Diet Vs Exercise

RunsWithBees

When I was losing weight, diet was definitely the key to success. Now that I’m in maintenance, I feel like exercise is really what keeps me in check. I don’t always log my food but I am aware of my portions, logging taught me how much I should be eating and how to stop when I’m full. If I put in an effort to exercise regularly and get enough daily activity I can afford to not have to count every calorie because exercise makes up for the portion inaccuracies and margins of error. It’s worked for me to maintain my goal weight for 5 years now without having to log all the time. The couple of times I regained more than 5 lbs was directly attributable to a decline in my work activity and I then had to turn to diet to lose again.

HeliumIsNoble

People try to turn it into a matter of black and white, especially outside MFP.

If someone is unwise enough to say that they want to lose weight, they get bombarded with stupid advice from all quarters, from "Have a teaspoonful of apple cider vinegar every morning" and so on. I include blanket pronouncements like "Exercise is the only way!" and "Diet, diet, diet! You can't outrun your fork, so don't bother with the exercise. It'll only make you hungry" in that.

The way to lose weight full stop is to calculate a (sensible) calorie deficit and keep to it for long enough. (However, the way you lose weight can affect what the new lighter you actually looks like at the end of all this.)

The way to keep to that calorie deficit is an individual decision, which should be made having taken your starting baseline and lifestyle into account.

If we simplify it a lot, the possible options are:
a) only reducing your intake (diet alone)
b) only increasing your output (exercise alone)
c) a combination of a+b

You should look at your starting point, and work out which is the better method for you.

In my n=1 experience, I was in the overweight category on the BMI chart, and getting closer to the obese category than the normal weight category.

So I decided to overhaul my life before I got to the obese category, following Option C in 2015. I took up a form of sport that I loved for itself, not just the weight-loss benefits, that I knew I could continue with, no matter what. Then I started logging my food. Over the next two years, I went from BMI 27.x to 24.x. Depending on what time in my cycle I weighed myself, I'd lost between 7% and 10% of my starting weight, and I was working on getting into BMI 23.x.

Then I had a close personal bereavement, and I just didn't have the headspace to bother with weighing my food, so I didn't. The scales went up a bit, and I thought "well, kitten it". After that, I ate whatever I liked for the following fifteen months. However, I kept going to my sports sessions. I do 5-6 hours a week of this sport, and according to MFP's various entries on the database, it burns between 572 and 657 calories per hour. Personally, I think that's a bit high, but you get the idea.

I kept on periodically weighing myself between then and now, and found I gradually gained 2kg, and then maintained it for a year, which put me into BMI 25.7. Not great, but not a huge disaster. To hear some people rubbish the concept of exercise, you'd think I should have put on 15kg.

Does option C work for everyone? Obviously not. But I can tell you now that option A, diet alone, does. not. work. for me. Option B of exercise alone didn't work that well either, at least not when paired with complete hedonism food-wise; so I'm going to log my food and cut the daily slices of cake, in conjunction with 5-6 hours of sport.