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Is Diet Or Exercise More Effective For Fat Loss And Muscle Tone?
So when it comes to losing unwanted body fat, is diet or exercise more important? If you were to ask me 20 years ago, I would have told you that exercise was the key to a sexy body. While exercise is important, I think the real key to burning body fat and looking great is the result of a clean diet. If people ate properly, there would be many more toned people in gyms all over the world.
So when it comes to losing unwanted body fat, is diet or exercise more important? If you were to ask me 20 years ago, I would have told you that exercise was the key to a sexy body. While exercise is important, I think the real key to burning body fat and looking great is the result of a clean diet. If people ate properly, there would be many more toned people in gyms all over the world.
The Ideal Weight Loss Plan is a Combination of Diet and Exercise
Everyone knows that exercise along with a good diet is a great approach to losing weight. The challenge with exercising is that often times life gets busy. There isn’t always time to exercise, but you always have time for a proper diet. My suggestion is to keep your diet clean at all times, and exercise when time allows.
“You Can’t Out-Exercise a Big Mac”
A Big Mac has 540 calories. Do you realize how much exercising it takes to burn those calories? Well about an hour on the elliptical trainer at a moderate pace would do the trick! So after an hour of boring cardio, you are back to square one. You probably won’t lose weight at all especially if you added the fries and soft drink. Large fries would be an extra 570 calories and a large non-diet soft drink would be an extra 310 calories. So how much exercise would you have to do to burn 1,400+ calories? Let’s not even go there!
It is Easier to Create a Large Calorie Deficit Through Dieting
A simple approach to losing weight is to create a daily calorie deficit. Basically, the idea is for your body to use more calories each day than what you consume in food calories. So, there are two ways to create this deficit; either consume less calories or burn more through exercising. Each pound of fat on your body is 3,500 calories. So to lose 2 pounds per week, you need to create a weekly calorie deficit of 7,000or a daily calorie deficit of 1,000. In my opinion it is much easier to create this calorie deficit by not eating those calories in the first place. You would have to spend two hours at a moderate pace on a stationary bike EVERY day to accomplish this!
Fat Loss Is A Bit More Complicated
The body is actually much more complex than simply responding precisely to a calorie deficit. There are WAY more variables that come into play when it comes to fat loss; the type of food you eat, the timing of your meals, the metabolic effect of exercise, the muscle sparing effect of resistance training, etc. There are a lot of things that come into the fat loss picture that I’m not addressing here.
Diet Play a Bigger Role in Fat Loss Than Most People Realize
I would bet that over 80% of the articles in fitness magazines are about exercise. It does make a lot of sense, because exercising is a much more interesting topic. The funny thing is that diet is equally, if not more important to an attractive physique. Don’t get me wrong. I am a HUGE believer in regular exercise, I just think people are “spinning their wheels” when it comes to getting fit by not paying enough attention to diet. If your diet is bad, a lot of your effort in the gym goes to waste.
Your Will Get WAY More Out of Cardio When Your Diet is In Order
Show me an overweight person who works outs hard 5 times a week and I will show you a person who doesn’t eat well! The mistake people often make in gyms is that they copy the workout routine of a person who is in great shape. The real reason that person is in great shape is because of their clean diet. True weight loss happens “behind the scenes”. Working out speeds along the process, but the foundation of a great body is in a clean diet.
Bonus: Here is a Way to Increase Your Self-Discipline
Want to make sure you eat well as well as exercise? Plan to exercise later in the day and make yourself eat well to “prepare your body” to get the most out of your cardio workout. When you eat lower calories leading up to your workout, your body will burn fat for energy. If you eat strictly all day that workout will do wonders for you. So what happens if you don’t “feel like” exercising once the evening rolls around? Well, you just spent all day preparing your body to get the most out of exercising. It would be foolish to miss this great window of opportunity when it comes to burning off unwanted body fat. You will find that you will naturally find the self-discipline to exercise more, the stricter you are with your diet. This is how to truly transform your body!