Can I lose weight without exercise, through diet alone?

Losing weight by dieting alone is technically possible though it's probably not feasible for most people and won't lead to long term results. Instead it will lead to crash diets resulting in gaining more weight back than you initially started with.

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Calorie Balance

Calorie balance controls weight and is simply the relationship between how many calories you burn and how many you eat. If you burn more calories than you eat, you'll lose weight and there's no way around it. Any diet, book or personal trainer that claims you can lose weight with little sacrifice is lying and only trying to rip you off.

Basics of Weight Loss

Though many people think that losing weight automatically means healthy, it doesn't. There's a huge difference between diets and healthy lifestyles. Creating a calorie deficit is the only requirement to losing weight.

A calorie deficit is a state in which you are burning more calories than you eat. If you burn 2,500 calories per day and only eat 2,000, you've created a deficit of 500 calories per day. Since your body needs all 2,500 calories and you've only provided 2,000 through food, it has to get those extra 500 calories from non-food sources: body fat. It's through this mechanism that weight loss occurs.

How to Create a Calorie Deficit

Calorie balance has two sides: energy burned and energy taken in (eaten). That's two possibilities for you to use in your weight loss plan. You can create a calorie deficit by either exercising more, eating less or a combination of both.

Diet Alone

Losing weight is a numbers game (as long as you're only in it to lose weight and not improve your health). As long as you're burning more than you eat, you'll lose the weight. The problem is, to lose weight without exercising, your calorie intake will have to be so low, you'll damage your health and torture yourself trying sustain your diet.

By using the calorie calculator, you can estimate how many calories your body burns each day. If we make the following assumptions...

• 25 years old
• 5 feet, 7 inches
• 170 pounds
• sedentary, no exercise
• female
• ...the calculator estimates that this person would burn 1,900 calories per day.

Since this person doesn't exercise, they don't burn a lot of calories. To lose weight, she would need to eat less than 1,900 calories each day, a somewhat difficult task. The speed that weight loss comes off is affected only by the size of the calorie deficit. A deficit of 500 calories per day will result in losing 1 pound per week. A deficit of 1,000 calories per day will result in losing 2 pounds per week.

The female in this example would need to eat between 900 to 1,400 calories to lose any meaningful weight. This intake would be almost impossible to keep up for very long time. After a while of almost starving herself, she would realize what she's missing out and start binging on all the junk food she loves. She would then decide to quit her diet because it's too hard to continue and go back to her old ways. This would lead to gaining the few pounds that she managed to lose.

The Body's Reaction to Dieting

If she did continue her diet for a bit longer, her body's metabolism would start to adjust to the drop in calorie intake. Your metabolism isn't set at a certain level. It's fluid and can adjust to your lifestyle. The problem with cutting calories drastically is that your body goes into a 'starvation mode' in which it burns a lot less calories. The result is that your metabolism's reaction to your diet starts to shrink your calorie deficit. Even with your low intake, your calorie deficit will be much smaller than you think causing weight loss to slowdown or even stop.

Losing Weight With Diet and Exercise

Starvation mode is why losing weight is best accomplished through a combination of moderate calorie reduction and a solid workout routine. By using the calorie calculator again, we'll change the female's activity level from sedentary to moderate exercise, 3-5x per week. That same person now burns about 2,450 calories per day. That's a jump of more than 500 calories. By exercising, this person can now eat about 2,000 calories per day and still lose 1 pound per week.

Exercising helps you lose weight easier than dieting alone because it's very difficult if not impossible to cut your calories drastically enough without your body reacting negatively to it. By adding enough exercise, you might even be able to lose weight without cutting any calories out of your diet.

Benefits of Exercise

In addition to increasing your daily calorie needs, exercising can build muscle (make you look better), decrease cholesterol levels, reduce blood pressure, increase bone density and give you more energy. By starving yourself, not only will you miss out on the benefits of a healthy diet, you'll also be ignoring everything that exercise has to offer.

The End

While dieting alone can technically lead to weight loss, it's very difficult to accomplish and unhealthy if you do. Dieting alone might sound easier but after a few days of a very low calorie diet, you'll realize that exercise is much easier and produces better results than starving yourself.