It is very hard, if not impossible, to maintain or lower your body’s fat levels when not exercising at all. The more you exercise you get, the wider margin you have to mess with your daily calories intake.

Let’s look at the problems of a diet without exercise: The only way to get rid of fat is to burn it through exercise that makes your body burn more calories at a given time x than the calories amount available from the sugar in your blood.

Let’s take a look at this setting: A lazy person Y decides to trick the system by eating much less but staying on the couch. “Theoretically”, he/she thinks, “the effect should be the same as you eat less than you spend for sitting on the couch. Therefore the body will have to burn the fat.” Is it right? No way! His/her body is much more intelligent than the brain attached to it.

Here is how it really works: The body perceives the changed circumstances and will start adapting to them. The first activated mechanism will be to lower the energy expenditure and the second to conserve available energy supplies as long as possible.

Therefore your body will:

1. Get rid of energy spenders: your muscles. Your body literally eats itself. Therefore it can be considered as self-cannibalism
2. Conserve the fat as long as it has the gained energy from destroying your muscles. Additionally, it will turn much more calories you take in into the fat instead of using them. Even if that energy is not enough to survive, your body will prefer conserving it “for dark days” and destroy your muscles instead.

What is the outcome? “Who needs muscles” (somebody shouts in the audience). Well, guru, think twice. Your body conserved the most fat layers but destroyed the energy spenders at the same time. Therefore it is spending less energy now and can survive on your newly adapted low-calorie diet.

Now with less muscle mass it will be much more difficult to burn that fat. Moreover, your body is in defence stage now and will not give up on the fat so easily.

Congratulations, you got yourself into a downward spiral of obesity that is hard to get out of. But it’s not impossible.

Here’s what you should do:

1. Convince your body that it is safe and has plenty of food available. For this, you should start eating 5-7 small meals high in complex carbs to give your body a constant energy flow.
2. Gradually increase the energy intake by 10-15% a week until you reach your “perfect LEAN weight”. You can use the same formula that you use for BMI calculation (activity multiplicator 1.35 already included for the following exercises):English BMI Formula BMI = ( Weight in LEAN Pounds / ( Height in inches ) x ( Height in inches ) ) x 703 x 1.35Metric BMI Formula BMI = ( Weight in LEAN Kilograms / ( Height in Meters ) x ( Height in Meters ) ) x 1.35
3. At he same time add endurance and strength exercises into your weekly schedule and increase the difficulty weekly.In endurance, you could start with fast walking 1 hour a day, 3-4 days a week. Then, after few weeks switch to jogging half an hour, 4-5 times a week. Later add some interval training. NOTE: This is just an example. You could do other exercises like riding a bike or swimming.In strength training you don’t have to lift huge weights. You also don’t have to buy protein supplements and all the junk pills. But you have to do some strength (3 times a week) training to restore the lost muscles as they are your only tool for burning fat.

The difference between spending calories through exercise and on the couch is that exercise produces short-time calorie deficit. While exercising your body doesn’t have time to adapt to the changed circumstances and has therefore no other choice than using its fat reserves.

That is the reason why you should never train more than 40-60 minutes non-stop. After that your body starts feeding itself on expense of your muscles. Bad idea. If you want to train more, do it in 2 sessions: 40 min in the morning and 40 in the evening.

I hope this post cleared some misunderstandings and made the point why exercising is so important, especially when losing weight. Think twice when abruptly cutting on your calories, beware of the recoil.

One last thing. The process of energy expenditure during the exercise is a bit more complicated than described. I simplified it in order to show my point more clearly. But the essence is the same.

Live strong.