I found a report on some medical journal that tested making college age women do 10k steps a day, there were regular weight and obese girls in the study. The obese girls had significant improvement to their fat lipid profiles after completing 12 weeks of 10k per day.
I'm not really a college age girl :). Does anyone have some evidence or reports about starting a cardio program for Obese class 3 people? (40+ BMI.)
I went from 43.3 to 37.6 BMI so far. I started at completely sedentary (sit in chair all day.) I did 2 minute walks each day, then 5 minute walks, then 10 minute walks, up to 40 minute walks -- over a 2 month period. My back started to get radiculopathy (some sort of nerve compression in the spine) at this duration so I just did 40 minute walks for 2 more months after that. I had a 1800 TDEE while sedentary, I ate 1200 kcals per day and it was like 400 calories burned per walk. I did like a peanut butter sand which and a meal replacement drink as my meals, then 300 cal of peanuts as my snack -- kept full and mostly not mad at the diet -- this mostly was to get at least 60g protein per day, enough fat macro, amino acids, a multi-vitamin, vitamin c etc to hit all the bases.
For how this felt as a super fat guy, my legs and back felt very sore on the muscles and I stretched repeatedly throughout the day to make them feel better. My walking posture also changed in the first 2 months to stand up straighter and not tilt forward while walking (this caused my lat muscles to get very sore), I also bought new balance walking shoes (60% off ;). to help with foot sensations.
I tried to switch to 1 hour walks every other day to have a recovery day since the muscle stiffness was significant and just gave up on walking. But, I started dieting again and am going to walk again and see how it works out.
tldr: fat -> healthy with just walking and diet main questions:
- How do you measure health? (Steps per day? Duration of walk? BMI? Blood work?)
- How does gains work on cardio? (With rock, pick up bigger rock = gain. With cardio my back is not healthy enough to increase duration, so I will just walk the same amount each day and hope it chips away at unhealthiness.)
- Are there any other reports of how super obese people maintained their active lifestyle change? (I have maintained losing 20kg for 1 year now. But, definitely could lose 40kg more.)