Do You Really Need to Exercise to Lose Weight?
Can you lose weight without exercising? Plenty of sweat-averse dieters out there sure hope so. And who hasn’t heard that whole “weight loss is 80 percent diet, 20 percent exercise” stat?
Experts anything but agree on the actual split, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that when it comes to losing weight – and keeping it off – diet and exercise have two totally different roles.
To lose weight, you need to burn more calories per day than you eat. Called a caloric deficit, it’s the bottom line of weight loss, and there are two ways to make it happen: Burn more calories or eat fewer calories. Exercise obviously belongs to the “burn more” camp, while dieting is all about lowering your caloric intake.
Excerpted from health.usnews.com
