Healthy Eating Is More Effective Than Exercise for Weight Loss
Exercise is an important part of a healthy life, but is it as important as healthy eating when it comes to weight loss? Would you be able to just focus on exercise and eat whatever you want to lose weight? The answer may not be what you want to hear, but it is important to understand it for successful weight loss and a healthy life.
Many People Try The Exercise-Focused Route…And Fail
There are many people who try to exercise their heart out in order to maintain the diet that they prefer. Unfortunately, they soon realize that exercise with an unhealthy diet will eventually get them nowhere.
While doing this, most people develop the mentality that they can eat whatever they want as long as they pound the calories out of them at the gym. Unfortunately, this habit of overeating or unhealthy eating happens whether or not they workout as hard as possible. It can be hard to maintain an intense exercise routine that continuously knocks off the excess calories that they are consuming. Eventually those extra calories catch up to them.
That is why focusing on changing your diet is much more beneficial than focusing only on exercise. You can maintain a healthy diet and consume an appropriate amount of calories, even when you do not feel like working out or have no time in your day to do it.
Nutrition Is Important To Fat Loss
Eating the right kind of foods can have a big impact on your ability to burn off fat. There are certain foods that have a thermogenic effect, which means that they help you burn off more calories simply by eating them. This means that your diet can boost your metabolism simply by adding foods that fire up your central nervous system and give your metabolism a boost by as much as 12%. For instance, chilies, cinnamon, and ginger can all impact your metabolism in a positive way.
Some foods burn off more calories simply through digestion. For instance, in one study half of the participants ate a sandwich with refined grains and processed cheese while the other half ate a multi-grain bread and cheddar cheese sandwich. The sandwiches were comparable in other terms, such as protein, carbohydrates, and fat, but the whole food meal was found to increase energy expenditure by nearly 50%.
“This reduction in daily energy expenditure has potential implications for diets comprised heavily of [processed foods] PFs and their associations with obesity.” – NCBI
Other foods have nutrients that boost your metabolism. When your diet lacks in certain nutrients, your metabolism can slow down because the body is not getting the nutrients it needs to work optimally.
Nutrition Is Important To Muscle Building
You may have heard that building muscle helps you burn off more fat, which is a definite pro for exercise. However, all those guys and gals at the gym know that their nutrition is an essential part of their fat loss, muscle building, and overall body maintenance. If you ask any fitness enthusiast, they will advocate that without proper nutrition and properly timed meals, it is hard to lose the fat and build the muscle.
The right diet can help you last longer in the gym, help increase muscle strength, prevent muscles from being used as an energy source, and increase hormones essential for lean muscle and strength gains.
In the end, you can experience weight loss by eating a healthy diet with whole foods whether or not you exercise. It is much easier to focus on your diet, which has a huge influence over your ability to burn off fat, than it is to try to burn off the calories and unhealthy choices day after day.