Cutting calories, not just exercise, key to weight loss - 13 WTHR Indianapolis

Doctors say, as you age, exercise alone won't help trim extra pounds.

Dr. Steve Samuels spoke with Eyewitness News Healthbeat reporter Anne Marie Tiernon Tuesday about diet and exercise to help you lose weight.

"Once you reach the age of 30, it's been shown now, in good clinical studies, that if you just apply an exercise program, you don't lose weight. Your body will adapt and eat more calories and you won't lose any weight with that exercise program. I tell my patients I like them to exercise. They live longer, they feel better as they get older, but they are not going to lose weight with exercise," Dr. Samuels said. "Diet is the key. You have got to learn to count calories, you have got to calculate how many calories you can burn and you have to count how many calories you are intaking and get yourself at a calories deficit."

A simple equation for figuring calories, if you weigh 150 pounds, add a zero. That means you burn 1,500 calories in a day. So to be at a deficit, you would want to consume less than you burn. If you cut 100-120 calories per day, you would lose a pound a month.

So how is the best way to cut calories to lose weight?

"Some of the things I've found is liquid calories. I think that is another major reason why we are gaining weight. For hundreds of years, we drank water. Now we drink juice, we drink milk, we drink pops with sugar in them, lots of calories there. I have had patients come in and tell me, 'Doc, I don't eat too much,' and they were right, they weren't eating too much, they were drinking too much. They were drinking five, six, seven hundred calories a day, so getting rid of those is a low-hanging fruit. Something easy to get rid of," Dr. Samuels said. "An adult who goes out and walks for a half-hour really only probably burns another 100-200 calories by doing that walking, so it's not that many calories."

One pound is 3,500 calories. If you cut 500 calories a day for seven days, you can lose one pound in a week. It may not sound like much, but if you started today (April 10), you'd be down five pounds by May 15 and down 10 pounds by June 19.