Is Diet Or Exercise More Effective For Fat Loss And Muscle Tone?

Obviously both diet and exercise are key when it comes to losing weight and getting a toned body. The question is this…are they equally important or is what you eat more important than what you burn? As a fitness site author I am a huge believer in exercise, but I would say the real key to muscle tone and a sexy body lies in what you eat each day.

The Ideal Weight Loss Plan is a Combination of Diet and Exercise

Have you ever been too busy to exercise? Me too! Well, you can’t use that excuse when it comes to eating a clean diet. No matter how busy life gets, you always have time to eat well. So, while you may go days and even weeks without visiting a gym, you can eat well every single day.

“You Can’t Out-Exercise a Big Mac”

A Big Mac has 540 calories. Do you realize how much exercising it takes to smolder those calories? Well around a hour on the curved trainer at a moderate pace would do the trick! So after a hour of exhausting cardio, you are starting over. You probably won’t lose weight at all especially if you added the fries and soda. Huge fries would be an additional 570 calories and a large non-diet soft drink would be an additional 310 calories. So how much practice would you have  to do to burn 1,400+ calories? Let’s not even go there!

A Clean Diet Creates a Larger Calorie Deficit Than Exercising

The best way to lose weight is through creating a large daily calorie deficit. The goal is to for your body to use more calories each day than what it consumes. If you wanted to lose a pound of fat on your body, you have to create a 3,500 calorie deficit over time. If you wanted to lose 2 pounds per week that would be a deficit of 7,000 calories over a week…or a daily calorie deficit of 1,000. Do you know it takes close to 2 hours of moderate cardio to burn 1,000 calories. The best plan is not to eat those calories in the first place!

This is Simplifying Fat Loss a Bit

The body is actually much more complex than simply responding accurately to a calorie shortage. There are WAY more factors that come into play when it comes to fat loss; the type of nourishment you eat, the planning of your dinners, the metabolic  effect of exercise, the muscle sparing effect of resistance preparing, and so forth. There are a great deal 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 work out. It makes a ton of sense, in light of the fact that exercising is a much more interesting topic. The funny thing is that eating regimen is similarly, if not more imperative to an alluring physique. Don’t get me wrong. I am a HUGE believer in regular work out, I simply think individuals are "wasting their time"  when it comes to getting fit by not paying enough attention to count calories. On the off chance that your eating regimen is awful, a ton of your exertion in the gym goes to waste.

Want your Cardio to Be 3 Times More Effective? Then Eat Well!

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.

Bonus: Here is a Way to Increase Your Self-Discipline

The crazy thing about self-discipline is that it all depends upon the “way you think about things”. We are impressed when we see someone who has strong self-discipline, but you would act the same if you thought like that person thought. Hope that makes sense. Here is the way I think about cardio exercise and diet that works for me. If I know I am going to workout hard later in the day, I will eat strictly. The reason I do this is that I actually want my exercise to mean something and burn body fat. During the day I will eat low calorie foods to prepare for my early evening workout. Often times the evening rolls around and I don’t feel like exercising. Since I skipped the unhealthy food and spent all day getting my body ready to exercise, it would be foolish if I skipped a workout. I force myself to exercise, since I stuck to a strict diet during the day. This is a great way to make diet and exercise play off of each other.

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