So you want to know how to lose weight faster with exercise and diet. I am sure that you have heard it time and again that in order to lose weight effectively, you need to exercise and go on a good weight loss diet, so that your calories burnt can exceed the calories you consumed to lose weight naturally.
So why must we combine exercise with diet in our weight loss plan? This article will discuss which is a better way to lose weight. Exercise or diet or both.
You see, exercise plays only one part of a successful weight loss story. Professor Robert Kushner of Northwestern University and clinical director of the Northwestern Comprehensive Center on Obesity said that his overweight patients often tell him they are not getting the results they want from exercise. These patients will typically say that they have been working out three days a week for 30 to 45 minutes for several months and I have lost 1 or 2 pounds.
Dr Kushner said that he advise his overweight patients that exercise is very good for them, but for successful weight loss, he emphasizes a healthy diet in the beginning. “Firstly, we’ve got to get a hold on your diet,” Dr Kushner said. “Then, as you are losing weight, feeling better and you are getting lighter, you can then shift more and more toward being more physically active and then living a physically active lifestyle for the rest of your life which is critical to keeping your weight off permanently.
James O. Hill, PhD, professor of pediatrics medicine and the director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of Colorado at Denver said that Prof Kushner’s weight loss strategy is a reasonable approach to losing weight effectively but others have had success including physical activity early on. It is easier to cut 1,000 calories from a bloated diet than to burn off 1,000 calories through exercise.
Prof Hill went on to emphasize that there are numerous studies that show that exercise is associated with weight loss when done in enough volume and consistently. It all depends how much exercise you do.
Another medical doctor, Pamela Peeke, MD, MPH, FACP, said that she emphasizes getting exercise immediately with obese patients, partly for its mind body benefits.
Dr Peeke said that she asks her patients to start walking as a way to “celebrate” their body with activities. “For years, they have blown off their body, so by having them actually using their body, they can begin to integrate their body back into their life and not use it as a source of torture or torment or shame.”
All the weight loss experts metioned above agreed that no matter how you lose the extra pounds, you need to be active to keep them off. “You can’t find very many people maintaining a healthy weight who are not exercsing regularly,” Prof Hill said. “What we find is that people who focus on diets alone are not very successful in the long run without also focusing on regular exercise”.
He further warned that people can be wildly successful temporarily at losing weight through diet alone, but there are plenty of data to show that those people regain the weight if they are not physically active or exercising regularly. “When it comes to weight loss, you can’t talk about diet alone and you can’t talk about exercise alone because you absolutely have to address both issues at the same time,” declared Dr Timothy Church, MD, MPH, PhD, director of preventive medicine research at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La.
“The average person overestimates the amount of activity they are doing by about 30% and underestimates their food intake by about 30%,” said Kathianne Sellers Williams, MEd, RD, LD, a registered dietitian, personal trainer, and wellness coach in Atlanta. She said, “When I am looking at people’s food consumption and activities, sometimes things just don’t add up,” she said. “I do think that people think, oh, I just did 60 minutes at the gym or I just did 30 minutes at the gym and think that counteracts a lot of what they are eating. But the reality is, our food portions are huge.” Plus, you have to look at all the other calories you ate or drank that day and how sedentary you were apart from your workout. The rest of the day, you are sitting down and you are also eating other things,” Dr Peeke said. “How are you going to burn of those stuff, let alone this extra little treat that you just thought you wanted?”
It is hard to accurately estimate how many calories you burn working out. Dr Timothy Church said, “If it is an intensive workout, you will kind of instinctively think, wow! That’s cool! I just put enough in the bank for two days. But and you really have not!”
For example, it is estimated that a 150 pound person who bikes furiously for 30 minutes burn about 340 calories. Let’s just say that this person would have burnt 70 calories sitting on the couch watching TV, the extra calories they burned by biking drops down to 270 calories. That’s less than the 300 calories in just one cup of cappuccino.
Treadmills and other exercise machines often have monitors that estimate how many calories you are burning. Those displays are “close, but for each individual as they can vary quite a bit,” said Prof Kong Chen, PhD, director of the metabolic research core at the National Institutes of Health. Prof Chen suggests using calorie displays on exercise equipment for motivation, but not to offset your eating. “For example, it doesn’t matter if the monitor says, 300 or 400 calories. If you do that every day or increase on that level, then you have achieved your purpose. But if you’re feeding yourself against that, then no, I wouldn’t recommend that”.
Those machines may not subtract the calories you would burn without exercising. “It isn’t 220 calories for those 40 minutes of exercise versus zero. If they were sitting at work or playing with their kids, they are probably burning 60 to 70 calories during that period of time,” Prof Kushner said. “You have to minus out what you would burn if you didn’t exercise. So it really becomes much less.”
Therefore your best bet for effective weight loss is to lead a physically active lifestyle that goes above and beyond a brief bout of exercise. “It is not just about 30 minutes of exercise a day, it is about avoding being sedentary.” Dr Chen said.
So the message isn’t that the half hour on the treadmill isn’t any good, it is just that the 30 minutes on the treadmill is not going to make up sedentary hours. So you should weave in physical activities throughout the entire day.
So which is the best method for losing weight effectively and to keep the pounds off permanently? Diet or exercise? The answer is both together.
