Exercise and Weight Loss

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Can you lose weight without exercise?

Yes.

Can you lose weight only with exercise?

Absolutely not.

Too many people are conditioned to believe that exercise plays a bigger role in weight loss than it really does.

While your food intake accounts for 100% of the energy that goes into your body, exercise only burns off less than 10 to 30% of it.

In fact, people tend to wishfully over-estimate how many calories they burn via exercise, and then they make up those calories and then some with more food—and most of the time, junk.

If you worked out 5 days a week, even with the best trainer money could buy, but didn’t complement that activity with eating correctly, you wouldn’t lose weight. That’s why so many people who don’t eat right are so obsessive about exercise; they think if they do it ‘til they drop, they don’t have to make any changes in their diet, or they lose weight very slowly or not at all.

A perfect combination is to learn how to eat correctly AND exercise. But if you only have the time and the money to focus on one thing, choose learning how to eat correctly first. Drop a size or two, start feeling better about yourself, and then join a gym. Too often, when someone tries to conquer two bad habits at once — like smoking and drinking, for example — they fail at both.

Don’t get me wrong: Exercise is wonderful. It does wonders for your mood and your brain and has a host of other health benefits, but it’s not (and shouldn’t be) a main driver of weight loss because no matter how much time you spend exercising or working out, you can NEVER out-exercise a bad diet!