Walking for Weight Loss: What Will You Gain?

Health trackers can be found everywhere, and, it seems, on everyone. These devices have put walking at the center of a healthy lifestyle. While using a new device with bright graphs will provide a nice motivation kickoff, the task of sustained motivation still remains. 

The Psychological Difference with Step-Tracking

Taking a stroll, walking the dog, and hiking the trails all sound like positive experiences that connect us to nature. The purpose of taking a stroll, is to take a stroll. There is no requirement or commitment associated with a decision to hike the trails or explore the neighborhood with your canine companion. You do it because doing it is enjoyable. It is just a part of how you create value in your daily life.

Step-tracking is a little different. It introduces an expectation—a commitment to achieving a number each day. When engaged with a step-tracking device, taking a stroll has new meaning. It is no longer just for pleasure, but has a target number associated with it. In the beginning, this is exciting. It makes change and a healthy lifestyle feel more attainable. The numbers are reassuring—I know I had a healthy day because my tracking device is showing green. 

So which is it?

In exchange for this reassurance we get with using numbers to measure how healthy our day was, there is a shift in how walking feels. It is no longer purely for pleasure, or how it makes your body feel, but is also evaluated for its length and intensity using numbers and graphs. This is not necessarily a problem, but could become one. Below are some questions to consider:

• Can I do without it? How would I feel if I left the house for a nature hike and forgot to charge my tracking device? To what degree would it de-value the experience?
• How does not achieving my daily steps goal feel? Does it affect my mood or outlook on progress in other areas of my health journey?
• How important are streaks to me? Do I feel anxious when a streak might be broken? (In other words, have they made walking a compulsion?)
• Have I said no to physical activity I wanted to do because it would not be recorded on my step tracker, such as yoga or swimming? Have I felt angry when I was blocked from walking—such as by rainy weather or holiday gym hours?

Sustaining Motivation for Exercise: The Key Ingredient

The key to motivation for exercise is called natural reinforcement. These are rewards that are provided naturally, without a person or device delivering them to us. If you take your steps tracker on a hike, the graphs and colors displayed by the steps tracker are not considered natural reinforcers. Anything relating to the experience of hiking does qualify as natural reinforcement. This might include the way you feel from all the fresh air, the way your body feels from the hike (when the walker feel gratitude for sore legs they are a reward), the social experiences of any hiking partners or strangers met along the way, and—possibly most important with regard to hiking—the connection to nature that is achieved from the hiking experience.

You do not need to plan a hike to access natural reinforcers. When you know how to recognize them, natural reinforcers are accessible in everyday life. With regard to walking for weight loss, these reinforcers might include how your body feels, how the additional exercise affects your sleep, and how your mood is affected by the additional activity and time spent outdoors.

Walking for Weight Loss

The Big Lesson: Changes to daily life.

Walking for weight loss comes down to walking as a a normal part of your day. When experiencing pleasure from physical activity becomes a regular part of daily life, the weight loss will be long-term because it will be the result of a new lifestyle. Rather than making weight loss the goal, it is the result of a process that places the patterns of daily life and sources for pleasure first (more on habits).

Bringing it all together, walking for weight loss means walking for gratitude. If you can experience pleasure from having walked, especially if you can access this pleasure without the graphics and numbers output by a health device, then your walking will be sustained with time.

For more on sustained change for weight loss, check out the No Weigh app.

Are you ready for something different?