Do You Need To Exercise To Lose Weight?

By Ronald C. Wichin, DC

Lifelong Health & Weight Loss

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Do You Need To Exercise To Lose Weight?

No and it can help or hurt.

You see, in order to lose weight, you have to consume less calories than you burn. Once you burn 3,500 calories more than you have eaten, then you have lost a pound (whether that pound is fat or muscle is another story and a very important story, too).

Without any exercise your body will burn between 1,400-2,000 calories a day (about 70 calories per hour) just by your daily activities and running your body. This is called your basal metabolic rate (BMR). So if you eat fewer calories than your BMR, you will lose weight without exercise.

However, exercise can help you burn more calories in two ways, depending on the type of exercise. Slow, sustained aerobic exercise (think walking or light jogging) will burn between 250-500 calories per hour. Intense interval type exercise (think sprinting or heavy weight lifting) increases your BMR for up to 24 hours after you exercise.

In both situations, you burn more calories so you lose more weight. But remember the vast majority of your weight loss is always diet related. In the above example, even at 500 calories an hour, you would have to jog for seven hours (without eating anything don't try this) to burn a pound of weight. Exercise is a helpful adjunct but not the most important aspect of weight loss.

You Can Never Out Exercise a Bad Diet

In fact, in some cases exercise can actually slow down your weight loss. I know that sounds strange so stay with me and let me explain. All your gains from exercise happen during recovery. So you exercise to stress your body, which then adapts to the stress with improved capacity. You then stabilize at the new level. Then you stress again (exercise), recover, stabilize; stress-recover-stabilize.

This is known as the exercise cycle. It presupposes that your body has the ability to recover. Many overweight people do not have normal recovery ability because their excess weight has stressed their body to the max. For them, exercise can be another stressor and their body may react to that by secreting a hormone called cortisol, which, among other things, causes an increased release of insulin and increased abdominal fat storage not exactly what you want as a result of your exercise.

There are a couple of very simple tests that should be done in any good weight loss clinic to determine when to start exercise, the right type (low intensity or high intensity) and the correct duration. Failure to do these tests and follow the recommendations can easily sabotage your weight loss efforts.