We’ve all heard about the importance of exercise. But if you’re interested in weight loss, is it better to focus on diet or exercise? In order to achieve weight loss, you need to achieve a calorie deficit. This can be done by either affecting your calories in (the food and beverages you consume) or affecting your calories out (daily activity and workouts).
Both diet and exercise play a role in weight loss, but if I had to pick one, there’s really no competition. Let’s look at a specific example: an average donut is about 250 calories. Now let’s look at the calorie expenditure for different exercises:
Walking (30 minutes, brisk rate): Approximately 159 calories
Walking (1 hour, 185-pound person): Approximately 318 calories
Now think about this: what’s easier, consuming a donut or going for an hour’s walk? If you’re aiming for weight loss, it would be a lot easier to remove that donut from your diet than add an hour of walking.
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Let’s compare just diet or just exercise for weight loss. In order to lose a pound of fat, you need to reduce your calories by about 500 per day for a week (3,500 calories per week). Through just dieting, you could reduce your intake by the equivalent of approximately two donuts a day. On the other hand, vigorous weightlifting could burn about 250 calories per half an hour. So in order to burn off those 500 calories, you would need to do an hour of vigorous weight training every day.
Ultimately, it’s important to focus on what will get you the best result in the fastest time. While exercise has many benefits, if you’re short on time and overwhelmed, it’s better to focus on controlling your nutrition intake to reduce your calories.
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