Which is better – diet or exercise?

Which one of these statements do you think is true?

“I can eat pretty much whatever I want because I work out for an hour every day.”

“I don’t need to work out if I just watch what I eat.”

Ah – the age old “diet vs exercise” questions: Is it more important to eat clean or to get in daily calorie-burning workouts? Is one better than the other? And or course – where should my focus be? Have you ever had any of those questions?

There has actually been a ton of research done to answer them and today on Tone-and-Tighten.com I wanted to clear them up for you. You’ll have a better understanding of the relationship between diet and exercise and be able to come up with the formula that will ultimately work the best for you! Here we go:

Alright – before we get into this too much I’ve got a term I need to explain.

Your “Basal Metabolic Rate” or BMR is a measurement of how many calories your body burns just to stay alive. If you were to wake up and just live and breathe and nothing more, your body would expend a certain number of calories just performing its bodily functions. Your BMR depends on a lot of variables – height, weight, sex, activity level, genetics, etc and you can calculate what it is (or pretty close to what it is) by checking out this link.

For the rest of the post, we’ll take a 5’7″ 150-pound, 30-year-old female. Her BMR, or the number of calories her body will burn just staying alive, is 1500 calories. Now… diet vs exercise…

Diet?? So let’s say our example female starts hitting the diet train pretty hard. She starts eating cleaner, watching what she eats, eliminates junk food, and really just starts to dominate in the kitchen. Let’s say she gets her diet down to around 1800 calories a day. If she needs 1500 just to stay alive and consumes 1800 daily, there’s a net 300 calories in there somewhere. This is easily burned up doing your everyday tasks (anything MORE than just laying there breathing). Going to the store, chasing the kids, walking, etc all requires energy (calories) above and beyond your BMR. As long as she burns 300 calories doing these activities, she basically gets a status quo for the day – nothing gained nothing lost. In order to lose weight, she would have to create more of a deficit somehow – either eating fewer calories or increasing her energy expenditure a little. Which is a fantastic segue into…

Exercise?? Let’s say our 5’7″ 150 pound 30-year old female decides the diet thing sucks and would rather workout like a crazy woman and eat whatever she wants.We’ll say she now consumes 2200 calories (completely typical here in the United States) but works out for 30 minutes every day. Her BMR will stay the same at 1500 calories and we’ll still give her the 300 for performing normal-everyday tasks. That takes us to 1800, but according to her 2200 calories that she’s consuming we have 400 calories in there that will be stored in her body if we don’t burn them up somehow. Will her 30-minute-a-day workout make up for those calories? Well…
Weight lifting = 85 calories burned in 30 minutes
Jogging = 238 calories burned in 30 minutes
Running (6 mph) = 250 calories burned in 30 minutes
HIIT workout (HIGH intensity) = 300 calories burned in 30 minutes

You can see that it’s actually pretty tough to nullify a bad diet by working out. Of course you might ask – “couldn’t she just workout a little longer to make up for it?” The answer is – definitely; but let me ask you – do you workout for 30 minutes EVERYDAY of the week?? I know few people who have even have time for that; let alone stick to it consistently.

So – what do you think the answer is?? Should you focus more on watching your diet or exercising more? The answer…

BOTH.

In order to get the absolute biggest bang for your buck and make your weight loss/fitness goals a reality you HAVE to give an equal effort to each. Let’s take our gal through one more example.

Let’s say we cut her down to a completely doable 1900 calorie diet. That’s not starving, but it’s certainly cut out a lot of excess. On top of this let’s say she works out for an AVERAGE of 15 minutes a day (maybe 30 minutes every-other-day) doing some running and weight training. So we’ll take her BMR of 1500, we’ll add 300 for chasing kids, working, shopping, etc. and subtract it from her 2000 calorie diet. She only has 100 calories that need to be burned off in her 15-minute workout (or 30 minutes every other day).

These numbers are COMPLETELY DOABLE, REALISTIC, AND ATTAINABLE! This isn’t a crash diet nor is it a crazy workout schedule. It’s a great goal to shoot for and I know you can do it.

Okay really though, I admit I picked the easy answer there. If you’re going to spend your time and effort anywhere I advise you do it in your diet first.

Think about it – when was the last time you ate 300 calories in a brownie? Last night, right? When was the last time you burned 300 calories working out? To give you some perspective that would be approximately 25 minutes of burpees to burn that one single, chocolately, fudgey goodness. Fix your diet and you can expect good results. Fix your diet AND increase your exercise, you can expect miracles to happen!!

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Looking for more great posts about diet and exercise? Here are a few of my favorites…

Questions or comments? I would love to hear from you! Leave me a comment below or email me at ToneandTightenFitness{at}gmail.com

Make it happen,

Jared