So you finally decided to start your weight loss journey. If you do a little research on the topic, you will find thousands of opinions on what is the best approach. Therefore, it is normal to get lost and don’t know where to begin.
What I want to discuss in this post when it comes to weight loss, is whether it is better to put more attention on diet and nutrition, or increase your exercise plan? Sometimes I have people coming to the gym and asking me how many calories is something they ate before coming to exercise. More or less I give them the answer at the best of my knowledge and I ask them: ‘why do you ask?’. The answer I get is: ‘I will get on the treadmill and I will not stop until the machine shows me that I lost those calories!’
How Easy Calories Are Lost
Unfortunately, the above example is not very effective. If it was, everybody would be thin! Let me explain with another example. Let’s say you walk on the treadmill for one hour and you lose 500 calories. Then, you go home and eat a meal that was 800 calories. So, it took you one hour of hard exercise to lose 500 calories, but it took you only 15 minutes to eat 800 calories.
The conclusion is that calories are lost a lot slower than are gained. Therefore, it is clear that exercise alone without proper nutrition is not enough when it comes to weight loss. It would take you way too long to lose your weight without reducing your daily calories.
As a living example of the above statement myself, I was doing up to five hours of exercise 5 times/week, but I just couldn’t lose the post pregnancy weight, and everybody was wondering if I had any kind of hormonal problems. I was not on a strict diet as I was never a big fan of diets, but I was eating normally like most people do. After talking to a nutritionist, she explained to me that the reduction of calories is far more effective than exercise alone when it comes to weight loss.
We Eat More Than We Think
Many times we miscalculate the calories we eat, thinking we eat a lot less than we actually do. Let’s say we cook a healthy in our opinion meal combining a grilled chicken breast, with some rice and vegetables. Sounds very healthy and great for diet. In our mind we think that this meal is about 500 calories, when in reality it might be around 800 calories.
If we miscalculate every meal like that, at the end of the day we end up eating way more calories than we think, wondering why we don’t lose weight.
Another thing that stops us from losing weight is the contemporary way of life. We are always in a rush, and since we don’t have time to cook a homemade, healthy meal, we end up eating fast food often, which is usually loaded with extra fat and calories, as well as preservatives.
Remember, the closer to nature the food we eat is, the easier it is for our bodies to digest it, therefore the easier it is to lose weight. So try to avoid whenever possible, the food or ingredients that have been changed from their natural state. An example would be to choose brown rice instead of white.
So I Don’t Need To Exercise To Lose Weight…
To all of my lovely ‘I hate to exercise’ friends, and I hear that often, the truth is that if you only use diet to lose weight, you will lose weight. If you only use exercise to lose weight, you will not. Of course the combination of the two will give you the best results.
But before you hurry up and feel so happy that you don’t need to exercise in order to lose weight (if you are an exercise hater), continue reading the next chapter…
Benefits Of Exercise
Yes that’s right. Sorry to interrupt your ‘I don’t need to exercise’ happiness, but many researches show that the benefits you get from exercise are far more important than nutrition. An overweight individual who exercises, can be far more healthy compared to a thin individual who does not exercise.
Just to name a few benefits of exercise, it strengthens your muscles that hold your bones in the correct position, prevents or improves various health issues such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, neurological diseases and many more. You are able to do your daily activities a lot easier, like lifting heavy groceries, and improves your balance, especially to elderly people that can fall easily.
So adding exercise to your daily routine should not be just for weight loss, but for a healthy and strong body.
So Exercise Or Diet For Weight Loss?
Well, the short answer is both. While the benefits of exercise are a lot, however, exercise alone cannot help you lose much weight. And if it does, it will take you way too long to lose it.
On the other hand, a strict diet will make you get bored and give up easily. Or perhaps lose some weight and then regain it back. What I would suggest is simply making better choices when it comes to the ingredients we use. Try to use ingredients that are as close to nature as possible. Avoid fast food and cook a healthy, homemade meal whenever possible. If you don’t have enough time, perhaps you could cook 2-3 portions and keep them in the freezer, ready to be consumed whenever you don’t have time to cook.
So you don’t need to follow a strict diet, but rather try to make healthy choices, which is something you can do for the rest of your life without thinking ‘when will my diet ends so I can return back to my old habits?’.
Combine this form of nutrition with some exercise that you enjoy, and the weight loss should not be an issue for you.