(*Anyone who’s relatively able bodied and without obvious illnesses or other issues)
Anyone can get fit. Really, it takes about 2.5 hours a week of work to be in decent shape, in addition to some other reasonable decisions like eating well.
I think everyone should be athletic in something. Weight lifting is one option, but equally viable are getting good at running, swimming, rock climbing, etc. You don’t have to force yourself to go to the gym if you really don’t like lifting heavy blocks of iron up and down. Go run in the park, go hiking, go outside and swim. Do something. Enjoy your body’s abilities while it’s still able to exercise.
If you want to get into weight-lifting shape, you can and should run Strong Lifts 5x5 for 45 minutes 3 times a week1. If you want to get into running shape, run couch to 5k for starters.
Calories out
Alternatively, you could swim for 30 minutes every weekday, burning about 1,150 extra calories a week (excluding afterburner effect and benefits to sleep). That’s a pound a week. Running is about the same caloric expenditure, a little easier to execute, but a little more taxing on the body. Even just walking more or doing yoga a few times a week would make you significantly healthier.
Calories in
The real killer is in the kitchen though. As you see above, a pretty significant effort has to be put through to burn enough calories in the kitchen to lose weight. It’s much easier to just eat less (actually easiest to do a bit of both). “Easier” in terms of calories, eating itself in modern times is an addictive behavior and probably should be viewed/treated as such. It’s better to never form the addiction than to try to break it.
Healthy Alternatives
That being said, I think it’s a lot easier to add habits than break habits (about working out or eating).
Recently, in a cut I did, I found that just by replacing my morning cereal with low-fat greek yogurt, I could reduce my caloric intake by about 300 calories a day. After just a week of doing this, I actually much prefer it to the former cereal. Additionally, I’ll occasionally make edamame pasta, which has crazy macros: in about half a pound, it has nearly 500 fewer calories and almost all of those are protein instead of carbs. The taste is about the same if you can make sauce well.
If you’re eating like I did (cereal every morning, pasta every night), that’s about 800 calories a day with extremely little effort. Let’s say you just do this weekdays and eat the same on weekends as you do currently, that’s 4,400 calories a week or over 1 pound of weight lost a week just by switching two items. You probably don’t eat the same thing every day, but this is just a showcase that with a few, very easy switches in what you eat you can make a huge difference in your average caloric intake.
These little changes with a few life-style exercise changes can make a massive difference in your overall health. Most importantly, you should track what you eat and do: You can’t optimize what you can’t measure.
Footnotes
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=135 minutes a week, just over 2 hours ↩