Food vs. Exercise

[azimm]

I'm struggling to lose weight...I can't seem to focus.  What is more important exercise or what food you eat???

[Dominique]

I think for most people it would be the food (it’s very hard to "out-exercise" a sub-optimal diet). Not so much what food you eat, but how much. Many people seem to believe that switching to "healthy" / "clean" eating should automatically result in weight loss, which is not necessarily the case. Not saying what you put in your mouth doesn’t matter, just that food quality primarily affects your health, and food quantity your weight. As to exercise, its main goal should be to improve your health, fitness, well-being, and its impact on weight loss (via energy expended) should be viewed as a side benefit.

[Callee.R]

Honestly, you can exercise every day but if you are eating too much, and all of the wrong stuff, you erase it. It is good to study your body and make a plan. If you have a fitbit make use of monitoring your heart rate for fate burning and cardio. To put it simply, you need to eat less and move more.

Don't starve yourself (this will make your body burn muscle instead of fat), try to eat healthy foods. There is a lot of bad crap and empty calories in processed foods that don't fill you. Eat carbs that aren't processed, lots of veg, fruit, and don't underestimate the importance of drinking a lot of water! Cut out empty calories like fruit juices or drinks like pop - they don't do anything for you, they make a better treat than a daily or weekly habit. 

All of our bodies are different! You need to find what works best for you and what you can actually keep up. For instance, I hate Keto, I am a vegetarian who likes carbs, but I know that for weight loss or maintenance I can't kill them, so I listened to my body and found a balance; too little and I am hungry, too much and I am bloated and lethargic. 

You can do this!!!!! I swear. Just remember, balance is key, you need to be realistic, it needs to be something you can live - it is not a diet!

Good luck!

[Baltoscott]

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@azimmwrote:

I'm struggling to lose weight...I can't seem to focus.  What is more important exercise or what food you eat???

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Food.  

For weight loss I think “what” food you eat is important to the extent that changing your diet results in consuming fewer calories.  Eating less of what you eat now might work in the short term, but you also will likely wind up hungry all the time which makes “less” food a generally ineffective weight loss strategy.  Changing what you eat might help you reduce calories without being hungry all the time.  Moving from highly processed foods (restaurant and frozen foods, which tend to have a lot of extra salt, fat and sugar and are scientifically designed to keep you wanting more) to something you make yourself out of whole foods will likely help.  

Exercise is important for other reasons (improving you blood markers, mobility, outlook on life, building muscle for body transformation,  etc), but if you are really doing enough exercise to lose weight you probably won’t be able to sustain that amount over the long term — there is only so much time in the day, and injuries happen. And if exercise helped eliminate the weight if you cut back on the exercise the weight will come back. So eventually you will have to focus on food for weight loss anyway.  (I am definitely NOT anti-exercise, but I think the best approach is to build it into your daily life so that it becomes a lifelong habit.  Trying to do it to lose weight turns it into a chore that you will eventually stop doing).