Eating Less is More Important than Exercising More
When someone wants to lose weight, they typically focus on improving their diet and increasing exercise. This plan has come from doctor after doctor, and it’s been reinforced with thousands of examples of its apparent effectiveness.
But research is finding more and more reasons why a person’s diet is more effective in achieving the overall health improvements we seek. The fact is that you can’t just exercise away your sinful eating habits. You must also make changes at the dinner table, and here’s why . . .
Exercise Alone Doesn’t Help Certain Issues
It’s important to broaden your understanding of dietary health to include more than just the extra fat on your body. There are invisible threats that aren’t necessarily correct just because your scale is giving you good news, and there are food-related impacts on your body that a simple caloric reduction won’t reverse.
If your doctor has discovered a cholesterol or blood glucose issue in your lab work, exercise can’t be the only solution. Yes, if your triglycerides are dangerously high, you will need to increase your exercise level to help your body clear your bloodstream.
However, it can be challenging and even impossible to make progress against such enemies when you continue to consume more of the problem substances. Plus an intense exercise routine can increase your appetite, spurring you to make things even worse if you aren’t eating what you should be.
Better Diets Yield Better Energy Levels
Professional athletes know that their performance depends largely on their energy level–and their energy level depends largely on their diet. People who want to have the energy for intense physical activity can’t get by with eating heavy, sleep-inducing carbs. They focus on quality foods that provide sustainable energy, quality protein for muscle maintenance, and of course, all the necessary vitamins and nutrients.
We’ve all eaten meals that leave us feeling slow and sleepy. Avoiding that type of intake will keep you energetic so you’ll feel like being active instead of lying on the couch. In other words, two diets with identical caloric content but different types of calories can have a very different impact on our bodies and the amount of exercise we feel like doing.
You Can Eat Right Every Day, But You Can’t Always Exercise
One of the biggest problems with exercise is finding a time and a place to do it. Simpler routines like walking are the easiest to schedule, but to burn higher calorie amounts (and to lose weight faster) you need to do activities that burn more calories for longer. Weight training is a great example of this, but getting to the gym for intense workouts isn’t always easy, especially if you travel for your job.
Eating is something you can control any day no matter where you are. Your grocery trips will control what items are in your home, and if you have to eat out you can select the restaurant and the items wisely. By eating right every day, you can gain ground on your required calorie differential and stay on track to lose weight.
Make no mistake, exercise is critical to losing weight, gaining energy, and improving overall health. But it’s also dangerously one-dimensional to think that an intense exercise routine paired with a reckless diet will help you achieve your goals. Instead, you must focus on the types of food you’re eating and how they will affect your body. When you eat in a way that increases your energy and addresses the unseen effects of your old diet, there’s no doubt that you’ll see the overall impact on your health—and your exercise program will be even more beneficial.
