Effective Weight Loss Without Exercise

The USDA's "Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2005" recommends the following for persons who want to lose weight: "Aim for a slow, steady weight loss by decreasing calorie intake while maintaining an adequate nutrient intake and increasing physical activity."

People typically equate physical activity with exercise. And exercise, in the traditional sense--going to the gym, doing aerobics, jogging--is sometimes not an option for certain individuals.

Determining Caloric Needs

• To get a rough estimate of your maintenance calories, put a zero after your weight. For example, a sedentary 200-pound person needs to take in 2,000 calories to stay at that weight.

  To get a tangible picture of your caloric intake, get a small notebook and write down everything you eat for a week. If possible, take note of special occurrences, like if you were having a bad day or if you attended a social event.

  Calculate your estimated calorie consumption for each day. There are many online resources that allow you to determine the calorie content of foods and beverages. FitDay is one such website. There also are books available that have calorie counts for foods.

Reducing Calories

• In order to lose weight, you must expend more calories that you consume.

  A healthy rate of weight loss is one to two pounds per week. Reducing your consumption to 500 calories below your daily maintenance calories will lead to a loss of one pound per week.

  Examine your food journal and compare your calorie consumption for each day with your calculated maintenance calories. For each day where your calorie consumption most closely matches your maintenance calories, find ways to reduce by 500 calories on those days. Some simple ways to reduce calories are switching from full-fat dairy products to reduced-fat dairy products, switching from regular soda to diet soda (switching to water is even better), and snacking on fruit instead of candy. Additionally, you can and should reduce your consumption of highly processed foods: Replace white bread with wheat or whole grain bread, white rice with brown rice, and fruit juice with fruit.

  Keep chronicling your diet in your notebook or online. Weigh yourself once a week to mark your progress. If you hit a plateau, where you don't lose weight for two weeks, it's again time to reduce your caloric intake. Your caloric intake eventually will match your goal weight with a zero at the end of it. At that point, your caloric intake is the same as your daily maintenance calories.

Expending Calories

• Another way to break through a weight-loss plateau, is to increase the amount of calories you expend. Everything you do expends calories; you're burning calories as you read this. Consider everything you typically do as your baseline calorie expenditure.

  To lose more weight, you need to exceed your baseline calorie expenditure. You can do this without structured exercise: Parking further from the door of the mall or grocery store allows you to burn more calories because you're walking more than you normally would. Walk to the mailbox instead of driving to it. If you've always wanted to learn a certain dance, look into taking dance lessons. You'll find that exploring your interests will often include the bonus of expending more calories on a daily basis.