I’ve done it, and I know it can be done. Most people don’t realize or fail to grasp the reality of how our bodies lose weight. At the most basic level, you need to expend more calories than you take in, and many people mistakenly think that they can eat the same high-carb, pre-processed, and sugar-filled food and lose weight if they exercise enough. Unfortunately, while it’s true that if you can exercise enough to expend more calories than you ate, the amount of physical activity to burn of the calories in a typical McDonald’s meal is quite extreme. As the meme says, “Aint nobody got time fo’ that!”

People today want to lose weight without effort and without giving up anything. This is unrealistic, and anyone who clings to these will be forever disappointed in their lack of results. Something’s gotta give.

There are two ways to go about losing weight. First, you can eat reasonably and exercise a lot. Second, you can cut out high-carb foods and go Paleo and lose weight without physical activity. Don’t believe me? Well, look at these pictures.

That is what losing 110 lbs in one year looks like, and I did it without exercise. I did it by restricting my diet and sticking to it with very, very few exceptions. To be able to get the weight loss results I achieved without exercise, you must be prepared to give up the high-carb foods. There’s no way around this. If you allow  yourself a few fruit drinks, sodas, or high-carb meals a week, you will lose at a much lower rate, if even at all. Couple that with some exercise and you can start to lose weight at a steady rate, but it will be much slower.

Lots of exercise gives you more freedom in what you eat, but any nutrition or fitness coach worth their salt will tell you that a diet of moderation is key to maintaining a steady rate of weight loss.

There is more than one route to lose weight successfully, and we are all different in not only what we are willing do to but in how our bodies will respond. My way was Whole30, Paleo, and very little exercise. Your way very well may be different. However, I’m confident in saying that unless you do something radically different from what you’re doing now (if that is nothing), you will not lose weight.

There’s an old saying: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Well, there’s also no such thing as free weight loss. You’ve got to make some sort of change to make that happen. The good news is that you can do that without exercise, but it does mean being strict with your diet. The choice and the journey is yours.