> Well, why not ride a bicycle, and let both your mind AND your body benefit?
I can walk in the city and be relaxed; cycling in the city stresses me (I live in London). There are large parks nearby where I can walk without traffic and where I at least in the mornings could easily go 20-30 minutes without seeing either a person or a car, but where cycling isn't an option. If I could cycle along somewhere with no traffic I might very well feel differently, but walking and cycling are very different activities, and I suspect a lot of the differences in opinion have to do with whether or not cycling is viable as a relaxing activity near where people live.
> I've tried this. I walked 1.5 hours a day, 5 times a week for about a year. Didn't lose a gram of body weight, while having a normal diet with limited refined sugars (I don't like sweet tastes). Switched to cycling (30 minutes a day), and feel much more in control now.
If you walked 1.5 hours a day without losing a gram of body weight, you compensated by eating more or moving less the rest of the day. If cycling works better for you with the purpose of losing weight, then great. But that certainly does not mean walking did nothing to your body.
In any case, if your purpose was exercise, it's trivial to make walking hard: Walk with a weight vest (5kg-10kg will do wonders), or walk faster, or both.
