About Dieting and Dieting+Exercising

Exercising will give you fitness muscle tone and help your cardiovascular health. Dieting will help you lose weight.

For weight loss, the results will be the same. For body composition (fat and muscle content), the results will drastically differ, particularly if you incorporate strength training. Strength training will help you maintain the muscle mass you already have, helping more of your weight loss come from fat than if you did not strength train. This will result in a better ending physique. Cardiovascular exercise is excellent for your heart, and in my experience is a great mood enhancer, so you should do that as well. As they say, diet to look good in clothes, exercise to look good naked.

I think if you exercise plus eat good food, you will feel much, much better! They say weight loss is 80% diet and 20% exercise, but when I skimp on the element of exercise, I don't feel as strong, energetic, and happy. Exercise is huge! Even 15-20 minutes a day makes a difference. Cheers!

On the flip side, exercise can increase appetite and requires willpower (which may be better reserved for diet if you're struggling). Some exercise is better than none of course, particularly a balance of weight training and cardio.

one of the issues is that it is actually not that easy to determine how many calories you have burnt unless you have a HRM with a chest strap.

another can be observed in most gyms with a café: burning 300 cals in exercise increases the appetite to the point that that piece of cheesecake for 600 can't be resisted

If you exercise to lose weight, you are going down the wrong road...

And yet somehow, I've lost a significant amount of weight, and without counting calories. The self-righteous sentiment that weight loss has nothing to do with exercise is all over this site, but whatever, it works for me.

Just because you don't 'count calories' does not mean you don't control your calorie intake

Your Body did not evolve to sit all day, live that life and you end up in all kinds of a mess

If you are not exercising you are doing yourself a disservice. If you don't want to eat all of the exercise calories back, don't. But DO workout. Working out is important for bone density, getting a good night's sleep, heart health, being able to run away in case zombies attack, etc. Humans are animals too, we need exercise.

Is there any difference between Dieting and Dieting plus exercising. For example, If I eat 1300 kcal a day, will I get the same results as if eat 1800 kcal and then burn 500 kcal from it with exercising. The net calories will be the same, so basically I would like to know if there's any advantages in exercising or the results are just the same.

Thank you... and sorry for any grammar mistakes.

Several folks have already confirmed that there is no difference in the outcome if the numbers are as you posted. But consider a couple of other things:

1. It is difficult to accurately assess how many calories you burn through exercise -- and it is therefore easy to assume you are burning a lot more than you are (i.e., that 500 cals of exercise might in reality be 250 cals).

2. If you don't actually enjoy exercising, then dragging yourself into an unpleasant task at the same time you are trying to stick to a calorie deficit might be a lot tougher than just hitting your deficit.

That said, I enjoy exercise, and part of this change is driven by vanity for me, so I got over my inherent laziness and have been working out a fair bit. Wouldn't have done so if I really hated it though - would have been setting myself up for failure.