A friend of mine needs to lose at least 15 kilos. I have known her for about three years and during these years she has been struggling with her weight and is always saying she is on a diet.

She always says: "But I don´t eat anything".
And I say: "But you have to eat or you will not lose weight".
I know that she eats and she eats quite a lot. Of the wrong stuff.

I have tried to explain to her that if you stop eating your body will go into what I call "salvation mode", it will prepare itself for hunger and try to keep all the fat you have. Because if times get rough your body has to protect itself. And of course you will not lose any weight. I'm not sure but I think this is something that goes way back to when we lived in caves and times were rough and we didn't always have food. To make sure we survived our body stored all the fat it could.

Another thing my friend does is that she says she walks everyday for one hour. The other day she came to my house and we went to pick up my son about two kilometers from my house. We didn´t walk slow and we didn´t walk fast but I could tell she had problems keeping up.

We talked about walking and I told her that only walking might not help her. Of course walking in itself is an excellent way of exercising but it also depends on how much you push your body.
If I walk for one hour in my normal pace (read strolling) that will of course count as an hour of exercise but I will not have burned all the calories I could have, had I walked a bit faster. Our body gets used to our pace, so for us to burn more we need to push our body a bit more. No one is saying we should push ourselves too hard, just a little so we speed up and get a bit sweaty.

My friend didn´t know about this, incredible as it might seem. But she thought only walking for an hour in her normal pace would help her enough to lose the weight. And I thought about it and realized that probably many other daily walkers are not aware of this. Many of us think that only slow (read strolling) walking is enough. Of course slow walking is better than no walking at all!

My friend told me she will try to speed up her walking a bit and make sure she gets sweaty. I hope she does it, walking is a great way to get into shape.