Which is better for weight loss: dieting or exercise?

Have you ever ask this very same question to yourself? So let’s know which is which?

A recent story from US News asks this very same question, and points out that both diet and exercise are significantly important, but “if you decisively have to choose between the two, the data is clear that diet plays a much bigger role in weight loss.”

From a logical point of view, the idea is just senseless: Does anyone actually have to choose between doing one or the other? In the end, eating less, by definition, is simply doing less of something. It’s not an add-on.

Perhaps you feel you don’t have time to exercise, and that’s understandable. But your decision not to workout is totally unconnected to whether you eat less or not. So let’s just stop squabbling about it like that, alright?

The key point that’s made in the article is that you can’t “outrun a bad diet.” This maxim was popularized in the middle of 2000s in order to highlight the importance of good nutrition to go along with—not as a substitute for—a good exercise.

And the saying is generally correct, since you can eat a 900-calorie cheeseburger in 4 minutes, but it would take an hour or more of intense exercise to burn that many calories. Although you could say that lots of young athletes do outrun a bad diet. This isn’t intended to suggest that exercise doesn’t matter, only that it’s easy to mess up your calorie-burning efforts with nasty calorie-consuming habits.

Though some really fit-looking fellows will tell you straightforwardly that “diet is everything” or that “it’s about 90 percent diet.” I consider this is well-meant advice, but it also sends a message that exercise is basically irrelevant when it comes to weight loss.

Nonetheless, diet plays the greatest role in your weight loss efforts when your diet is horrible. If you’re overeating by 2,500 calories a day, you can move the needle on the scale a lot faster by simply not consuming than you can by starting an exercise program. That doesn't make dieting better than exercise. It simply means you had a really, really bad diet. And of course you have to fix it.

Ideally, not overeating should be your baseline. In reality, if you have a good amount of weight to lose, don’t say, “I’m going on a diet.” Just stop overeating. Get used to that. It’ll surely work.

Once it does, your progress will eventually slowdown, and then you can lessen calories to a greater degree, if desired. But know what? You won’t be reducing your calories by 2,000 from baseline. It might be 500 calories, or perhaps more, if you take an “extreme” method. But even with the latter, it’s not dramatically more than what you might burn if you also participated in a vigorous regular exercise program and a little more time of leisure walking.

That means it’s not “all about diet” or even “90 percent diet.” So, if eating at baseline is your norm, you can drop your weight by just exercising—no dieting required. It’s all about context, right?

Exercise is undeniably important, for a number of reasons. The role of exercise in weight loss beyond the fact that it simply burns calories, it also offers both physical and psychological benefits.

If you care about your weight, you should make every effort not overeat. That’s it, period. And this is not voluntary. And if you want to optimize weight loss and improve your health, you should exercise regularly.

Each one is not better than the other. They both work. And they work even better together for sure.



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