Can a person lose wieght by eating healthy and not exercising?
What do you mean by “not exercising”? Are you talking about being bed-ridden? Paralyzed? Just too damn lazy to walk anywhere? Even to the bathroom?
Yes as a matter of fact by working out you may lose about 10 pounds. But unless you cut your caloric intake you will find it hard to make much more of a dent.
A marathon runner averages about 200 calories an hour. One Snickers has 280 calories.
You can see it is easier to not eat.
However by working out while dieting you keep your metabolism up and tend to lose fat. While w/o working out you will lose fat and muscle.
If by eating healthily you mean avoiding fatty, fried foods, eating more fruits and veggies, watching portion sizes, etc., then yes, I believe you can lose weight. I’ve heard many people say by simply cutting soda/beer/dessert out of their diet, they lost, say, 10 pounds in a year.
Exercise in conjunction with diet modification is still the way to go, though, if you want to lose weight.
First, I’m gonna assume that you’re talking about making a temporary change in your eating habits.
As long as your caloric intake is less than your caloric expenditure, you’ll lose weight. Problem is, if you’re not exercising, your caloric expenditure is gonna be pretty low, so your diet will have to be fairly restrictive. The more calories you expend, the more you can take in to maintain your weight, and the more quickly you’ll lose on a given caloric intake.
As if that weren’t bad enough, you’ll lose muscle as well as fat, so even if you’re thinner at the end, you’ll be in worse shape than you started–the less muscle you have, the slower your metabolism is, and the easier it will be to put the weight right back on when you stop dieting.
If you’re talking about making a long-term commitment to eating well, then it will be a little harder to put the weight on in the short term, but the loss of muscle mass will still catch up to you in the long run.
If you’re trying to lose weight, just bite the bullet and exercise. It’s unpleasant at first, but once you see results, you won’t mind so much.
I don’t understand your first sentence, but as to your second paragraph, anybody (need not be a marathoner) loses, as a rule of thumb, about 100 calories per mile. So, unless you are “running” 30-minute miles, you will lose a heck of a lot mroe than 200 calories an hour. Of course, the exact amount depends upon a number of other factors, not the least is your weight.
I’m not sure where this number comes from. Jogging/running will burn about 500-600 calories per hour, with the exact number depending on variables such as weight and speed, of course. In fact, this calculator shows that a 130-lb. person running at a moderate pace of 11 minutes/mile burns 535 cal./hr.
I also doubt that it’s the burn rate while at rest (4800 cal. per day?). The only reasonable possibility I see is a combination of 2400 calories per day burnt from just going about your business, and 2400 additional calories burnt by running for 4 hours. But in any case, you’d only reach that exalted state of calorie depletion through regular exercise.
Calories is a measure of work performed, so it depends upon the total number of miles, not the time element. If you run 11-minute miles, you, in one hour, will run about 5.4 miles, and, using my rule of thumb, you will expend 540 calories, very close to the 530 noted above for a 130-pound man. If he weren’t so underweight, he would have lost the 540 calories. The speed that you run is, practically speaking, immaterial. It is the work done: number of miles. However, a slower person will expend slightly more calories due to inefficiency.
At rest, a typical 180 pound male will burn 2200 calories. So, eat 1700 per day and lose a pound of fat per week. (a 3500 cal deficit will force your body to tap fat reserves to survive…to breath…pump your heart…feed the brain…run your cooling/heating…) Most calories are burned just running body functions…heck…watch tv all day and you’d burn like 1800.
Actually, exercise is important, but diet habits are 90% of the package when trying to lose weight.
highly recommend: www.howstuffworks.com/diet
or just go to www.howstuffworks.com and search on diet
Since May 1, I have lost 30 pounds by eating in a healthful manner and simply walking (fast) 4.5 miles a day, split into 4 chunks - 0.7 miles to the train, 1.4 from arrival station to work, then at night 1.7 from work to train, and then 0.7 from arrival station back to my house. For some reason, splitting it works extremely well for me - I used to RUN the same distance every day and couldn’t lose weight not matter how hard I tried. So you don’t necessarily have to exercise yourself to death. YMMV.
Definitely. I lost quite a lot of weight with only a low-calorie diet and no additional cardio exercise. Kept it off too.
But the problem with losing weight merely by diet is that you will lose protein along with fat. This results in reduced musculature.
As to walking 4.5 miles and losing weight but running 4.5 miles and not, this flies in the face of science. You will lose approx. 450 calories whether you walk or run 4.5 miles. There has to be some other factor or factors not mentioned.
Disagree, the body’s efficiency is not the same at all speeds. A graph of speed vs. calories per minute at http://pwp.value.net/fitness/sreport1.htm shows that calories per minute is not linear with regard to running speed; this implies that calories per mile is not a constant. Unfortunately the site gives no tabular data or references. The later graph of speed vs. calories per mile shows that slow running speeds are inefficient, then efficiency increases but then craps out again at around 11mph. This chart only goes up to 14mph, which is a 4.3 minute mile (not fast enough for a champion miler but pretty fast for anyone else).
Cooking with Gas, if you read my second post, I acknowledged the inefficiency of a slower rate will cause a higher calorie expenditure, but this is so slight as to be practically immaterial, as I said.
Fatty fried food are pretty much irrelevant (see atkins, zone, etc) As long as calories in < calories used you will lose weight.
Yeah, but…
Eating 1500 calories worth of ice cream a day will cause you to lose weight, but I don’t think anyone will claim that that’s a healthy diet. So it’s not quite as simple a picture as you paint.
I’ve gone from about 200 pounds to about 175 pounds over the past six months just by adapting my diet, with no meaningful change to my daily exercise routine (which basically consists of pacing and walking when I run errands). Cutting fat intake took care of the first 10 pounds, but for the next 15 I had to actually cut calories (so no more of my two-quart Kool-Aid nightcaps).
Cheers,