If you ask 100 different personal trainers to define the "best" diet plan for a woman that can't exercise, you'll get 100 different answers. This is because different women have different goals, capabilities and physiologies. Oregon-based fitness coach Ben Cohn reports that despite these variation, there are practices and considerations common to all approaches to a weight-loss program that doesn't involve exercise.
Weight Loss Basics
Losing weight is a matter of applied physics. Your body takes in energy in the form of calories and burns that energy through activity. If you eat more calories than you burn, your body stores the excess as fat and you gain weight. If you burn more than you eat, you take the excess out of your stored fat. This makes you lose weight. Women that can't exercise in order to burn more calories must pay special attention to their diet, since this is the only way they can establish the caloric deficit needed to lose weight.
Sustainability
Health counselor Maya Paul remarks that the best diet is safe and sustainable. Aggressive diet plans may result in fast early weight loss, but they are hard to maintain. Some are even dangerous to stick with for more than a few days or weeks. Even if you successfully stick to an aggressive diet to reach your goal weight, Paul reports that you're likely to put the weight right back on once you discontinue an unsustainable diet. Paul recommends losing no more than 2 lbs. per week. Cohn suggests that if exercise is not an option you should cut that in half, aiming to lose just a pound a week. This is safe and sustainable, and can still mean losing more than 50 lbs. in just one year.
Reduced Calorie Diet
Both Cohn and celebrity personal trainer Bill Phillips recommend reducing your caloric intake in order to lose weight. To lose the 1 lb. per week Cohn recommends for women that can't exercise, you should aim to reduce your daily calorie load by about 500 calories. There are many programs to help you do this, but the basic idea is to log how much you eat on average prior to your diet, then design a menu plan that reduces that load by 500 calories or so.
Nutrition
Reducing your calorie load means reducing how much nutrition you take in. According to Harvard nutritionist Walter Willett, the best calories to cut out are those that carry little nutrition. Willett lists refined grain carbohydrates, sugars and sweet drinks as the first things you should cut from the menu. Women losing weight should pay close attention to their calcium and iron intake, says Willett, as both of these are especially important to women's health. Dr. Mehmet Oz, author of "You: On a Diet," recommends taking a daily women's multivitamin to fill in any holes your diet leaves in your daily nutrition.
Safety and Health
Cohn warns that an important factor in dieting when you can't exercise is why you can't exercise. For example, somebody suffering from a temporary leg injury will need a different nutritional profile than somebody bedridden from a chronic illness. The details of this kind of nutrition are complex, and the consequences for making mistakes can be severe. All women---in fact, all people---should consult with a doctor before beginning a new weight loss regimen. This is especially important if you already have another health concern.
References
- Ben Cohn; Fitness Coach; Hillsboro, Ore.
- "Eat, Drink and Be Healthy"; Walter Willett MD, et al; 2006
- "You: On a Diet"; Rozien & Oz; 2008
- "Body For Life"; Bill Phillips; 2006
- Help Guide.org: Healthy Weight Loss
Member Comments