How To Lose Weight Without Exercise

Are you one of those people who would like to know how to lose weight without exercise? Do you always wonder how to get rid of belly fat? Well… you’ve come to the right place!

You may be surprised to learn that exercise is not the most important factor in losing weight. In fact, exercise has a much more indirect impact on weight loss by increasing muscle mass, which helps burn fat more efficiently and balancing hormones. However, the driving influences on weight actually come down to our bacterial biome and hormones.

Exercise alone doesn’t burn nearly enough calories to show significant losses in weight. It actually takes roughly 2,000 burned calories to lose one pound. That would take an intense amount of physical exertion to burn. This can easily become counter-intuitive, leading to fatigue and stress that will only cause weight problems down the road.

I will also say, it is this mentality that often creates the unhealthy mentality with food and exercise to begin with, the kind of mental construct of compensating for eating with exercise. It can truly be much simpler than we make it.

This doesn’t mean that exercise is not helpful, however. Exercising helps promote circulation, digestive function, and the secretion of feel-good hormones; all which help raise immunity and decrease stress. But there is such a thing as too much exercise. We do not need to be tri-athletes or gymnasts to have a lean, healthy body.

How to lose weight without exercise in 5 easy ways

By better understanding the relationship between exercise and weight we can see a bigger picture, which makes the whole concept of how to lose weight without exercise much easier. Let’s take a look at some of the dominant factors of weight gain and weight loss. This will help us create a more balanced lifestyle that will lead to more effortless weight loss without strenuous exercise.

1. Upgrade your cooking techniques

Cooking methods can make or break the integrity of our food. Equally as important as what we eat, is how we eat it. There are many cooking techniques that can damage our food—any food-preparation method that uses too much heat and destroys precious enzymes, vitamins and nutrients, for example.

For example, barbecuing, smoking or deep-frying oxidizes delicate fats and denatures proteins. This makes them difficult to digest and toxic in our bodies. Toxicity is one of the major root causes of weight gain actually, as toxins tend to store in fat cells. By switching up cooking methods for more ideal options that reduce our toxic load, we can greatly avoid excess pounds and help the body shed some at the same time.

Tips:

• As a general rule, eat a majority of your foods raw, especially vegetables, fats and most proteins.
• For cooking, always use low-temperature methods like steaming, braising, slow/low roasting, poaching and boiling.
• Swap your cooking oils to heat stable fats like grass-fed ghee, coconut oil, red palm, raw butter and tallow.
• For dressings and sauces, use raw, cold-pressed oils like stone-crushed olive oil, avocado and hempseed oil.

2. Quit sugar

There are numerous ways that sugar can make us fat. First, sugar is highly addictive, once you have a bite, dopamine surges through the bloodstream telling your brain that you must have more of it. This can lead to overeating in general, especially sugar.

When we consume sugar, blood sugar goes up, which requires the body to release insulin to keep the body from reaching toxic blood sugar levels that could kill. As we consume more sugar, insulin levels are unendingly elevated, which causes the energy in our bloodstream to be stored in fat cells.

If that’s not enough, the more sugar we consume, the more the body becomes accustomed to having it, making sugar its primary fuel now. The problem with this is that the body has a hard time accessing stored fat, where toxins are stored that throw off our biochemistry further. This can send signals to the brain thinking that the body needs food—even when it doesn’t—and then we eat more than we truly need.

Tips:

• If there were only one dietary modification you could make to dramatically change your approach to how to lose weight without exercise, it would be to ditch the sugar—especially refined/processed sugar and sugary fruits with a lot of fructose.
• Replace sugar with healthy fats like avocados, coconut, and soaked nuts/seeds. You’ll feel much more stable energetically and emotionally. Your body will burn fat more effectively and your entire health will benefit as well as your waistline.

3. Get better sleep

This is perhaps one of the most underestimated tools for achieving optimal health in general and especially in the weight-loss world. Too much importance is placed on exercise and even diet in many cases. Though both important and dominant influences, sleep is perhaps one of the most important things for the health of our bodies next to air, water, and a good mental attitude.

Sleep is one the only times that the body gets to experience a deep state of homeostasis, which activates self-repair and self-healing enzymes and hormones. Numerous studies show that people who lack quality sleep have more health problems and tend to have weight issues. Getting to bed earlier will ramp up your metabolism, digestive efficiency and even balance your mood and energy levels so you are less likely to reach for a sugary pick-me-up.

Tips:

• As a general rule, get to bed earlier and wake up earlier. We have an internal clock called a circadian rhythm that follows the spin of the globe and magnetic pulls of the planets. Get to bed when the Sun sets and the Moon rises and your hormones will thank you. The result will be a general sense of well-being and an easier achievement of your weight goals.
• For better sleep, shut off all electronics 2 hours before bed, form a nightly routine to give your mind some time to shut down and unwind, and try making your bedroom as dark as possible to improve melatonin production.
• You can also experiment with some sleep meditations where you visualize yourself outside of your body waving a hand over your body to relax it or by simply observing the breath.

4. Just eat real food

Diets do not work and for a handful of reasons. Number one, they often are full of restriction, dietary dogmas and are too limited to meet the uniqueness of taste and nutritional needs of each individual. All of these concepts lead to more stress, which causes more weight problems.

When the body is under stress it releases a surge of cortisol. At first, this stress hormone can cause us to be less hungry by suppressing appetite and actually burning up fat. After the stress response is over, the body will need to get back into balance. Cortisol will prolong its stay in the body to bring our hormones back into balance. This leads to an actual increase in appetite, often for sugary foods, hence why so many people reach for sugary foods during stressful times. And (as we also mentioned above) it’s pretty obvious how an increased appetite for sugar can lead to weight problems.

Excess sugar stores as fat, congests the liver and slows metabolism over the long run, while also suppressing the immune and digestive function. Over a long period of time, elevated stress can suppress adrenal and thyroid function—leading to a low (or underactive) thyroid—which is a major cause of weight gain. It’s called Hypothyroidism.

This is why dieting can work at first but then often results in gaining weight back. The last thing I would recommend is dieting for weight loss. It’s just going to lead to a roller coaster of stress hormones. Additionally, most “diet food” is often just junk food in disguise.

Tips:

• Instead, just eat real foods like vegetables, low-glycemic fruits, proteins, quality animal products, nuts and seeds, and herbs.
• If a whole-foods diet doesn’t sound fun to you then I highly suggest learning how to prepare some recipes and cultivating some cooking skills—you’be surprised how delicious real food is when you learn how to prepare it.

5. Cleanse your liver

In Greek they had a saying, “the condition of the liver is dependent on the Liver.” The liver is the governing organ of the body; it directs all other organs in the body. If you’re overweight, you can assume that the liver isn’t functioning as well as it could.

A fatty liver can cause excess weight gain, as one of the main jobs of the liver is to detoxify the body of toxins. When the liver cannot expel waste at a sufficient rate, the excess toxic load will be sent to fat cells in the body to be stored. The liver also creates all the hormones in the body, if it is over-producing stress hormones or under-producing hormones like testosterone . . . well, weight gain can be a problem.

As mentioned earlier, hormones are one of the major factors in weight problems; therefore, we want to make sure our liver is clean and functioning. A clogged, toxic liver can also mean poor digestive function, which can result in bacterial imbalances in the digestive tract—another major cause of weight problems as an overgrowth of pathogenic bacteria can produce an abundance of toxins in that body that will eventually be stored as fat. The following tips will tell you how to improve liver health.

Tips:

• One of the best ways to cleanse and tonify the liver is with bitter foods and herbs. The bitter taste actually cleanses the liver by stimulating the vagus nerve that is connected from the liver to the back of the tongue. In today’s modern diet, bitter is not a common taste as much food is highly sweet or salty. Consuming more bitter foods and herbs like beets, dandelion, arugula, radish, lemons, limes, burdock and herbs like Reishi and Chinese bitters will stimulate the liver to cleanse.
• You can also help the liver and gallbladder by consuming moderate amounts of healthy fats daily. This will signal the body to replace bad toxic fat cells in the body with new, clean fats. The best sources are always raw such as avocado, coconut oil and flesh, raw nuts and seeds (soaked), eggs yolks and stone crushed olive oil.
• Also, take non-GMO lecithin and drink plenty of water. This will help emulsify fat toxins, turning them into a water-soluble toxin that can be flushed out of the liver and body. Drink plenty of spring water to help flush the system of these broken down toxins.