Dear Kayla,
Do I have to walk 6 miles a day? Can I just walk 2 miles every day and stick to OMAD for weight loss? I have done it last year and I saw slow weight loss but I was wondering what would you say.
Signed,
Jojo
Dear Jojo,
Back in 2015 I was struggling to lose weight. I was going to the gym every day, doing HIIT and I was lifting heavy. I was also all over the place with my eating: sometimes I was doing intermittent fasting, other times I quit intermittent fasting completely, and on other days I was simply inconsistent with any kind of a plan. Then on June 13, 2015, I did a deadlift with poor form and I injured my back. My 7-day average weight at the time was 203.46.
I was in a lot of pain. I couldn’t deadlift. I couldn’t squat. I couldn’t run or even jog. The only thing that I could do that didn’t hurt was to walk. At the time, I thought there was no way that walking would be enough. But as the weeks passed and I saw that it was going to take a long time for the injury to heal, I realized it was my only option. So I picked 6 miles, since I had read an article at some point where a celebrity trainer said that she made it a rule for all of her clients to move 3 miles a day. I doubled it since I was obese and wanting to lose a lot of weight, and then I stuck to that goal.
But I wasn’t losing weight. In fact, I was gaining. My 7 day average climbed up to 206.2 by the end of that year. I was incredibly frustrated. I was being consistently active, and yet the scale was going up instead of down. I was dangerously close to throwing in the towel. Fortunately, I had been taking notes on my weight loss journey in my spreadsheet and tracking my weight. So I sat myself down and looked at the data. I could see a pattern: when I was sticking with intermittent fasting, I was losing about a pound a week. Whenever I was “in between plans” or had quit intermittent fasting, I was gaining or plateauing. And that’s when I finally understood a phrase I had heard many times before: you can’t outrun your fork.
Exercise provides tons of wonderful benefits: better energy, fewer aches and pains, better mental health (less anxiety, more positive emotions), and it gives you something to do other than stress eat. But most people (myself included, back in 2015) tend to focus on the idea of calorie burn. The problem with this approach is that we tend to overestimate what we’ve burned. Let’s take the 6-mile vs 2-mile walking habit, for example.
If you walk 6 miles a day, and you walk 3 miles per hour, you’re walking for 2 hours a day. At the end of that 2 hours, you’ve burned about 415 calories total.
On the other hand, if you walk 2 miles a day, you’re walking for 40 minutes. But you still burn a certain amount of calories just by virtue of existing. Your body is always burning calories, whether you’re laying on the couch watching tv, standing in line at the grocery store, or chasing your toddler who’s trying to make off with a bag of cookies. Let’s say after you go for your 40-minute walk, you come inside and read a book for 1 hour and 20 minutes. All told, you will have burned approximately 212 calories at the end of those 2 hours.
If you walk 6 miles, then you have burned 203 more calories than if you had just walked two miles. Which is great. Except that when you walk more, your appetite is also going to increase a little bit too. And because we’re human, after we’ve walked 6 miles, it’s easy to think we’re justified in eating a little bit more. And 203 calories easy to eat without even realizing it. For example:
- A small order of fries from McDonald’s is 230 calories
- 2 Buffalo chicken wings is about 200 calories
- ¼ cup of ranch dressing is about 200 calories
At the end of the day, the thing that really moves the needle on the weight loss journey is getting yourself to consistently eat in a deficit. OMAD is what helped me do that. If walking 6 miles fits in your life, and you can get yourself to do it consistently, I say go for it! It’s wonderful! But if 2 miles is what you can commit to, you can still absolutely get yourself in a deficit and lose the weight. You’ll just need to eat a little bit less than if you had walked 6 miles.
I hope that helps!
Sincerely,
Kayla