Is Diet or Exercise More Effective For Fat Loss and Muscle Tone?

by Rusty Moore

So is diet or exercise more important when it comes to losing body fat? I am the author of a fitness site so obviously I am a big believer in exercise, but to be honest, you can get pretty dramatic results from diet alone. In fact, I would say that 90% of the people who are having a tough time losing weight are simply messing up when it comes to diet.

In a Perfect World You Should Combine 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 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!

This is Simplifying Fat Loss a Bit

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 is More Important Than Many 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.

Your Will Get WAY More Out of Cardio When Your Diet is In Order

If you are going to do a session of intense cardio or HIIT, you obviously want to get good results. If you are downing fast food and drinking soda on a regular basis, you are just getting back to square one with cardio, you will not lose body fat. If you do that exact same cardio workout and follow a clean diet, you will get a huge fat loss boost from that cardio.

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

Self-discipline sometimes just depends upon how you view certain things. It really isn't that a certain person is just naturally more disciplined than other people, often times they just think a bit differently about a certain task. Here is the way I view cardio that almost forces me to follow a strict diet. I tell myself that if I do cardio while following a bad diet, that I am accomplishing nothing as far as getting lean is concerned. Since I do a pretty intense High Intensity Interval Training Routine, I would be mad if I didn't see results! I follow a clean diet, because I can't stand the thought of working out that hard for nothing. It works the other way as well. When I'm following a clean diet, I can't stand the thought of not doing cardio because I know it will be that much more effective!

About the Author:

Want a lean and hot body like Jessica Biel or Will Smith? Learn the Diet and Exercise methods of Hollywood's Sexiest Actors and Actresses. Click here for expert, up-to-date, Fitness Tips! This article is available as a unique content article with free reprint rights.