Losing Weight Without Exercise

Losing Weight Without Exercise

You may have heard that in order to lose weight, you need to exercise. This is not true. It is not absolutely necessary to exercise in order to lose weight. However, what most people find is that if they do exercise, losing weight is a lot easier. Here is why:

If you want to lose weight, you need to create a calorie deficit. You can create a calorie deficit whether you exercise or not. What you may not be aware of is that one pound of body weight equates to about 3,500 calories, so, if your goal is to lose one pound of body weight each week, you will need to create a calorie deficit of 500 calories a day or 3,500 calories a week.

There are two ways to create a calories deficit:

1. You can create a calorie deficit be eating less calories than your body burns.

2. You can create a calorie deficit by using exercise to burn the excess calories.

If you want to lose weight, it is much easier to use a combination of the two methods. The reason for this is because you have to severely cut back on calories if you want to lose weight without exercise. Often, when people do this, they find that they are hungry all of the time, but when you throw exercise into the equation, you can eat a lot more because you burn excess calories through exercise.

Let's say, for example, that your daily caloric requirement is 2500 calories a day. If you wanted to lose an average of one pound a week, you would need to eat 2,000 calories each day. This would help you create a calorie deficit of 500 calories a day. The main problem with this strategy is that you are going to be very hungry as you create a calorie deficit by not eating as many calories as you are accustomed to eating. Many people who rely on this weight loss strategy usually gain the weight back.

Instead of using this, strategy, what you could do is eat 2300 calories a day, which puts you in a calorie deficit of 200 calories, and exercise to burn off the additional 300 calories.

This is just one example - you could just eat 2500 calories and burn the additional 500 calories off with exercise, or do a number of different calorie and exercise combinations - the point is that its a lot easier to eat lots and burn the calories via exercise, rather than to eat a little and not exercise at all. I mean, which is easier to do: to eat more or to eat less?

When people start to starve themselves of calories, eventually, most people are going to crack, and start eating larger meals which exceed their daily caloric requirements, and they are going to gradually gain weight, and many of these people are going to end up heavier than they were when they started out. Dieting and will power only take you so far.

In my case, when I started to lose weight, I did a lot of biking when the weather got nice. I usually biked for about an hour and a half, and in that time, I could burn roughly 900 calories. I also work out with weights for about 20 to 30 minutes, and in those workouts I can burn easily an additional 200 to 300 calories. I go swing dancing on Friday nights and over a 3 hour period of dancing, I can burn an additional 500 calories or so. In short, because I exercise, I'm able to get away with eating more calories than I would if all I did was cut my calories.

As you can see, losing weight without exercise is possible. However, if you create a calorie deficit AND exercise, you are going to lose weight a lot faster, it will be much easier to lose the weight, and you are much less likely to put the weight back on.