out-exercising a bad diet

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  • GertrudeHorse
    GertrudeHorse Posts: 646 Member
    If you are doing a huge amount of cardio then it is possible, but it depends how bad your definition of "bad" diet is.

    When I was doing 14-20 hours of cardio per week I "got away with" a pretty crap diet and stayed lean. But the overexercising caused me to start peeing blood, so that probably indicates you shouldn't try and out-exercise a bad diet.

    Thank you for your input but again - I am talking about a controlled excess calories (not a "bad diet" all the time - phrasing was my fault, sorry) and compensating those with exercise.

    In that case, most definitely :-)
  • cwolfman13
    cwolfman13 Posts: 41,865 Member
    The phrase comes from the fact that people go workout, but they're surprised that they don't lose weight...because most people do not track calories so they go workout which generally makes people hungrier so they usually negate any possible deficit they may create with exercise. How many people do you know that workout all the time but never lose a Lb? There are tons of them in my gym...they're trying to out exercise their diet...it doesn't matter "good" or "bad" foods...if you overeat, you overeat and it can be difficult to out pace consumption.

    To boot, it's just really not very efficient...it is far more efficient for both loss and maintenance to utilize your diet for weight control and exercise for fitness. Always trying to outrun your diet and/or overeating with exercise can bring about an unhealthy relationship with exercise as well as lead to over training and injury.

    Really, it is diet for weight control; exercise for fitness.
  • Cre8veLifeR
    Cre8veLifeR Posts: 1,062 Member
    You definitely can burn off extra calories - but if you consistently have a bad diet (it doesn't sound like you do) it will eventually catch up with you!! You will burn yourself out, and it will show. When you exercise you are breaking your body down physically, neurologically and hormonally. If you follow a strenuous exercise regimen then you want to make sure to give your body proper nutrition so it can repair itself. Unfortunately, Twinkies ain't gonna cut it. :sad:
  • mjames9287
    mjames9287 Posts: 14
    The only reason I don't trust out-eating your diet is that I don't believe that you get an accurate read on how many calories you burn in many cases. Sure, there are ways to be more precise, but I see people on these forums insist they burn 1000 calories in an hour of exercise. I'm just not buying it. If you overestimate exercise calories, you aren't at as big of a deficit as you think you are. I'm sure this way of weight loss works for some people, I just don't personally trust that the numbers come out right according to the database of calories burned during exercise.

    FINALLY!!! I am so glad to see that I am not the only one who thinks that 1 hour of cardio burns all these calories.

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