For example, most people understand that muscle cells burn more energy than fat cells do – so you spend months in the gym – and manage to convert 10 pounds of your fat into muscle. A wonderful accomplishment! However, according to calculations published in the journal “Obesity Research”, a pound of muscle burns approximately 6 calories a day in a resting body – compared to a mere 2 calories a day for a pound of fat cells. This means that for all the work you did to create a healthier body – you can have an extra teaspoon of butter each day!

So exercise isn’t the magic pill that many people think that it is when it comes to weight loss. It’s critically important that you have an active lifestyle – but running the marathon, or doing Aerobics three times a week isn’t pulling it’s load when it comes to weightloss – indeed, it may be hurting you!

The major problem comes about after your exercise is over – many people can easily fool themselves into believing that they can now consume a food that would have produced too much guilt otherwise. Out running every day? Can’t figure out why the weight isn’t coming off? Do you realize that the muffin you just ate at Starbucks not only completely obliterated the calories you burned in your run, but piled on a surplus?

Or take, for example, that 20 oz. Gatorade that you sloshed down your throat after that Aerobics class… you just added 130 calories, which is probably what you just managed to burn in class. Now, you still have the added advantage of increased metabolism for the next four hours after your exercise, and that certainly helps with weightloss – but it doesn’t take very much in the way of ‘guilt-free’ snacks after exercise to completely demolish any gains you’ve made.

Keep an eye on this common weight loss exercise mistake – don’t be guilty of believing that your exercise now gives you the ‘right’ to eat what you’d ordinarily spurn. Water is a perfectly good after-exercise drink – you can add a twist of lime or lemon if you want something ‘tasty’ to quench your thirst.

Here are a few tricks that are worthwhile:

1. Drink plenty of water – the extra water you drink takes the place of food you’d ordinarily be eating.

2. Eat more frequently – smaller portions spread out throughout the day, rather than a few big, heavy meals.

3. Don’t eat out – it’s difficult to find food that is healthy when eating out – restaurant food is supposed to taste good, and tasting good invariably means it’s not particularly healthy for you.

4. Go to bed with an empty stomach – don’t eat just prior to going to bed – you want your metabolism high when digesting food, not low as when you’re sleeping.

5. Don’t skip meals! Breakfast really is one of the most important meals of the day, just as your mother taught you!

Now, despite these helpful suggestions – if you really want sustained and useful weightloss – you will have to change your lifestyle … it was your lifestyle that put the weight on, it can only be your lifestyle that takes it off. While it doesn’t have to be painful – it does take learning and commitment on your part. Take the time to research the different diet plans available – to one extent or another they all ‘work’ – but what works for one person may be disastrous for you.

I’m a big fan of the low carb lifestyle – which is a proven way to lose weight and keep it off for the rest of your life. But it’s not a very cheap way to eat, since you’ll be splurging on meat and vegetables, and not purchasing extremely low cost meal items such as processed foods, wheat products, sugar, rice, beans, and so forth. (I learned early in life that if you want to feed the most people for the cheapest cost – make spaghetti! But that’s ‘off the table’ for the low carb lifestyle!)

Exercise is going to be different for everyone as well – you may not even call it exercise – since the goal is simply to keep your body active. My grandmother is well into her 90’s, and still actively gardens – and I rather suspect that nobody would call ‘gardening’ an exercise – yet it keeps my grandmother healthy and fit. Exercise can consist of thousands of different activities – don’t try to restrict it to running marathons, or doing Aerobics at the local gym!

Weightloss without exercise or dieting can achieve very limited goals – if all you need to do is tone your body by a few pounds here or there – but real weightloss is going to require lifestyle changes – Good Luck!

Wouldn’t it be nice to simply call that 800 number for that late-night infomercial that promises 5 pounds per week weight loss just by taking three capsules a day of the latest miracle drug derived from some African herb that natives have known about for centuries? They even offer a money back guarantee (that expires as soon as you receive your first shipment in the mail)… so how can you lose?

Of course, the problem is that such ‘miracle’ pills never seem to work – and the rare ones that do are quickly taken off the market due to unintended side effects (birth defects, congestive heart failures, and brain aneurysm – minor stuff like that). So you’ve spent your money, and unlike the dreams and promises, you still haven’t lost a single pound.

The real answer is two-fold – first, you have to learn what diets actually work, and will work for you long-term. (Hint: what do they feed pigs to fatten ‘em up? Just eat the opposite!) Second, you have to find physical activities that aren’t what you’d consider “exercise”, fun things to do that you enjoy – and just do them. Simple things like taking a walk around the neighborhood. (No need to put on running shoes and jog 5 miles…)

Real weightloss is going to involve a change in your lifestyle, there’s simply no magic pill you can take, no quick fix. You don’t need to exercise in the traditional sense of the term, but you do need to be physically active. The body becomes accustomed to the daily exertions required of it, and if you’re a couch potato most of the time, then your body’s metabolism is going to be too slow to keep up with the foods you like to eat.

So the answer to the question is no, you can’t take a pill, and no, you don’t have to exercise – but – you have to be physically active. Obviously the more physically active you are the better… I don’t know about you, but I’m getting to the age where a walk around the neighborhood is not too different from the marathons I used to run as a teenager. The key, of course, is that I do make those after meal walks.

How about you?

Here are 10 simple tips for rapid weightloss:

1. No more bread, pasta, potatoes, chips – no wheat or corn products whatsoever until you’ve reached your goal.

2. No more sugar – if you want desert, keep some celery and peanut butter handy.

3. Make a real effort to dramatically increase the amount of water you’re drinking… a full glass of water before every meal is a start.

4. Don’t ‘work out’ or ‘exercise’… do something you love doing. Go bowling, go dancing, start taking walks around the neighborhood, do something you enjoy doing, but don’t label it as “exercise”.

5. Stop drinking soft-drinks (This includes “zero calorie” drinks) – switch to tea or water.

6. When shopping at the supermarket – do the vast amount of your shopping around the inside edge of the market – stay away from the center of the market as much as possible. Fresh real food, as natural and unprocessed as you can find it.

7. Keep healthy snacks around – celery is excellent, a handful of unsalted peanuts is good, ditch the apples and bananas, and look for munchable veggies.

8. Keep your food portions small, and take your time eating! It’s all too easy to eat faster than our body can register, and by the time our brain is telling us that we’re full, we’ve already eaten another 500 calories. Slow down so this doesn’t happen!

9 Don’t skip any meals! In fact, if it’s possible, break your meals into smaller, more frequent meals. This isn’t possible for everyone, but more frequent meals are a great way to keep your metabolism high.

10. Don’t eat out – prepare your meals at home. You’ll know what you’re eating, and there won’t be an excess of hidden carbs and sugars if you prepare the food yourself. You’d be amazed at how fattening most fast food is.

Give these simple tips for rapid weightloss a try, and you too can lose weight fast!

I’ve tried a number of diets, and I can tell you from experience that you’ll be thinking of food all the time if you try a low calorie approach, you’ll hate life if you try a low fat approach, and your wallet will thin considerably if you try a low carb approach. You can lose weight on any diet – but the problem is that the diet you chose must be a new lifelong habit, not a 2 week sacrifice. This is where most people go wrong – and fail to reach their desired goals – they don’t understand that it took a lifetime of bad habit to put the weight on, now it must take the rest of your life eating correctly to take it off.

The most rapid weightloss diet I’ve found is the Atkins (or similar low carb) diet. The big advantage that low carb has over low calorie diets is that you’ll literally forget to eat! Because your blood sugar levels don’t spike extremely high, then low (as happens when you eat a high carb meal), you’ll find that the body signals for hunger simply go away – and as I discovered, you actually have to remind yourself that it’s time to eat!

There are also many great food choices that you can have on a low carb diet that simply don’t exist on a low fat or low carb diet. This makes your dinner times much more enjoyable than those who suffer through a low calorie meal, or people trying to eat a low fat diet.

One tremendously useful way to wade through the misinformation and factoids found in this arena is to examine what we fatten pigs on – and it’s not fat or high calories. It’s carbs. Grain is the recommended feed to fatten pigs, and the typical ‘Hard Red Winter Wheat’ that most bread is made out of has the following components:

71% Carbohydrates
12.6% Protein
1.5% Fat

It’s not the protein or fat that’s fattening up those pigs for slaughter! It’s that incredibly high amount of carbohydrates. So if you want to get fat, high carb (and conversely, low fat) is certainly a great way to go. If you want to constantly be thinking of your next meal, and have food on your mind all the time, and know what constant hunger feels like, then low calorie diets are going to be the favored choice. But if you’d like a rapid weightloss diet that you can live with for the rest of your life – try Atkins, it simply works.

In the meantime however, proper exercise can only help you to lose weight. What scares most people is their idea of what exercise is. Come on, admit it – you think that only going to the gym, and lifting weights, or riding a stationary bicycle, or doing Aerobics is ‘exercise’, right? Or, for the truly ‘hard-core’ among us – going out and running 3-10 miles a day… if you aren’t running a few miles, you aren’t really exercising. (I know quite a few fellow Marines who would agree with that statement!)

But I discovered when my back gave me pain, and my knees gave out, that running roadwork isn’t the only thing that can constitute exercise. I’ve had to re-think what exercise consists of – because I want to lose weight without exercising. You know, and I know – that exercise is boring and repetitive movements that we can do without, right?

If you think like that – then no, there will be no weight loss without exercise – and you won’t exercise. But the real fact is that exercise can be virtually anything physical that you do. I rediscovered bowling – it’s a very low impact exercise that can burn calories. I bought a rebounder (a mini-trampoline), and was amazed at what a great low-impact ‘exercise’ I get from simply bouncing up and down. Bouncing to music makes the time pass swiftly – so it’s not boring.

Even putting the car keys down and walking to the store a few times a week can make an incredible difference in the speed that you lose weight. Walking as an ‘exercise’? Bouncing up and down to music on a rebounder – ‘exercise’? (Just try telling that one to your kids – you won’t be able to keep ‘em off the trampoline!)

I suspect that the whole trick here is to re-define just what ‘exercise’ consists of – if you define it as hard, sweaty, and boring – then you won’t be doing very much of it. But if you simply go out, and figure out things you can do physically that you enjoy doing – then you’ll be getting a lot of exercise done.

I recently saw my 98 year old Grandmother in the garden with a shovel in her hand, now, she doesn’t have any weight that she needs losing, but if she did, she’d certainly have weight loss without exercise – that garden is one of her major joys in life! What could possibly make me think that I can’t have fun exercising too?

So simply redefine what you think ‘exercise’ consists of – and start losing that weight!

The bad news is that if you think rapid weight loss is more than two or three pounds each week – the only way to get quick results like that is going to be from a visit to the surgery ward of your local hospital. Only surgery will cut weight faster than a safe and healthy 2-3 pounds every week.

The good news is if you believe that 2 or three pounds every week is rapid weight loss – then you will not have any problem meeting that goal if you learn the facts about weight loss, and take action. Learning how to achieve this rapid weight loss is easy – taking action is the far more difficult task.

Most people simply don’t have the ‘will power’ – or whatever you want to call it – to keep to a diet. It’s much like alcoholism – where it’s commonly accepted that you have to reach the bottom before you can start scrabbling your way to the top again. Myself – I reached bottom when I was approaching the 300 pound mark – and knew that the only way that I’d lose weight is if I took action.

Rapid weight loss? I never thought it was particularly fast – indeed, for weeks on end I’d see little results on the scales. It takes time, it takes patience, and it takes as long as it took to put it on to take it back off! (Well, actually I think we can all agree that it gets put on faster than we can take it back off!)

The important thing to remember is not to use your concept of rapid weight loss as an excuse not to start, and more importantly, continue on your diet plan. If you simply accept that it’s going to take months, yes, and even years to get back to the weight you want to be at, and the health you deserve – you won’t try to excuse your lack of action because the weight loss isn’t ‘rapid enough’.

“Rapid” is a state of mind, nothing more. Look for a slow steady loss week by week, month by month – and you’ll soon be back in the body you deserve!

It can be done, but I suspect that most people would be unwilling to pay the price – since a diet is actually far easier than the alternative. What’s the simple alternative? More exercise. If you greatly increase the amount of exercise you do, you can continue to eat the same way you do now and still lose weight.

But is this the best thing to do for your health? Losing weight is only one part of the equation – the other, more important part is your long-term health. Continuing to eat the ‘Western Diet’, full of refined carbohydrates and manufactured “food” is not a recipe for good health. Indeed, much of the world enjoys better health than Americans, for the simple reason that they’ve not been seduced by the lure of refined grains and sugar.

So while you certainly can lose weight without going on a diet – the first thing you need to do is rethink your conception of what a diet is… it’s not some temporary restriction of your favorite foods – a real diet is a complete overhaul of what you normally eat, and it’s a lifetime thing, not just for a few weeks until you lose weight.

I know that this isn’t what you want to hear – everyone wants the quick fix, everyone wants the least amount of pain. But by choosing to eat properly (and it’s not easy in America to do this!), your health will be dramatically improved, and you can count on living a lot longer lifespan. The major causes of death in America are tied to the refined carbohydrates and sugars that are unique to the American diet – and if you can avoid the “Syndrome X” diseases, such as heart attacks, hypertension, diabetes, strokes, and so forth – you’ll have a much better chance to get to see your grand-children grow up. And who doesn’t want that?

The answer to the question, “How to Lose Weight With No Diet” is a simple one – exercise more. But it’s an incomplete and fatally flawed answer – since it panders to the desire in all of us to seek the simple & quick answer. Weightloss and having great health is not a simple concern – it takes a bit of knowledge, and the ability to break a lifetime of poor eating habits – it’s not your fault, American society teaches these poor eating habits, but if you want to improve your life, take the time to learn about how to eat a healthy low carb lifestyle, and you’ll not regret it!

Large amounts of refined carbohydrates and a sedentary lifestyle (a fancy way of saying no exercise!) is the cause of “Syndrome X”, which is the name for a list of symptoms that often occur together and support the development of obesity, coronary artery disease, hypertension, stroke, and type 2 diabetes.

The 10 Aborigines moved away from town, and back to their traditional homeland, a day’s drive away by off-road vehicle from the nearest town. At the moment that they left “civilization”, they had no more access to refined carbohydrates, flour, sugar, etc – all the normal components of the ‘Western Diet’.

Kerin O’Dea, a nutrition research who designed the experiment, traveled with the Aborigines to monitor and record their diet, and to check on their health. When in town, the main dietary components were flour, sugar, rice, carbonated drinks, alcoholic beverages, powdered milk, cheap fatty meat, potatoes and onions. However, once in the bush, their diet shifted of necessity to seafood, birds, kangaroo, witchetty grubs, turtle, crocodile, yams, figs, and bush honey.

After seven weeks in the bush, O’Dea drew blood from the Aborigines and found amazing improvements in virtually all areas of health. All had lost weight (an average of 17.9 pounds), their blood pressure dropped, their triglycerides were now at normal levels, and their Omega-3’s had increased dramatically.

O’Dea concludes: “In summary, all of the metabolic abnormalities of type II diabetes were either greatly improved or completely normalized in a group of diabetic Aborigines by a relatively short (seven week) reversion to traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle.” (In Defense of Food – Michael Pollan, pg. 85-87)

So the facts are startlingly clear – if you want to lose weight, eat grubs.

Or more accurately, get away from the heavy dependence on carbs that the Western Diet has burdened us with.

Indeed, very few sports that you have access to in the educational system are worthwhile for the rest of your life… you can pretty much eliminate all team sports, since it’s not necessarily easy to put teams together. Also, many of the sports played in the educational system are far too vigorous and violent to be played the rest of your life. Were I to join even a ‘touch’ football game, I might not walk off the field under my own power!

My own personal favorite exercise is a simple rebounder. I have music that I play while simply bouncing up and down. Many times I’ll do jumping jacks, and count ‘em out. Hitting 1,000 takes less than 30 minutes, and isn’t nearly as difficult as trying to do that same number on a hard floor! And when you can synchronize with the music, you’ll find the exercise enjoyable as well! I’ve even watched a movie a few times while rebounding – although to be sure, they were movies I’d seen before and knew well.

Another exercise that is often under-emphasized is simple walking. Go for a walk! Say hi! to all the neighbors! If you have a pet dog – go out for a 30 minute walk every day, and your weight will shrink, and your dog will love you! I like simple exercises like these – for if you set your goals for exercises that require you to go to a gym, you’ll soon find excuses not to exercise (can’t make it to the gym today!)

So find something – a low impact, stress-free exercise that will get your body moving. The benefits long outweigh the time you spend – as the body’s metabolism will be higher for up to four hours after you finish your exercise! Take advantage of that fact, and start to burn some of those ugly calories off…