What Is More Important - Diet Or Exercise

The Case for Diet

On the face of it, diet appears to be the most important factor in changing your lifestyle and body shape, at least when it comes to weight loss.

At a basic level, losing weight and burning fat comes down to just one thing – calorie balance. To lose weight you must burn more calories than you eat. Sure, you can increase your calorie burn through exercise, but it’s far, far easier to create this calorie deficit by dieting.

Take a look at this example to illustrate the point:

It takes a calorie deficit of 3,500 to burn one pound of fat. The amount of calories you burn exercising depends on many different factors, namely the type of training you do, how much effort you put in, your age, gender, weight, body composition and genetics, but for argument’s sake we can say that one hour of moderate intensity cardio training, such as jogging or cycling burns around 600 calories per hour.

Therefore, to lose one pound of fat, you’d have to exercise for nearly six hours. Now, even for the most hardened of gym devotees, six hours in say, a week, is a fair amount of time to give up for training. And that’s just to lose one measly pound.

This doesn't mean following some horrendous, low calorie, low carb, deprivation style diet either. Take a typical day of eating for the average person.

Breakfast might be toast with butter, a bowl of cereal and a glass of fruit juice. Lunch consists of a sandwich, chips, a soda and some sort of candy bar, while dinner is a pasta or rice dish with meat. Add in a few snacks here and there, even of the “healthier” variety such as fruit, and, depending on quantity size, this could easily top 3,000 calories. (Most of which comes from sugar, refined carbs and poor-quality fats, but that’s another matter.)

By making a few simple dietary changes, such as switching your breakfast to a vegetable omelet, or having water instead of fruit juice and a protein shake instead of toast and butter, or ditching the bread at lunch in favor of salad, and lowering the carbs at dinner, you can save yourself well over 600 calories. That’s the same as you’d burn in an hour of exercising, but these changes won’t take you nearly as long. In fact, they may even save you time.

You then have the issue of general health. We’re constantly being warned about the dangers of processed foods, trans fats, sugars and junk foods. Regardless of whether you’re overweight or not, foods high in these pose a risk to your health. By cleaning up your diet and cutting back on these, you’ll make yourself a good deal healthy and potentially prolong your life.

In terms of building muscle and improving athletic performance, food is fuel. There’s a reason why bodybuilders say that diet is as important as training, and that’s because what you put in determines what you get out. Feed your body well and you’ll perform well, feed it badly, and, well….

You simply can’t out-train a bad diet. Even with no exercise whatsoever you could lose weight, simply by scaling back your calorie intake.

Where Exercise Wins Out

Before you hand in your gym membership card, none of the above is designed to take away from the importance of exercise.

Sure, you CAN lose weight just from dieting, but you’ll look pretty terrible. 

Where weight loss is concerned, cardiovascular training is likely extremely over-rated, especially going by the earlier example of cycling for an hour only burning 600 calories. Weight training on the other hand, is not.

Weight training actually burns fewer calories per hour in general than most cardio exercises, but lifting weights has a profound effect on your body composition and metabolism.

After lifting weights, your body increases its uptake of oxygen in order to repair the muscle cells damaged while training and it doing so, creates a huge metabolic boost. This is a concept known as excessive post-exercise oxygen consumption, or EPOC. This increased calorie burn can last for over 24 hours and will lead to much, much greater fat loss gains.

Secondly, weight training builds muscle. Whether you’re in pursuit of big, bulging muscles or not, muscle plays an incredibly important role. Not only does it make you stronger and less prone to injury, more muscle mass also increases your metabolism and calorie burn and will prevent you from looking soft and stringy when losing fat. You’ll look lean, defined and toned instead.

There’s also the aspect of performance to take into account too. If you’re in the least bit interested in playing sports, competing in athletics, or building muscle, you need to exercise.

Just as diet has many benefits in terms of improving your general health, exercise does too. Training improves your insulin sensitivity, meaning you process carbohydrates better, leading to fewer spikes in blood sugar levels and reducing your risk of diabetes. Your heart will be healthier, your bones and joints stronger, and your risks of developing issues with cholesterol, blood pressure and cognitive function greatly reduced.

The Wrap Up

If you absolutely had to choose just one – diet or exercise – you would be better off choosing exercise. However, it really doesn't have to come down to an either or scenario.

A high energy intake and a high energy expenditure will lead to much better body composition than a low energy intake and a low energy expenditure, according to sports nutritionist Dr. John Berardi. In essence, this means that