Diet Plan For Losing Weight Without Exercise

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Combining regular exercise with a healthy diet really is the best way to lose weight, however, often people are unable to exercise on a regular basis for various reasons. So if you are not able to exercise you have to adopt a healthy weight loss diet plan to help you to lose weight and then manage your weight.

How Can Diet Alone Lead To Weight Loss?

To lose weight all we need to do is ensure that our daily calorie intake is less than our daily calorie requirements.

Why Is Exercise So Important for Weight Loss?

Regular exercise makes this easier for four main reasons:

1. It increases the amount of calories you burn while you are exercising
2. It increases your metabolism as your body builds new muscle tissue
3. It helps to manage appetite by releasing hormones that suppress hunger
4. It helps to use up glycogen reserves which triggers the fat burning hormone called glucagon.

So if you cannot exercise you are missing out on a huge advantage when it comes to weight loss. However, it is still possible to lose weight.

How To Lose The Right Sort Of Weight?

Where things become more complex is ensuring that you lose the right sort of weight. Everyone asks “how do I lose weight?” but the real question should be “how do I lose body fat while maintaining lean muscle tissue?”.

Muscles are vital for good health. Not only do they make us stronger and fitter, they also help keep metabolism raised. Muscle tissue is very “hungry”, it needs proteins and carbohydrates for growth, repair and function, and needs much more energy that fat tissue. Another way to explain it is that muscles are the body’s engines, fat cells are the fuel tanks. When someone wants to lose weight, they actually want to lose fat.

The Problem of Very Low Calorie Diets

The problem is that when people attempt to lose weight with diet alone they generally throw themselves into a low calorie diet, or sometimes a very low calorie diet (VLCD) which is defined by being below 1000 calories a day. Often these diets do not provide the body with enough protein to sustain muscle tissue and so muscle wastage occurs. The body simply breaks downs its own muscle tissue to provide energy for other parts of the body. Fat loss will also occur, but not in isolation.

Some Biology: The Relationship of Food, Fat Storage and Hormones

To understand why this happens we need to explain a little about how the body stores and then burns fat. There are two hormones at play in the body that control fat storage – insulin and glucagon. Both are triggered by changing levels of glucose in the blood (blood sugar).

When we eat carbohydrates, especially high GI carbs such as bread, blood sugar levels rise. This increase triggers a release of insulin from the pancreas. The role off insulin is to reduce blood sugar levels (prolonged raised levels leads to health problems). It does this by aiding the uptake of glucose into fat storage (adipose tissue). The glucose is actually converted to glycerol and combined with fatty acids for for TAGs (triacylglycerides) and this is what we call “fat”.

So, in a nutshell, when we consume sugary foods our bodies release insulin that causes that sugar to be stored as fat. Understanding this is key to understanding how diet can help lose weight.

So, what causes fat burning?

When glucose levels fall the pancreas then releases glucagon. The role of this hormone is simply the opposite of insulin, it causes blood sugar levels to rise again. Glucose is the prime energy source of the brain which  is our prime organ as it controls the functions of all other parts of the body.

So glucagon’s prime objective is to ensure that the brain is supplied with sugar. It does this by breaking down the fat tissue to extract the sugars locked up in the TAGs (glycerols and fatty acids). This is what we call fat burning.

It is not easy to get the body to release glucagon though. You have to allow your blood sugar levels to fall to very low levels. As soon as you eat a sugary food, such as some bread, pasta, high GI vegetable like parsnips and pumpkin, processed breakfast cereals, rice, any junk food (cakes, cookies, donuts), you blood sugar rises and therefore glucagon production stops and insulin takes over, so you quickly go from a fat burning situation back to a fat storing one.

This is why unhealthy diets are so likely to lead to weight gain – most of what is unhealthy is also high on the glycemic index (high GI) which means it causes blood sugar spikes, insulin and fat accumulation. So by limiting high GI foods you can help to lose weight with diet alone.

The Importance of Protein

Protein is important for two reasons:

1. Without adequate daily protein muscles start to waste away as the amino acids locked within muscle tissue are used to help with the ongoing repair of vital organs.
2. When protein is digested the body releases another hormone, PYY, which helps to suppress hunger.

This is another reason why very low calorie diets are bad – people eating less than 1000 Calories a day to lose weight often fail to consume enough protein, instead just eating their favorite sugary snacks. This sugar heavy diet not only causes fat to be stored but also the lack of protein causes muscles to waste away and lowers BMR (basal metabolic rate) which determines how much energy is used to maintain the body at rest.

How To Increase Weight Loss By Exercising After Eating

Although it is possible to lose weight through healthy diet alone, as detailed above, it is far easier and quicker to lose weight by combining diet and exercise. But when is the best time to exercise? Is there a best time at all? One school of thought is that so long as you are active and burn additional calories it does not matter what time you exercise. However, there are other opinions on this, so lets take a look at them.

Many people advocate that the best way to lose weight is to exercise on an empty stomach before a meal. It has long been believed that this fasted exercising will increase metabolism and help lose weight, then eating after will provide the body with essential proteins, carbohydrate and fats to start building healthy new muscle tissue.

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However, recent collaborative research carried out by Surrey University and Imperial College London and published in the Journal of Endocrinology suggests that exercise after eating can help people to lose weight more effectively than vice versa.

The research found that exercising after a meal boosts the release of hormones PYY, GLP-1 and PP which then suppress appetite, meaning that you stay full for longer which reduces snacking.

Dr John McAvoy, a GP with a special interest in obesity, said “For exercise to contribute to weight control it should be sustainable over the long term and enjoyment remains a critical factor to this end.”

As is often the case, the real conclusion is that to lose weight, lifestyle change is required. There really is no quick fix to fitness and health. People that keep healthy remain active throughout their lives and generally socialise with more active people.

One specific hormone that we are currently aware of which affects appetite is the PPY hormone. PPY helps to reduce our appetite when it is in the system. It is created ion the body in response to two specific activities; exercise and the digestion of proteins.

Previously it was assumed that the increase in PPY in the body would not last long enough to make exercise after a meal a useful approach to weight loss. However, this research showed that exercise did not result in a reduced Calorie consumption. In fact, people in the study who had exercised ate more food than the non0exercising group. They still lost more weight though, because the exercise they were performing each day was adequate to burn off more calories resulting on a great daily calorie deficit than if they had not exercised and eaten less.

Ultimately the best advice is to find a healthy sport or pastime that you enjoy and build it into your life so that as time passes exercising becomes part of your daily routine, second nature.

How To Lose Weight With The Diet Solution

Putting it all together you can create your own weight loss plan using a carefully constructed diet. If you also follow the scientific ways to lose weight (some points which are covered here), consume a low GI diet and ensure that your diet is healthy and calories are kept below your daily requirements, then you can lose weight without exercise.

If you do not wish to construct your own diet plan then The Diet Solution provides meal plans and recipes which will help you to lose weight. We highly recommend The Diet Solution program, it is certainly a well structured diet plan based on human biology and nutrition research.

References

“Exercise after eating diet tip” - BBC News, Monday, 4 June 2007

“Effects of exercise on gut peptides, energy intake and appetite” by Catia Martins, Linda M Morgan, Stephen R Bloom1 and M Denise Robertson. J Endocrinol May 1, 2007 193 251-258

Tags: diet, sugar