Lose Weight Without Exercise
Why you lose weight when you stop exercising A lower number on the scale may be a surprising side effect of ditching the gym at first, but it’s not the kind of weight loss you want.
“If you’ve stopped exercising and dropped a few pounds, you’re probably eating less or you’ve lost muscle,” says Kara Gallagher, Ph.D., CEO of Mohr Results, a nutrition- and fitness-consulting company in Louisville, Kentucky.
Depending on how much muscle you have and what your exercise routine was before you stopped, the enzymes that support muscle mass will start to decrease after a month or two of couch time, which may result in the loss of a few pounds of muscle.
However, each pound of the lean stuff burns 5 to 10 calories a day – fat burns about 2 – so if you drop just 3 pounds of muscle you’ll burn up to 50 fewer calories a day, and that will eventually translate to a weight gain of 5 pounds a year.
When your schedule goes haywire, you can stave off muscle loss by working out only once or twice a week. [via]
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