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Diet vs Exercise - Which is more important and why?
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BrackNelson wrote: »I think exercise is more important than diet. Exercise also helps boost your metabolism, meaning you burn more calories all day long. Diet and exercise both are essential for our body.
Umm... not really.
First: Boosting metabolism
Exercise in and of itselt does not cause any lasting effect on your metabolism. Yes, you will burn calories while you exercise and the exercise is usually great for the body, but when you stop the exercise, you stop buring extra calories, except for the EPOC effect - which only occurs when you have done vigorous execise - something like interval training, spinning, true HIIT, etc. Walking, most weght lifting (with the exception of vigorous circuit training) yoga, etc. will NOT trigger an EPOC effect.
Second: The EPOC effect (post-exercise calorie burns)
Most exercises that people perform do not stimulate the body enough to create the EPOC effect. It takes a vigorous exercise session to trigger this effect and then you will only gain an extra 10-15 calories per hour from EPOC after the completion of the exercise. You could easily burn more calories than this by getting up from your desk each hour and moving around.
Third: Exercise calories are great but...
It is very easy to erase the benefits of exercise calories with just one snack. I give you the example of my wife... We often go for relaxed (<10 mph avg) bike rides and she thinks that she can reward herself for her 'good behavoir' by downing a 400+ calorie ice cream because she burned all those calories off on the bike. The problem with her reasoning is that she might have burned 200 or so calories on the bike (she wants to compare the relaxed ride to a spin class in terms of calories burned) so she has not only erased the calorie benefit of the exercise, she actually added an EXTRA 200 calories to her daily total!
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This particular thread started on Dec 8, but the discussion has gone on forever.
"Diet vs Exercise - Which is more important and why?" The question is: important for what?
If you purely want to lose weight, controlling your dietary intake is pretty much all that matters.
If you want to be stronger (able to lift more weight), training is key. And being a bit heavier yourself also helps, so maybe you need to eat in surplus. Oh my god, those competitive weight lifters are huge!
If you want to be faster as a runner or cyclist, training and diet both play important roles. Oh my god those professional marathoners are thin! The cyclists are thin, too.10 -
Better for what? Weight loss? Yes diet is more important. Better for health? IMO 50/50 split...0
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Like said before...matters for what.
There is context missing in this question
#contextmatter
#makecontextgreatagain1 -
Def need more context. Generally speaking, if we are focusing on what is better for weight loss, it is diet 100%. You can meet all weight loss goals on diet alone.1
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Bears VS beets VS Battlestar Galactica - which is more important, and why?4
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Nutrition I would argue is very important, but sleep, stress management and daily exercise are so important they are interconnected in so many ways.
I would argue the SAD isn't even a diet. It's almost a devolution of what was once food. The gradual creeping in and pervasiveness of high-fructose corn syrup, along with GMO foods, and food "products" is a global phenomenon but I think found commonly in the West. In other parts of the world, the quality of food is on another level. Culture plays a large role in this I think.
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I've always said that the diet is more important towards the weight loss, but exercise is more important motivation wise to KEEP me on the diet.1
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Wherever I read these threads, and this is a subject that comes up regularly, some people always come off as feeling threatened that other people are able to bring exercise into their life and benefit from it. I see a lot of bizarre comments that are negative toward exercise here and don't make sense in any other light. Example: I've seen people say they can "undo" a walk with a bag of Oreos, I've never seen anybody say they can undo 30 years of savings with a poker game.7
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NorthCascades wrote: »Wherever I read these threads, and this is a subject that comes up regularly, some people always come off as feeling threatened that other people are able to bring exercise into their life and benefit from it. I see a lot of bizarre comments that are negative toward exercise here and don't make sense in any other light. Example: I've seen people say they can "undo" a walk with a bag of Oreos, I've never seen anybody say they can undo 30 years of savings with a poker game.
I think that's a good point, and cute, but not a fair analogy. You can't undo a substantial overall weight loss (that took a long time to gain before that loss) with one bag of oreos, sure. You can counter, hmm, the 25 bucks you put in your house down-payment savings fund this week in a pretty normal poker game (in arithmetic terms). The latter's more analogous to the potential impact of a bag of oreos on weekly deficit, let alone one walk (depending on the size of the bag!).
Overall, yes, I agree that some people here seem quite resistant to the idea that exercise is valuable, in sometimes cognitively bizarre ways. Being an oddball who got quite active separately (and long before) weight loss, I see both as very beneficial. I proved to my own satisfaction that exercise is not, completely by itself, enough for good health . . . and I have a pretty strong belief that good nutrition in a complete couch-sitter is not going to be enough, either, even though I didn't personally run that experiment.
All of us tend to biased by our own cases, including our personal tastes and preferences.1 -
I think anybody who thinks only exercise or only diet is all that's needed for good health is in for a rude awakening.
I don't think I've seen many people saying "if you exercise a lot nutrition is completely meaningless and you can eat anything you want without consequences." There are plenty of threads here about cico and people take time to explain that calories from iced cream and broccoli have the same effect on your weight, those threads always have a lot of side talk explaining that weight is but one last of overall health.
Overall it seems like the people who are very emotionally invested in the need for calorie restriction like the idea of having to choose between diet and exercise whereas people who enjoy using their bodies mostly take both approaches.6
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