What can a relaxed 2 hour walk do for you?

I have mentioned in the past that I have a close friend who is severely overweight and had bypass surgery to deal with it. Me and my group of friends who are athletically inclined are banding together to help him to change his life.

I tell him that anytime he wants to go for a walk that we can do it and we can just talk and take it easy... no need to push it but I keep telling him that the surgery is not enough, he needs to actually become healthier as well. Well yesterday we set out for a walk because the weather was ideal and I just left it up to him when we were going to stop.

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There is a lot of bad things about where I live but one of the good things that the city of Chicago does is that they do have a ton of walking and cycling trails that are kind of like being in nature. This is a great escape from the otherwise far-too-populated city and since I don't have a 9-5 job (and neither does my obese friend) we can go there in the afternoon when nobody else is around.

We were walking very slow and I let him set the pace.

My heart rate probably seems a bit high there but that is because I was mucking about a lot and doing little kick steps and what not. I am careful to not make my friend feel jealous because he is not physically capable of doing these things. He was comfortable and that was entirely the idea.

I was so proud of him that when we did a loop one time I figured he would want to stop but it was actually his idea that we do the loop again. This guy is one of those people that I can talk to for hours because we have very similar interests as far as our free time is concerned such as films, books, and websites that we enjoy, so we never run out of conversation, which is great!

We were walking very very slow. 13:40 per km is extremely slow for me but like I said, he was setting the pace because I don't want him to feel as though he is dragging me down. I normally would run this in half that time but I don't point out these things while we are doing it.

So you can see there that I burned around 700 calories just by doing a little bit more than nothing at all. I can only assume that my friend burned twice that much because he is more than twice my size. This is very good for him because he needs to keep a caloric deficit in order to lose weight and I am all but certain that he accomplished that yesterday.

Now keep in mind that for a reasonably fit person like myself, about 200 of the calories that I burned are called "resting calories" and that simply means the amount of calories that your body would burn simply by being alive. Most adult men will burn about 1800 calories just by not being dead. The computation of exactly what you burn is quite complicated, but because I was moving at all, the caloric burn goes up a bit.

This is a long walk for me even though I do some amount of exercise every single day. If you have 2 hours to walk you are probably lucky because not many people do. What I am trying to show here is that even the most trivial sort of thing burns calories and can contribute to you being fit or at least, in reasonably good health. It can contribute you to being "normal." These days, with so many health problems and the garbage food that most people eat, I think that just by doing this and trying hard to not eat trash, you are probably going to have a pretty healthy life.