Food intake vs Exercise - the best way to lose weight

There are a lot of arguments both ways when it comes down to the "best" way to lose weight. If you've read my blog, you'll notice I try to incorporate a bit of exercise into my routine every day in addition to healthy eating.

I'm a firm believer that exercise is necessary for maintaining your weight loss long term as well as your overall well-being. It may be hard to get started, but I guarantee if you can get into a routine, after a couple of weeks you'll feel bad if you don't exercise!

Back to the title of this post - where should we be concentrating our efforts when it comes to weight loss? Well from everything I've read, I believe that diet is the number one place to start and should be given the top priority.

Why is this? Well because it takes far more effort to burn off those excess calories by working out than it does to simply not eat them in the first place. I'm sure most of us know that losing weight is a numbers game - you have to eat less calories than you burn in a day in order to lose weight (that is, have a calorie deficient diet).

Here is an extract from an article on free women's fitness entitled How to Lose Weight for Good, Your Ultimate Guide (click on the link to read the article in full):

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The mathematics of weight loss

The sad part about weight loss is that it is mostly, in the long term, about maths. You see, if you want to lose weight you need to be burning more calories than you take in. If you have excess calories in your diet they are going to be converted into fat stores. And the thing that most women don’t realize is that over a number of years those calories add up.

Take a look:

If you have a can of Coke with lunch everyday of the week you are taking in 155 calories x seven days a week. That is 1085 calories a week. Now, there are 3500 calories per pound of body fat. So, if you take in 1085 calories from one can of Coke per day in three weeks you have added a pound of fat. That is 17 pounds per year. Just from your daily Coke.

Now, don’t panic. Weight loss is more complicated than that. It is not that black and white. The point of the above example is to show you how important your diet is going to be over the course of your life. Every little thing you take in each day will add up to extra pounds.

Eating well vs running

The most important thing you need to realize after seeing that mathematical example is that eating well is so so so much easier than running and burning the calories. All you have to do is leave the can of Coke in the fridge and you have effectively burned 155 calories from your diet. That is a good 20 minutes on the treadmill. Now, when you do go to the treadmill, you are going to be burning other calories and that means you are going to lose weight a lot faster than if you had that Coke with lunch.

Remember this: eating well is so much easier than running.

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Having regard to this, it seems logical why people have so much success with shake diets, even without exercise. The challenge that ultiamtely faces us is the transition to normal eating at which stage it's vitally important to remember that it's a numbers game!