It’s an old debate really, and while there are those that would pick sides, most would agree that weight loss cannot be brought on in a healthy manner unless you are maintaining both fronts with precision. Nevertheless, we are going a step further today and taking the question head on to find out once and for all if one of these two truly is more essential than the other for achieving your weight loss goals.
The Diet is More Important than Exercise
To answer the question in one line, one would have to say that strictly speaking, diet is indeed more important for weight loss than exercise. It’s quite simple really; what you consume is always going to be more important than how much you move your body around in a quest to burn calories. There is no doubt that exercise hastens the weight loss process and it is absolutely essential to build muscle mass, but when it comes to the raw weight loss potentials, diet just wins hands down.
If you have any doubts regarding this conclusion, you need to understand the fact that while you can definitely burn a lot of calories through planned exercise and determination, you will probably end up eating more calories than you just burned at the gym in just a single post-workout meal! So, if you skipped the workout and the meal, you would end up creating a greater calorie deficit than if you worked out and ate the meal. Add all that to the fact that exercise makes us hungrier than usual and it becomes even harder to control your diet when you are exercising than when you are not.
You Can’t Lose Any Significant Weight Through Exercise Only
In case you thought that you could get away with eating junk just because you exercise regularly, you thought wrong. On the contrary, it is possible to lose weight only through dieting, but any significant weight loss is not possible under normal circumstances if you exercise without controlling what you eat. Unhealthy foods are generally rich in calories and saturated fat, while being low on essential nutrients such as protein and unsaturated fat. Therefore, you just cannot burn off the excess calories by working out hard, if you are eating poorly at the same time.
The Body Adjusts and Makes the Job Harder
This is true for diets as well, but it is particularly true for exercise routines. The amount of muscle you will build during your first two years, or the amount of weight you will lose during your first few months at the gym, are not going to be matched by similar rates of improvement later on. Our bodies adjust and we reach a plateau where gaining even a quarter of an inch on your bicep feels like a herculean task, while losing just a couple of pounds takes a lot more labor than before. The body can and will also adjust to your diets in the same way, but by the time you reach your weight loss plateau with a diet, you will have come very close to your goals already.
Now that we have established that dieting is indeed more important than exercising, head over to Cuisine Study and find out everything you will ever need to about eating healthily and keeping it tasty at the same time. Do keep in mind that if you are serious about losing weight fast, becoming healthy and looking good in the process, you will always need to combine both diet and exercise for best results.