Is Diet The Key to Burning Body Fat or Is Exercise the Answer
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on 2/26/2008
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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 Best "One Two" Weight Loss Combo is Both 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 Much Easier to Create A Large Calorie Deficit With a Clean Diet
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
If you are eating a bunch of calories, a large part of your time spent in the gym is a waste. What is crazy is that over 80% of all articles in fitness magazines focus on exercise, while diet is the key to getting a great looking body. I am a HUGE believer in regular exercise, I just think that diet is what is holding most people back from hitting their goals.
Diet is What Makes Your Cardio Much More Effective
If you eat junk food or just an excessive amount of calories each day, you are sabotaging your efforts in the gym. A hard cardio workout can be tough. It should drive you nuts to know that a bad diet will negate any positive benefits you could have had from cardio. If you did that same workout on a low calorie diet, you would actually reach your goals and not struggle so hard with weight loss.
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cardio, hiit, diet, exercise, lose body fat
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