Do you need to exercise to lose weight? If you hate exercise you are going to love my answer:

No not necessarily!

All you need to lose weight, is sticking to a routine where you are in average consuming less calories than you burn per day.

Do the numbers:

If you are a 65kg (130 pound) female running 5 km (3.5 miles), that’s about 30 min in moderate speed, you burn 295 calories.

If you have one Mars bar, that’s already 280 calories. Have a coffee with milk (and even sugar!) with it and all the sweating was for nothing!

In the end, it is rather the question what is easier for you, to avoid eating that Mars bar or to go for a 30 min run.

While I know that it is generally not easy to pass on your treat, believe me, it gets much easier if you image that you can have it if you first go for that run. That puts it into perspective, I guess.

In most cases the mouthwatering experience that you would have for 2-3 minutes pales a bit! Good for you!

From now on, every time you are tempted to cheat on your diet, think about how long you will have to run for that indulgence.

The diet AND exercise synergy

Now having said that you can use exercise as a threat to stick to your diet, that does not mean, that you shouldn’t do any exercise.

Quite the contrary, I think exercise is not only good for losing weight, but also has enough general health benefits that should convince everybody to do at least a bit of it.

To continue with the above numbers, if you are good and pass on the Mars bar AND go for a run, that is a difference of about 600 calories! Not too bad!

And to push it even further, what if you were able to pass on that Mars bar (or any other sweet or snack for that sake) for a whole week (7x 300 cal = 2,100 cal) and go for a run only 4 times a week (4x 300 cal = 1,200 cal)?

That is a total difference of 3,300 calories. Taking in account that 1 pound weight loss equals about 3,500 calories (theoretically), you are almost there!

One pound a week, just from that! Weight loss is easy, isn’t it?

PS.: And don’t worry, if you still don’t want to exercise: weight loss just takes a little bit longer, that’s all.