Generally, lossless and lossy coding problems are treated separately. In contrast, we shall see that the direct statement of rate-distortion theorem can actually be derived as a corollary of the lossless coding result. In fact, our idea extends to a more general multiterminal framework, and any coding problem, irrespective of the reconstruction goal, admits a direct theorem that follows from the lossless coding (Slepian-Wolf) theorem for the same encoder configuration. The converse holds if all but at most one encoded sources are perfectly reconstructed. In general, a canonical sequence of inner bounds approaches the achievable region, and points to a new problem, whose solution, if found, would lead to a computable description.