Is Diet or Exercise More Effective For Fat Loss and Muscle Tone?
by Rusty Moore

Obviously both diet and exercise are key when it comes to losing weight and getting a toned body. The question is this…are they equally important or is what you eat more important than what you burn? As a fitness site author I am a huge believer in exercise, but I would say the real key to muscle tone and a sexy body lies in what you eat each day.

The Best “One Two” Weight Loss Combo is Both Diet and Exercise

For best results, exercise with diet is your best route to a lean body. The problem is this, things don’t always go as planned and life gets busy. There are times when you simply can’t exercise, but you always have time to diet. No matter how busy life gets, simply follow your diet and you will make forward progress. Exercise whenever time allows, but no matter what stick to your diet (whatever diet plan you end up following).

“You Can’t Out-Exercise a Big Mac”

A Big Mac has 540 calories. Do you realize how much exercising it takes to burn those calories? Well about an hour on the elliptical trainer at a moderate pace would do the trick! So after an hour of boring cardio, you are back to square one. You probably won’t lose weight at all especially if you added the fries and soft drink. Large fries would be an extra 570 calories and a large non-diet soft drink would be an extra 310 calories. So how much exercise would you have to do to burn 1,400+ calories? Let’s not even go there!

A Clean Diet Creates a Larger Calorie Deficit Than Exercising

A simple approach to losing weight is to create a daily calorie deficit. Basically, the idea is for your body to use more calories each day than what you consume in food calories. So, there are two ways to create this deficit; either consume less calories or burn more through exercising. Each pound of fat on your body is 3,500 calories. So to lose 2 pounds per week, you need to create a weekly calorie deficit of 7,000or a daily calorie deficit of 1,000. In my opinion it is much easier to create this calorie deficit by not eating those calories in the first place. You would have to spend two hours at a moderate pace on a stationary bike EVERY day to accomplish this!

This is Simplifying Fat Loss a Bit

The body is actually much more complex than simply responding precisely to a calorie deficit. There are WAY more variables that come into play when it comes to fat loss; the type of food you eat, the timing of your meals, the metabolic effect of exercise, the muscle sparing effect of resistance training, etc. There are a lot of things that come into the fat loss picture that I’m not addressing here.

Diet Play a Bigger Role in Fat Loss Than Most People Realize

If you are eating a bunch of calories, a large part of your time spent in the gym is a waste. What is crazy is that over 80% of all articles in fitness magazines focus on exercise, while diet is the key to getting a great looking body. I am a HUGE believer in regular exercise, I just think that diet is what is holding most people back from hitting their goals.

Want your Cardio to Be 3 Times More Effective? Then Eat Well!

If you are going to do a session of intense cardio or HIIT, you obviously want to get good results. If you are downing fast food and drinking soda on a regular basis, you are just getting back to square one with cardio, you will not lose body fat. If you do that exact same cardio workout and follow a clean diet, you will get a huge fat loss boost from that cardio.

Bonus: A Self-Discipline Tip That Works Well

The crazy thing about self-discipline is that it all depends upon the “way you think about things”. We are impressed when we see someone who has strong self-discipline, but you would act the same if you thought like that person thought. Hope that makes sense. Here is the way I think about cardio exercise and diet that works for me. If I know I am going to workout hard later in the day, I will eat strictly. The reason I do this is that I actually want my exercise to mean something and burn body fat. During the day I will eat low calorie foods to prepare for my early evening workout. Often times the evening rolls around and I don’t feel like exercising. Since I skipped the unhealthy food and spent all day getting my body ready to exercise, it would be foolish if I skipped a workout. I force myself to exercise, since I stuck to a strict diet during the day. This is a great way to make diet and exercise play off of each other.

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