If nothing, the pandemic taught us the value of natural air and exercising over the past couple of years. Whether to escape work from home or vent out or catch a break, taking a walk is an excellent way to get your mind off stress and get some exercise. 

Walking is easy. It does not require any special skills, complex techniques, or equipment. It is an indispensable survival skill embedded in every human being. Unfortunately, work from home has glued most of us to our chairs and beds, and we no longer remember the importance of walking. 

On this National Walking Day, take a few steps to get outside to become a healthier version of yourself. Walking for only thirty minutes to an hour each day can improve your health and help fight against diabetes and heart conditions. You can walk anywhere, any time of the day, and be in charge of your pace and time, without spending any money. 

Besides helping with these conditions, walking also has other benefits like 

• The first and most known of these ways is that walking creates more energy (calorie) expenditure. Moderate walking can burn up to 7 calories per minute, depending on the individual's weight. Although these numbers may not appear to be high yet can accumulate over an extended period and result in weight loss. It can also be an excellent weight maintenance strategy for a person who has previously lost weight and become more conditioned.
• Improving blood circulation by increasing blood flow in the body.
• Boosting immunity.
• Assisting in getting better sleep. 
• Walking can increase lubrication between the joints if your joints are aching, resulting in less stress on joints. 
• It helps increase resting metabolic rate by increasing lean body mass. 
• Furthermore, the best advantage of walking is that it helps in weight loss.
• Unlike other forms of activity, walking doesn't seem to increase appetite. This implies that higher-intensity exercise can achieve a caloric deficit without increasing hunger signals. Therefore, walking can be an excellent way for yielding more weight loss for a person sticking to a calorie-restricted nutrition plan.

Even though eating a better diet and moving your body are crucial habits for helping immune function, and that may be precisely what some people need to do to correct their weight. But for others, some factors go unaddressed and leave your efforts futile and frustrating. Unfortunately, for people with obesity and other critical health challenges, walking alone may not be able to help with weight loss. But supplementing your walk with a holistic and natural approach to weight loss like functional medicine can help. 

Functional approach to weight loss identifies root causes that usually go unnoticed, like toxins, an imbalanced microbiome, suboptimal thyroid nutrient deficiencies, food sensitivities, and intolerances. Problems that the use of functional medicine can solve.

Functional medicine realizes that weight gain and obesity have deep-rooted causes that cannot simply be solved by limiting calories and exercising more. Weight gain and obesity can be symptoms of immune dysfunction. So in order to get results in losing weight and keeping it off, we must consider what triggers the immune system and causes weight gain to go unchecked. Functional medicine addresses all factors of your well-being and takes this same path with medical weight loss.

On this National Walking Day, take back control of your weight loss journey by having a different approach towards it with functional medicine.