exercise got heavier.
But the "easy" walkers, who strolled just under 2 miles per day–it took them about half an hour–actually got their weight down. They lost about 1 percent of their body weight over the eight months. And it took smaller tape measures to go around their thighs and waists. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been preaching the 30-minutes-per-day gospel for several years. Other groups, however, such as the Institute of Medicine, have recommended 60 minutes. Here the message comes down on the side of the minimal: Doing without and dieting aren't essential to weight control. It isn't as easy as a walk in the park–actually, it could be that easy, as long as it is a half-hour walk.
