.: Exercising vs. Dieting

In their quest for weight loss, men toss back and forth one common question: What’s more important -- exercising or dieting? Common sense tells you that both play important roles in helping you shed the pounds, but what does science say? Does one really trump the other when it comes to progress?

There are a few important things you need to consider when deciding between exercising vs. dieting. While this article isn’t supposed to make you think that one is more essential than the other, its aim is to help you determine what the correct balance between exercising vs. dieting is for your own individual goals and lifestyle.

So, to help you understand, let's discuss exercising vs. dieting.

the law of weight loss

The law of weight loss must be addressed. This law states that in order to lose body mass, one must have a net calorie deficit at the end of the day. If you end up with a net surplus at the end of the day, you will gain weight.

Weight loss does really boil down to one simple equation, but how you get there is a little more complicated.

the role of dieting

We’ve determined that you must be in a net deficit, which can be defined as all the calories taken into your body (through food or beverage) minus all the calories you have burned throughout the day through not only scheduled exercise, but also through bodily processes that are required to keep you alive (also known as the basal metabolic rate). Diet, as you can see, is a major component of this equation.

The benefits of relying on diet to do the work

Many personal trainers or weight loss experts say that, ideally, you want your diet to be the thing that is causing the weight loss in and of itself, without relying on exercise to do any of the work.

They may not shun exercise, but they believe exercise should be added to the equation for health, strength and aesthetic benefits rather than as a means of “burning calories,” thus tilting that important equation toward the net deficit side.

The benefit of such an approach is that first, it forces you to diet. By strictly placing focus on the diet end of things, there is a slightly better chance that you will also up your nutritional intake as well since, chances are, the foods you will be eating to lose weight will be lower in calories (fruits and vegetables, for example), which are coincidentally more nutrient-dense than typical high-calorie snack foods.

The second benefit of this approach is that it reduces the likelihood of exercise obsession or overtraining. Some dieters, when really trying to speed up fat loss, will start spending hour upon hour in the gym, mostly on cardio equipment with weight-lifting sessions supplemented in.

While workouts keep you feeling good, this is definitely a case where you can get too much of a good thing.

By doing marathon-long workouts, you risk overtraining yourself, especially if you are eating hypo-calorically. Furthermore, you might find yourself needing exercise when you feel anxious for missing a session.

Men are not immune to this type of thing, although many think it only affects women. Don’t kid yourself, though; there are more men than you think who are on the verge of developing this type of exercise disorder.

The drawbacks of relying on diet to do the work

Next, we come to the drawbacks of relying on only your diet to do the work for you. The biggest problem here is when an exercise program is completely aborted because all the focus is on the diet.

Without exercise, there is a much greater chance you will lose muscle mass while dieting than if you were to include it. Since muscle is one of the most calorically expensive tissues in the body, this is something you really do want to avoid at all costs.

Additionally, you obviously want the weight loss to look good, and this is possible if you are at the very least performing a moderate strength-training routine.

The second drawback of strictly using your diet is that of hunger control and total caloric intake. For some individuals, you may need to bring calories down to very low levels without physical activity to get weight loss moving. This could put you at risk for nutrient deficiencies simply because you can’t take in enough nutrition and still be under that daily total.

Furthermore, exercise tends to have appetite-suppressing effects, so this can make the process of dieting more comfortable.

the role of exercise

Next, let’s look at the role exercise will play in the weight-loss equation.

The benefits of relying on exercise to do the work

Exercise can be a very effective tool when it comes to weight loss, especially when you combine a good weight-lifting program with intense sprinting activity. Both of these fitness techniques tend to dramatically raise your metabolism for up to hours at a time, helping to stroke that metabolic furnace of yours.

A big benefit you’ll get from using exercise as the main way of losing weight is that it will get you into very good habits as far as fitness is concerned. Studies have shown that those who use a fitness program and remain active after losing weight have been far more likely to keep the weight off in the long-term than those who did not.
Furthermore, by staying active you help build strength, stamina and flexibility, all of which help to increase your quality of life and keep you mobile into older age.

The second benefit of using exercise as a means of weight loss is that it will allow you a little more freedom on the diet side of the equation. If you really do enjoy your food and are active enough, you should be able to keep more of the foods you love in your plan since you’re burning more total calories per day.

The drawbacks of relying on exercise to do the work

Finally, the drawback of using exercise alone to do the work is that many individuals will start to “reward” themselves with their diet because of the workouts they’ve done. They put in a really terrific cardio session and figure they’ve earned a small treat -- after all, they worked so hard, they should still see weight loss, right?

Unfortunately, it is exceptionally easy to consume all the calories you’ve just burned off in a matter of minutes. If you are not particularly careful with this, you might find yourself stalling with weight loss or potentially even gaining weight.

Secondly, when a great deal of exercise is performed, it does tend to make people hungrier, so this is another concept that can also be taken to the extreme.