• Walking is popular. Call it peer pressure. Walking is the most popular aerobic activity among women who exercise, according to surveys.
• Walking sticks. Studies show that four out of five women who walk for exercise keep walking. In contrast, half of the women who try other types of exercise, like swimming, stair climbing, or running, call it quits during the first few months.
• Walking is gentle. Many overweight women simply cannot do activities such as jogging or aerobic dance because their joints cannot handle the pounding. But most overweight women can walk. While the number of calories you burn depends on your weight, muscle mass, and metabolism.
• Walking is an easy fit. Walking is one of the easiest activities to fit into a busy day. When you split it up into short increments, walking can be squeezed into your day before breakfast or during lunch and coffee breaks at work. You don’t have to take time to change clothes or to shower. And you can do it anytime, anywhere. It’s easy as circling your backyard or your living room.
• Walking is a bargain. The only thing you need to buy is a good pair of shoes.

True, we’ve got a lot of uncomplementary things to say about fat. But not all fat should be vilified. On the contrary, there’s some you absolutely need for good body function.

Polyunsaturated fats, which are the kinds found in grains, seeds, nuts, soy foods (such as tofu) and some vegetables, are essential to the body function, because without them the body can’t utilize fat properly. This group of fats provides essential fatty acids called alphe-linoleic acid and linoleic acid.

Linoleic acid is readily converted in the body to arachidonic acid, which is important to the makeup of cell membranes. So you need polyunsaturated fats both to help you store fat – which you have to do to survive – and to help build cell membranes.

But although this fat is necessary, it’s unlikely you’ll ever need to worry about getting enough of it. These days, with such as a wide variety of whole foods available, you get all the linoleic acid you need-whether you’re on a low fat, high fat or ignore-the-fat diet. It’s simply not something you have to worry about, since we rarely need to obtain it from extra vegetable oil in our diets.

The best known benefit of a low-fat diet is its effect on your heart and blood vessels. Heart disease is the leading cause of death among American men and women. How many times have you heard that someone had a “sudden heart attack”?

The irony, of course, is that most heart attacks are the result of gradual changes in the circulatory system that develop over many years. These changes include atherosclerosis, a gradual hardening and thickening of the blood vessels due to an accumulation of plaque, a fatty waxy substance that builds up over the years of sedentary living and poor eating. Plaque restricts the flow of blood through your arteries. At the same time, people with heart disease are more prone to forming blood clots, and in the artery that’s already narrowed by plaque, one of these clots can be enough to stop blood flow entirely. The result is myocardial infarction-what we call a heart attack.

Doctors have long known that a diet high in saturated fat is the primary cause of atherosclerosis and that cutting the fat from your diet can slow the process or even reverse it.