How to Lose Weight When You Hate Exercise
According to the CDC, over 42% of adults in the US are obese and an even greater percentage are considered overweight [1]. This would imply that the majority of people’s first goal in fitness likely would be fat loss before anything else. Some people genuinely enjoy exercising and working out and look forward to it each day. Others despite it and see it as a total chore. If you are someone who falls into this category, then this article is for you. If you truly enjoy exercising and are working towards dropping some pounds, these tips will still likely be helpful to you.
Nutrition
The reason this is possible is because exercise is not absolutely necessary in order to lose weight. In order to understand why this is, we need to understand what causes weight loss and what the purpose of body fat is. Every day our body needs a certain amount of energy in order to continue to function. This energy is measured in calories, just as distance might be measured in miles. Most of the energy we need comes from the food we eat day to day. However, if there was a day where you ate less calories than your body needs to function, then it would be forced to tap into your body fat to supply those needed calories. Conversely, if there was a day where you eat more calories in a day than your body needs, then it will store those extra calories for use later when you do not have access to food.
Now, we know that we need to take in less energy than we burn in a day in order to burn fat. I want to point out that this does not mean you have to track all your food and calories obsessively, it is just important to understand the mechanism that promotes weight loss. There are some helpful strategies you can implement into your day-to-day life to help you reach this deficit of calories effortlessly. The why behind these reasons are broken down into more detail here, but some helpful tips are the following:
1. Eat as much lean protein as you can
2. Eat plenty of fiber in the day
3. Eat lots of fruits and vegetables
4. Limit how much oil you use in your cooking
5. Avoid liquid calories
6. Eat your first meal as late in the day as you can
7. Chew your food as thoroughly as possible and don’t rush through your meals
These tips will likely give you the best bang for your buck, so I would always recommend starting with these. When weight loss is the goal, the aim of nutrition is to limit how much calories you take in, therefore decreasing the calories-in side of the equation. However, we can also think about increasing the calories-out side of the equation. The most common way to do this would be to exercise, but the point of our discussion here is to do this without exercising. So, what do we do?
Activity
There’s another phenomenon we can think about with this. That phenomenon would be Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT). This is just a fancy way to describe all the movement you do in a day that is not exercise. Increasing this in your day could increase the calories-out side of the equation a lot more than you think, and over time the results may impress you. So, to do this, you should:
1. Take the stairs instead of the elevator
2. Park your car farther away when you go to work, the grocery store, etc.
3. Walk your dog more times in a day
4. Take a 10-minute walk when you’ve been sitting for too long
5. Or really any other way that you can implement more movement into your life
When it comes to increasing activity, this is where I would start if you hate exercising.
Something else I would strongly urge you to do, though, is to find some physical activity that you enjoy. This could be something like playing pick-up basketball, golfing without a golf cart, Frisbee golf, hiking, walking on the beach, etc. Doing something like these a few times a week can maximize the progress made on those days and can be a huge help in the long run.
Now, if you hate working out but are willing to strength train at least 1-2x a week, I would strongly encourage you to. The reason I say this is because you want to minimize the percent of weight lost that is muscle and maximize the percent of weight lost that is fat. When you strength train, you essentially give your body a reason to hold onto that muscle while the pounds are dropping. Further, strength training may increase your metabolic rate at rest due to the fact that it takes a lot of energy to recover from strength training.
Conclusion
What I want you to take home from this article is this: you don’t absolutely have to work out to lose weight or lose fat. When we understand what drives weight loss, we understand that adopting certain nutrition and day-to-day habits can be sufficient. Strength training can absolutely be a huge help, and if you are able to do it a few times a week then you absolutely should. However, your goals are obtainable even if you don’t want to.
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