Walking for an extra 20 minutes every day can make you lose 10 extra pounds (4.5 kg) a year. Besides burning fat and toning your muscles, walking also strengthens your heart, improves cognitive function and greatly decreases the risk of diabetes, breast cancer and colon cancer.
More facts about walking:
- Children who walked to school instead of commuted were found to be much more active and healthy than their peers.
- Running a certain distance burns the same number of calories as walking the same distance burns — the main difference is how long you take to finish the distance.
- The number of Americans who walk to work has been reduced by about half since the 1990s. Even then it wasn't so high — in the early 1990s, about 4 percent of Americans walked to work, but by the mid-2000s, that had dropped to about 2 percent.