To lose weight: if only I could choose one

Nothing about weight loss has changed since the beginning of time! The path to a healthy weight has always been the Second Law of Thermodynamics;

Calories in – Calories out = Calories stored.

Simply put, to lose weight you need to eat less, exercise more, or both. What if you could only use one method? There are many eating plans/diets out there, and good ones, Nutrisystem, Jenny Craig, and Weight Watchers, just to name a few. On the exercise side, some of the most famous or infamous exercise programs include P90X and Insanity. All of these programs are effective in their own right, but if you had to choose one direction, which one should you take?

The answer is perfectly clear. If you could choose exercise or diet, you should choose diet. I say this with the utmost confidence. And this is coming from the mouth of a lifelong fitness fanatic and strength and conditioning coach. Why do I say this with such confidence? That is easy! It is extremely difficult to beat exercise from your diet! Let me give you a couple of vivid examples.

If I had a 140lb woman and she ate two pieces of cheese pizza and one piece of cheesecake, that would be a total of 955 calories. To burn that off, you’d have to run 10 minutes for 1.5 hours! At the height of my racing days as a youngster, I couldn’t do that and I highly doubt you can’t either.

Here is another vivid example of this. According to Malia Frey, a weight-loss expert writing in About Health, cutting out a daily McDonald’s cola completely (if you drink one a day) would result in a reduction in your annual calorie intake of more than 200,000 calories, or about of 60 pounds, in a year. Replace that soda with water and overcome obesity. That’s just one big soda. For the same 140-pound woman to burn the same number of calories, she would have to run 1.5 miles in 16 minutes, EVERY DAY! Wouldn’t it be easier to just skip the soda and have a glass of water instead?

Fortunately, we don’t have to choose one. We can incorporate a healthy eating and exercise plan to achieve and maintain a healthy weight. Experts say that the contribution is 75% nutrition and 25% exercise. I will talk about both in future articles.